My delusional world
I, guess… I have been transported to another world.
Or maybe not.
I looked at the source of the voice once again, the cloak that I had envisioned him wearing was actually an oversized t-shirt.
The sword that I had seen hanging around his waist wasn’t a sword but rather a shovel, and the man in front of me wasn’t any adventurer from the other world but rather the gardener of our college.
Let’s call him Mr. T.
T for tuberculosis since he always coughed a lot but strangely so he was never diagnosed with it.
Good for him, I guess.
As for why he is referring to a nursery as a forest… well I guess he doesn’t know that this place is called a nursery, nothing new of a thing.
Breathing a sigh of relief with some amount of disappointment mixed in it, I shook my head and looked at him.
“I forgot the way to the exit, can you please guide me there”, I said earnestly, requesting the man standing before me in response to which he just pointed a finger in a direction and said, “Keep on walking in that direction and turn left on the second corner”
His husky voice fell in my ears and without saying anything I turned back and left the place but not without giving him a small bow of thanks.
***
So much for my dream of getting transported to another world.
Throughout the 20 years of my life if there is something that I have realized then it is that the things we come to know and believe as children disappear into the fog known as busyness as we grow up.
I remember my mother asking me what I wanted to become when I was barely a 5-year-old child, back then I remembered telling her something like, “I want to become a pilot, astronaut, police officer, engineer, doctor, scientist, and the President”.
“You don’t want to become Spider-man?”, she asked in a surprised voice to which I answered in an almost cocky tone, “Only kids think about becoming Spider-man, it’s not possible in real life!”
My mother smiled when she heard me say that, looking at her smile I must have also felt warmth in my chest.
But now that I think about her smile I kind of have a lingering suspicion in my heart that the smile that had boomed on her face back then wasn’t because of my innocence but rather because of the amount of stupidity I had shown in front of her.
After all, it’s easier to become Spider-man than to try your hand at all those professions I mentioned just a few lines ago. Take me for an example, just a simple bachelor's degree is proving to be so ridiculously taxing, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to even think of doing something else.
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In this respect becoming Spider-Man is way easier since I only have to get bit by a mutant spider and then whoosh! I will become the carrier of justice.
***
Walking back, I reached my hostel at 4:32 p.m.
I noticed 2 of my other 3 roommates lying on their beds.
I lived in the hostel with 3 other people, 2 of them being from my part of the country and the other one from a bit afar.
Hostel life, as I had imagined, was way more different from the school life that I had lived.
Yes, I did have fun in the school, I did bunk a lot of classes, and yes, I did enjoy my friends’ company but even so, there was something about the hostel that made it completely different from school. Maybe it was the absence of my parents or maybe it was because I was getting to live as an adult for the first time in my life, I was sort of enjoying this phase.
“You came back?”, one of my roommates said.
He was a 5’5” guy with his face full of beard. He is... well, no need to mention his name, he is just a minor side character after all, let’s just call him… Beard. Yeah, Beard.
“Yeah, when did you come back?”, I asked him trying my best to hide my lack of concern from my voice.
“At 3”, he just said and went back to sleep.
What a weird guy.
Well, not that I can say something better about myself.
The guy next to him was talking to his girlfriend on the phone. He was around the same height as me, maybe an inch or two taller.
I myself was around 6ft so he must be around 6’1” or 6’2”.
He is also a minor side character, so let’s call just him Pole.
Pole, because he was taller than me, anyone who’s taller than me is a pole, I know it’s a weird analogy but it is what it is.
So, Pole got himself a girlfriend last year in the month of December and ever since then, he has been spending his life nonstop talking with her on his phone.
I don’t get how he is able to generate so much content to talk about, but even if I were to get that I probably wouldn’t be able to practice the same since neither do I have any girlfriend to speak to nor do I have any prospects to practice this skill with.
But strangely so, I don’t feel sad about this.
Ever since I was a child, I have seen movies representing universities as some kind of amusement park with lots of rides full of adventure.
Hangouts, hangovers, girlfriends, and bunks these are the things that come first in mind when anybody ever thinks of a university, such is the image printed by the movies and shows in our minds. But it was different for me.
No matter how I thought about it, it was different for me.
I didn’t feel any excitement over the fact that I would get to live a college life.
‘A new beginning’, as described by teens throughout the world, for me this place was even more boring than school.
I was living far away from my house (approx. 1300kms!) and before dropping me off here my father told me only one thing, “You are too far away from your home, be cautious and don’t get in trouble”.
Of course, I had known how I should be behaving in such a faraway place even before my father had told me but… after he did tell me to be cautious the weight of things on my mind only increased, and thus started my boring college life.
Or maybe I should term it as the end of my life.
I didn’t feel alive.
Day to day I went with the motions of living as if I was a zombie, that is until I met her.
Until I met the girl with no aura, I’m going to call her Aura, after all, that was the name I gave her when we first met.