This story is a part of 52 bad stories challenge, where in I take the challenge to publish one story every week for a year, based on 52 prompts from this blog.
Here is the very first story titled “A New Beginning”
“Uggggggggghhhhhhh…. I’ll never make it. What is this shit that I am writing?” , I thought banging my head on the desk.
“ How could I be bad at this, this out of all things? It was second nature to me, and now a single sentence is hard to think. Can a single incident change your life so much? That now, forming a single sentence felt like a burden that my shoulders were unable to bear. Rehabilitation- that’s what they call it.Yet this seems to be an unreal infinite loop? Would I really become a better person through all of this? Would I ever be able to …”
“Wait, this is wrong. Am I becoming the same person I am trying to move away from? Why does everything have to be so difficult and so wrong. Why??? Why is it so harsh? Am I really so undeserving?”
A sudden beep of my alarm broke my chain of thoughts. Time to write was over. Now ,it was time to take a break and move to my balcony, and look at the sky. How stupid are they , these reminders, which are governing the cycle of my life. I had always wanted to be a free bird, and here am I , captive in my own prison.I never realized how it started, how a sensible and practical person like me got trapped in this cycle of overthinking, to an extent that it didn’t allow me to breathe? How did I come here? No one knows…no one believes, and no one understands. Yet, here I am , in a battle with nothing extraneous, but my own shadow.
I got up with a sigh and started walking towards the garden- roughly 50 square feet space on the seventeenth floor of a plush apartment in a metro- different from every place that had been my home so far. Home, did I ever have that, or I made peace with every place that life took me to, and called it home… So, yeah, my new home is different, because here I am disciplined. Here, I have to everything at a specific time- so there’s a time to get up, time to eat, to write, to overthink ,even to pee, because they are saying that I am forgetting everything,even my own being…Yet, there are some things I cannot forget. I cannot forget Maa, her touch, her soothing scent, the way her saree felt when I would sleep in her lap…
As I open the balcony door, the bizzare colours of this evening take me by awe. Believe me, the best thing about living on 17th floor is that I can see a clear sky, which is inaccessible to most people in this city. Though it is 6:30 p.m. already, yet the sun is no mood to go back.The Summer Sun sometimes feels like that old lover who stays in your life because they cannot move on, irritating the hell out of you…
I couldn’t feel the harshness of Summer this year, as I stayed mostly indoors. It’s June already, and I see some rain clouds in the sky.Few days, and the Summer would finally be over.Yet, this wait becomes unbearable. As a child, I would hate this part about summer. It was then that Mom taught me to spot the rainclouds in the sky. She said that they signified Hope, their presence meant that this phase of anguish is going to end. I wonder how she is, I miss her so much. I wonder if I would see her again, and most importantly, would I recognise her if I do.
Ahhh… I shouldnt do it, right. I should live in this moment. I look at the plants around. Well, they are beautiful. I can never believe that I created this garden out of scratch. How beautiful does it look… happy and green… Yet there is this one, which distresses me. I water it, I tend to it, yet it never seems to bloom. Lately, it seems to dry inspite of all my efforts/
Gardener says it would bloom only when it rains, and no amount of water can keep it from drying this Summer.Why?It never made sense to me. Why can’t a plant bloom when it gets everything it needs…
I remember My Tree at my home- place where Maa and Baba live. It is this huge tree in my courtyard, and it has been there ever since I have been on this planet. It is huge, massive, something you can hug everytime. Yet, every summer, it sheds almost all its leaves, and then I would keep watering it, so that it would bear some green leaves.
Once, when summers were too harsh, it lost all its leaves, and became a bare skeleton. I thought that the tree was dead, and went into a crying rage. Mom had to console me hard that day, She told that it would leaf out once the rain arrives. I never believed her.I kept watering it, just for a single leaf to grow. It did not budge.So, I had a secret funeral for my dead tree to honor it. I believed that Baba would cut it soon, and then I would ask Baba to make a swing ,just for me, out of it. It would be my memory of My Tree…
Then, it rained. As those tiny drops fell on the Earth, My Tree sprang back to life. There were these beautiful, new green buds all over it.I danced and danced around it that day. I don’t remember how long did I hug it. That night, as I kept my head on my mother’s lap, a crazy idea came into my mind.
“Maa..God listens to you naa… Why don’t you ask it to not bring Summer next year. My tree would always have leaves then.”
“Its not possible beta. We can’t just let summer go.”
“Why not,Maa? It’s so bad. I hate it. Everyone hates it.”
“Tell me, you learnt that Water Cycle ,right? If there’s no Sun, would there be rains?”
“Uhhm.. Nope..”
“And..if there’s no summer, would you eat Icecream and Mangoes?”
“We’ll see for mangoes, but icecream, nope”
“and… would you ever have a Summer Vacation?”
“Uhhmm.. I don’t think so…”
“See beta, nothing is ever completely bad. There’s a good within bad, and bad within good… If our tree doesnt dry out ,it would never get new leaves, it would never be able to begin again.So, if the summer allows it to do that, shouldn’t you be happy for it…”
“But Tree hates it. It looks and feels so bad without leaves. It told me.”
“It talks to you?”
“Yes, it does”
“Then ,whenever it is sad about its leaves, tell it that Summer is gonna end, that it would get its leaves soon, that there would be a new beginning.”
That was what I did the next summer. Every evening when I sat under my Tree, I would point at the sky and whisper to it that the summer is gonna end, and it will get new leaves. As I came back to this moment, I hugged the potted plant I had held so long, and told it the same. Then , there were just two of us, watching the vivid colors of dusk, waiting for the rains, waiting for the new beginning…
:)
Disclaimer: This story is entirely a work of fiction. If you like it, do share and show the author some appreciation 😀😀. See you next week with a new prompt.
