I couldn’t fathom the relentless chirping of the robins and the blooming daisies that enveloped the grazed pathway. It was perhaps the invigorating verdancy or the seamless skies that had made the hike seem more like a vale of prepossession rather than a ravine of boulders. The restless crater heaved in my bosom and my arms turned numb to the ever present load of my backpack as a fleeting memoir nestled in a reign of thorns. “Am I running?”
My existence shrank into a void of inadequacy as the laughter echoed through our boastful class and its unstoppable mischief, for suddenly I didn’t have a place to reside to. Zoya and her reverend counterparts had dislocated my desk as if even my name was a curse waiting to be spelt out. It was me who dragged the cadaver of my consciousness and a piece of wood that entitled me to the four overshadowing walls of agony. “Is this what they called being bullied, or am I just overthinking?” Maybe it was the perpetual urge of transparency as another trial of mocking was initiated in recess, as if the fear of adequacy was meant to be the imperishable paralysis.
A gush of freezing winds wrestled through the strands of my hair as I clutched the pen against a blank set of pages. The hike was measuring up to be a trial, a creed of disconnection indeed. “Why can’t I seem to write?” Nonetheless, the feet strolled once again against the elevated earth and my swollen ankle incessantly injected an unfathomable ache, as seconds later I yelled and clutched the only rock that acted as my stranglehold. It seems that I had slipped from the moistened earth and injured my right limb along the axis of the rock and hung from it dazed out as my brother reached out an arm of aid.
The chatter of normalcy ringed around me as I contemplated in my silent mortal riot. “Am I doing something wrong?” as I questioned a fading subconsciousness. In an iota of a second later, a meteor hit my face and I jolted backwards in vain as a ball had hit my head. I clutched my forehead to force open my globular organs and my vision landed on a group of ostentatious batchmates who defined mortification as humor. The discomfort overflowed my consciousness as I grasped my bleeding nose and ran to an astray shelter. Perhaps it was the first time I wanted to fall back, to maybe weep and exhibit a trait of human expression but I was scared, as scared as a wilting daisy crumpled beneath a tonnage of rocks.
It was only after I had been helped up the rock that I apprehended my right limb had started bleeding profusely, but even the melanin of my skin had numbed to agony and I started limping forward to reach the nearest village of Jahaaz Banda where I could disinfect my wounds, regardless of the unseen ones. It was indeed unforeseen, the resolve of the petulant human spirit as it metamorphosed into a perpetual resolution. “Is this what pain feels like?”
The elixir of life stung my inflamed, crimson skin as the blood dried and I held back the flooding weakness. “Where are the daisies?” I contemplated as the barren village enveloped my crippling conscience. In a racing second, a pale bowl of milk intercepted my befogged vision as I gazed up to find a young girl with hazel eyes and flushed cheeks grinning at me silently. My absolution dazed out and I grasped her bony hand to offer my regards as she crouched to analyze my injury. “Is this what kindness feels like?” I quietly sipped the fresh milk as she sang a native lullaby with a harmonious melody in her voice. Perhaps, amnesty and earnesty did not constitute a petrifying ravine of vice. “In giving we receive.” She glanced at me and recited another poem, “It isn’t a verdant landscape I look out to, for all I envision is the gradual mortality that glistens up in flames. It conforms and disassociates from the hand-held roots to let the blooming season pass once and for all, for spring assassinates the solitude of repentance.”
The Genres of Life 