Ordinary

Every time I met her, we had an ordinary meeting. We were just as ordinary as anyone else. She seemed simple and so did her thoughts. My mind wandered in various lands of a different universe when I sat across from her, listening to her while she talked. Life seemed simple and so I never paid attention. Every time, I visited home from college, I met her. The conversations focused on the future and a little on the past. None on the present. Don't know why?

We never appreciate the moment that we live in. Do we? It was never my belief to live in the past or even think about it. In addition to helping me forget people, this belief also helped me to forget the bad things they did. The only drawback is that sometimes I could not seem to remember even the good memories at all.

Anyway, let us come back to the girl. I was 15 when I met her. She was younger than me. To say we were good friends would be an overstatement. Was I like a mentor? A guardian? A sister? A senior in school? I could not understand who I was to her and who she was to me. But then she left. One day, there was a text. A one-liner. A death announcement. Since then, nothing remained simple.

There was another girl. I met her when I was 18 and a college student. Since I never attended classes, I found myself with piles of notes during exams. Unread and unattended. Vast syllabus of papers that were difficult to pronounce. Incomplete chapters of inorganic chemistry battling my memory. But the girl seemed simple, unlike my exams. I would go and rant out the leftover syllabus to her. Every time, she told me to "relax" while listening patiently to my “complaints”. She left too. A one-liner from a college mate I never knew. When I met her, she knew that her days were numbered. Didn’t I deserve to know that? Did not her life mean to be vaster than my leftover syllabus? She had to deal with more than just inorganic chemistry, didn't she?

Nothing has been simple since the day they left. Something inside me died too. Without any explanation. Just like that one-liner on a WhatsApp group. Some people get love while some people do not. But the most unfortunate people are those who find love and then lose it. The most unfortunate are those who cannot recognize love when it is right in front of them until it is too late.

It’s funny, how desperately we want love when we have always had it right in front of us. We are more than one person, one incident, or one mistake. Our lives are bigger than getting good grades. It is so much more than running a business or working in a big company. It is bigger than getting fired from a job or marrying at the right age.

So don’t let death make you remember life. Even though I am not fond of talking about the past, sometimes the only way to untangle the present is to talk about it. I regret assuming they were simple. People are never as simple as they seem. Lives overflow with countless stories waiting to unfold. As you listen to those stories, you will see that the love you seek is always right in front of you.