Life happened

[sakshi.joshi]

As I looked at my high school photograph with a group of friends, old memories started playing in my head and I got overwhelmed with a myriad of emotions. The pious hearts, the innocent laughs, the innocuous banter, the beautiful times, all came back to me. And I was all smiles. Also the way we looked then, cracked me up. But after basking in the happiness of an imaginary reunion for sometime, when I looked at the photo again, I saw a young face(resembling me) with a chimera of self righteousness mocking me. It was a confident face of a strong opinionated girl who knew what she wanted in life as opposed to the girl with flaky thoughts gaping at her. The young girl in the photograph had a dream, was passionate about it, she had her life sorted out but the old, time-worn girl was muddled and phlegmatic. She had stopped dreaming. The irony was that the one in the photograph seemed living while the present one lifeless. The complacent girl seemed to be asking "What went wrong".

I wanted to explain to the young romanticist that she was delusional about the world and that it was not as perfect as she had imagined, that we are just a trivial part of a vast Universe and not its center (as she believed) and the world does not play according to our tunes. That sometimes we give up on dreams because we realize that they are just that, dreams. But I realized I cannot make her understand any of this because we do not speak the same language anymore. 

So I just shrugged and mumbled "Life happened".

[Blinky]

Emotional without being melodramatic, somber without being weepy. You nailed it.

[Dew]

awesome write...it happens that way when we stop living and start surviving...sometimes after we've survived, we forget to go back to living and just drift into the worst of all: 'existing'. Hope she finds a match to relight the fire -dew

[sakshi.joshi]

Thank you so much blinky and dew :)
yeah I too hope she gets some new spark in life!

[ramfire]

The reality of life can be hard. We dream for sure and often the dream can't be reached for one reason or another. Maybe something great not dreamed of will happen unexpectedly in our life. Got to keep on living to find out.

[cafeboy]

I found this so sad, but also kind of beautiful. That we can have these past/present experiences when going through photos. I don't think past/present selves have to agree, but I do value recognizing changes because we all come from somewhere.

I really enjoyed reading this.

[ramfire]

Yes, life has a habit of hurting and disillusioning us. Your prose has capture the truth that is so real for most of us.

[sakshi.joshi]

Thank you so much cafeboy and ramfire for the uplifting comments, means a lot :)