An end too soon...

I sit on my bed, reading old letters and diary entries, trying to recollect the eventful journey these past three years have been. I feel desolate, somber somehow. I didn’t think I had it in me to be serious, ever. A feeling of emptiness floods me. I don’t really understand it. I have had a full life in college, there is nothing that I regret or still crave. What is it then that fills me up with this sense of losing something I never had?? An implication of being incomplete.

I was many people in college. I could afford to be. I experimented with people and their reactions. I took it as a ‘course’ to prep me for people I met later in life. I made choices, drastic ones, mostly impulsive. My choices did not have lifelong implications and I am not done exploiting that yet. Isn’t this what we all crave for?? A life of full authority but negligible liability..??

I made friends that in true definition are my family now. I loved them like I have never loved my own siblings. I met people who detested me. I let people hate me and enjoyed loathing them as well. I experienced diversity in regions but unity in thousands.

I took quantum physics and I butchered the subject so badly that it ashamed my teachers to fail me and allow me the massacre again. I politely threatened my ‘acquaintances’ to let me play innumerable basketball matches. I didn’t care till the time I was on every team playing my energy’s limit daily. I bullied juniors to tears from under the ‘invisible’ cloak of a department interview.

I painted on my walls, crude derogatory testimonials to the institute and its rules. I didn’t bother to remove it; the look on their faces was precious. I was penalized for coming late, in an uninhibited state of intoxication. I came that way again. And again. And again. And then they just gave up.

I lived with expression, with compassion and ambition. Then I lived like a sloth, surviving on the endless flow of TV series, enjoying their lives when mine seemed too demanding and laborious.

I gave up the right guy for reasons pertaining to matters of the heart and more. I loved the wrong guy for three whole years, suspending all my ego and self respect at his disposition. I got rejection and heartache, but I just held on. I held on because I knew it didn’t matter. I knew this behavior wasn’t anticipated. I was expected to walk out with my head held high. But my way was just so ‘different’ and implausible, that I did it just because I could.

College happens to be that one place where everything is possible. One is not too young, yet not old enough. It’s a place where responsibility doesn’t have to accompany every thought of risk and possibility. Whether it’s plunging into a career field completely unknown or taking a leap in love, falling head first every time. It’s a time when friends are made for the mere enjoyment of company, and not some underlying iniquitous purpose. It’s a world where trivial feelings of worthlessness, disappointment and betrayal have a face and are not hidden beneath masks of the pleasant disposition that comes with maturity. Every body is an equal, standing an unbiased attempt at self actualization and success. No problem is insignificant or petty, and if it’s too big then ‘li8’!!

Graduation marks the end of a life without consequences. It’s hard to let go. There is so much more I haven’t risked yet. I am not over my quota of this mad but lucky gamble.