..The marriage of thoughts..

Met someone today who shared with me a part of her life...

Life that was no different from yours or mine..yet it was so hard to sit and concentrate on the sentences...right there...right then...

...Not because it was like the 'ever so often' heard lecture from our elders, or something that was contradictory to my beliefs..but simply because it was the truth..truth which I knew so well but did not wish to accept...truth that stares at me everyday but I don't dare stare back at it...truth that I knew would come back to me when I was her age...truth that would make me look small if I swallowed my pride and bow down before it...truth that was and is hard to digest..even at this very moment as I write this..

I could see my future in her eyes, which, may I add, made it all the more scary. There were the same thoughts, same fear, same faith, same reluctance, same 'know it all' attitude, same negligence, same regrets, same stories, same generation gap and the same bunch of 20 somethings sitting around, who furiously swallowed every word as 'old fashioned' with as much conviction as the fact that it was all real... and each of them knew it was...

I did what any other person would do..rather any other person with the slightest ego would do...I argued..

Deep down I knew I was fighting a losing battle.. it was a battle with myself..with my thoughts..with the justifications I had been giving myself since the past few months...with the laws of nature...with the ways of the world...with age...with time...a battle that would naturally end once I opened my mind...

She told me there was nothing like the 'right time' for anything, or 'being prepared'..these were only illusions we make for ourself to avoid facing situations..illusions that promote themselves as maturity in young minds...and I shook my head, shook it with all it's might ..who did she think she was calling immature?..

...while my eyes nodded..nodded through the closed lids..and that was all she saw...

...For I had closed the window to my mind...while she continued narrating her experiences...hoping that what I could not see would not happen...what I could not see in her eyes would not transfer to mine...what I could not see would eventually pass, leaving me unharmed,unscarred ..but the only thing that passed...was time...treacherous time..

As I walked home..it struck me..maybe it was finally time for me to open my eyes...

And in that instant's realization I smiled...I had grown up...

...although I knew so well I would repeat the same mistakes some day...