Who are you today?
I often wonder
Have you geared up to tackle blunt realities or are you still clouded by conspiracy theories?
Are you still a cosy armchair expert or are you jumping into the field and getting your hands dirty?
Is your full-time job what you’d like to do in leisure? Perhaps, you published the comics, that the seven-year-old you unleashed on walls and chart paper alike.
If genetics wins the Nature vs Nurture debate, then perhaps you’ve found your safe haven in education. I bet you’re raising hell by inspiring your students to rebel.
I hope you’ve embraced your awkward self and still happily flail on the dance floor, fumble song lyrics and stay wary of glass.
I pray you still get lost, every now and then, and go through a memorable adventure to find your way back. Who knows? Maybe those days are long gone and you’ve turned into a visuospatial whiz now.
Do you still talk in your sleep, rush to the sports section in the newspaper and like your coffee strong?
Is your sense of smell still your superpower? I can imagine your distasteful glance when you sniff out spoilt milk in the kitchen, all the way from the terrace.
Does your mind still get its flipflops done by solving puzzles on the commute to work? I picture you multitasking, with your enthusiastic ambidexterity.
I can’t see a bumbling play pal strapping on the boots of parenthood, but enough time has passed for you to build a sweet home and a sweeter family.
I wonder if you’re saving the world, one brick at a time like you always told me you would. You tend to spring into action when it comes to charity.
I know you mastered many a foreign tongue to visit alien lands across the globe. Are you happily experiencing a different city every day? Perhaps, that’s why you’ve never returned home.
Can you imagine, in the world where everyone seems to know everyone, we managed to lose touch and stay lost?
Well, I found the suspense we were looking for in the detective novels we sprinted across. I’ve replaced them with my wondering about you, which is a consistent source of thrill.
At the end of my guessing games, I always come to the same conclusion:
No matter who you are today, I wish you were around.
Copyright © Roshni Ramanan
Goals: To introduce a third person to the reader through an ambiguous, possibly unstable author.
Offer the reader enough space to determine what to believe and what not to, so as to build a caricature of the third party, who may entirely be a figment of the author’s imagination.
To instil a sense of nostalgia, melancholy and loss where ‘loss’ could mean a parting of ways or a more permanent separation, like death.
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