It just hits you from nowhere. This feeling of closure. One day you are sitting and wallowing that there doesn’t seem to be any goodness left in the world, and then suddenly someone manages to show you the light and you are left counting your blessings. That was how she felt now.
For a year now, she had been living like a zombie. The end of her relationship had made her suspect she would never feel again. There had been the usual damp pillow stage, then the determined, put it aside stage and finally the getting on with whatever is left stage. For quite sometime now, she had just been getting along. She had stopped doing a lot of things. Not that any of them reminded her of him. Just that so many things had stopped making sense to her now practical mind. And it helped that the we-are-so-grown-up world around her, wanted her to kill her exuberance and appear as practical and professional as they were. So she played the part well now. No one she met knew that she had any kind of life other than her job. No one knew the dreamer that once lived in her and those who could sense it, despised that quality in her, because it didn’t fit with her practical surroundings.
Life was a home to office routine and it didn’t help that she had always been a loner. So much so that she no longer knew how to interact with people and as she had no desire to make a fool of herself, she just kept away. Aloof in her own world, battling her own demons, trying to make loved ones understand her innermost thoughts and failing each time. She had forgotten that she was young; that she could breathe. Everything was on autopilot. She shuddered at the thought of having someone else share a day with her. She was afraid that if she had fun today, she may have to pay for it later. So she modeled her life after everyone’s expectations. How ironic then, that these burdensome expectations would be the catalyst for her.
She was expected to attend that function. Not because of her own love for music, but because it was a social call and no one else in her family could make it that day. It was there that she got her closure. As the band belted out song after song, all old numbers, it was as if all the years of her life were being played out in the screen of her mind. There was the song that was the first ever song that she sang, the one that reminded her of that one evening at the amusement park, the one about the time of her first serious crush, the one when she had started taking lyrics seriously, the one that had fired her ambition, the one that accompanied her on lonely nights. The songs kept coming one after another, just like the tears that were flowing from her eyes. She once again felt her eyes fill with dreams. Dreams that those songs promised, dreams that were hers in the past, dreams that she had deliberately buried under the tears. Today they were all flowing out. It was like she had just been cured of her amnesia. She could remember who she was now. The zombie born of others’ expectations had died. With her vision cleared, she could see her own expectations now and she knew she had to live for them now. Even if it was a gamble, it was worth taking and she was ready to play now.
