Can a single night be the cause of switching the flip on your life?

He is tossing and turning around in his bed, his feet cold and dry, and his whole body is restless. The mattress seems to push him away as he wraps his blanket tighter around him to protect himself. Protect him from himself. It’s been a struggle of hours now. He wishes he could just close his eyes and everything would be alright. He just has to survive the night. The next morning, he’ll be alright. He’s scared and keeps whispering something to himself. ‘It’s just that hour of the night, everything will be fine’. He tries to convince himself, but his words don’t feel like his own. His tongue is whispering something, but his head is screaming something else. Suddenly, he is engulfed by a calm wave. His body is relaxed now, his throat dry, and his eyes hopeless. He lies there for a few more minutes. He’s lost his restlessness now and gained more courage. But courage doesn’t always push you towards the right things. He gets out of bed and walks towards his balcony. Everything is quiet except for the sound of the rain. It’s raining heavily. The night has wrapped all its tired children in its consoling arms. Except for one. He closes his eyes and feels the cold breeze on his skin. For a moment, he thinks maybe this isn’t the right decision, but then his empty reality flashes in front of his closed eyes. He takes a deep breath. He is now more sure than ever, he doesn’t want to live this suffocated life. He climbs up the railing of his balcony, his face towards his bed, and he gives one last look into his room. He had heard of many people who tried to kill themselves by jumping off a building but survived, recalling how they screamed out of regret the moment they became airborne. He feared that’s what he might feel, too but in his heart, it didn’t feel that way. He felt it might feel like freedom. A freedom of his soul. And with that last thought, he tilts back and lets go of control over his body. As he falls, it’s a few minutes yet an eternity of complete silence. A teardrop flows from one of his eyes, but he is not scared; he is free. Free from this world that he has grown to despise. His life flashes before his eyes.

‘Advait! Are you even listening to what I am saying?’ He wasn’t. It’s difficult to listen to everything she has to say. She says a lot of things. Akshita. Akshita is Advait’s best friend. The yapper to his quiet. The chaos to his composure. The colour to his black and white life. We like to think friendships just happen spontaneously. But there’s always deeper roots to what brings two people together.

When you have been an invisible kid all your life and are given an opportunity to be finally seen and accepted by the world, would you take it?

An 11-year-old kid walks through the corridor of the school. He can hear all the names he is being called. He doesn’t respond, just pulls his shoulder even closer to his chest, his chin down and walks hurriedly without making eye contact with anyone. He has learned his lesson well. If you don’t want to have your bag stomped on, get your tiffin snatched, or your pants pulled down in front of the whole class, it’s best to be as invisible as possible. 11-year-old kids are harmless. To adults, maybe. But to another 11-year-old who doesn’t seem to fit in, maybe not. The school bell rings. It’s PTM at school today. Most kid’s fathers are there for the meeting except for Advait’s. His Mother is late as usual. The teacher, for no reason other than idiocy, chooses to scold the kid for the parent not being on time. Advait isn’t angry at his mother though. He understands that his mother works hard to make ends meet, handling everything on her own. He couldn’t help but feel envious as he looked around. One kid’s father is fist-bumping his kid for doing great on the exams, another is already building a timetable to get better grades in the next exams. The boys in his class are quite competitive, whether it is academics or sports or anything else. He never seems to be interested in the competition. He never seemed to be interested in any of the activities the boys enjoyed. He never understood the point of rough tumbling. They say mothers teach you love and compassion, and fathers teach you to be tough and competitive. But what happens when you lose your father at a young age? Advait always thought that maybe if his father were there, he would have grown into a different person. Maybe he wouldn’t have been a coward. He wouldn’t have been so sensitive. People think kids can’t have big emotions, because apparently your age decides whether your emotions are worthy of validation. But if you were an 11-year-old ousted by your peers and felt like something was deeply wrong with you for being different, you wouldn’t say the same thing. Kids don’t always have the words to express their emotions. Advait did; he wrapped his emotions in stories no one cared to decipher. He liked writing stories ever since he could remember. People said he was a quiet kid, lost in his own world, having nothing to do with people. But that wasn’t entirely true. He liked talking, except his words were expressed more often on paper. He was curious about the world and the people just as much as the other kids, maybe even more.

Advait had managed to make no friends. Until Akshita joins the school and soon becomes popular among her peers. Akshita talks a lot, which Advait finds a little annoying at first, and tries to stay away from her. Unfortunately for him, she takes it as a challenge to become friends with him. She brings her lunch over to him as a token of friendship. She may talk a lot, but she always has something interesting to say. That’s the reason her peers liked her. But she was also the kind of person who would cook up lies just to entertain other people and make other people laugh. Soon, the other kids saw through her façade, and her friends abandoned her. All but Advait. Even though he knew a lot of her stories were cooked-up lies, he couldn’t help but smile. That’s what brought them closer. Stories. When their classmates didn’t invite them to play with them at camp, they stayed inside the tent holding torches and telling each other stories, giggling loudly with no care in the world. They might have been a couple of weirdos for their classmates, but what fun it is to be a weirdo when you have someone to be weird with.

Time passed, and Advait continued to write stories, but only because he had Akshita to share those stories with. He turned out to be good at Academics and was on the track to become a CA. He wrote a lot of stories, but the one that controlled his life turned out to be a story written by someone else. A story in which there are only a few accepted ways to be successful and respected in society. When you are an invisible kid and get an opportunity to be a well-respected man in the eyes of society, it’s difficult to resist. But how long does respect and societal acceptance alone suffice to live a life? He’ll find out soon.

‘Are you listening?’ For once, he comes out of his thoughts, ‘Yes?’. ‘I said we have decided to get married the first week of this June, so make sure you are free for the whole week’ He doesn’t say anything. He had seen this coming. Is it selfish to want your best friend to just stay yours? He knew Akshita’s marriage meant he would no longer have her in his life. They talked for a while and then parted ways, saying they’ll meet soon. They did. On the day of her marriage, and then not again.

It's been 3 years...

Over these 3 years, nothing special happened, but something did. It happened so gradually that it seemed like nothing was happening. That’s what he convinced himself at least. He got so overwhelmed by work that he couldn’t find time for much else. How many people live their lives being someone they are not, then why did it still feel so difficult, like you are the only one doing it? On the outside, he gained what he wanted. It feels good to be respected, it feels good when people see you as a well-accomplished adult. But nobody told me that in becoming that adult, you end up losing yourself. The knot had started tightening around his soul the day he decided a good load of money and a respectful job were much more important than writing some ‘silly’ stories. How then such a gradual tightening of the noose turned to such a drastic step is difficult to explain. So he gave the simplest explanation he could come up with in his suicide note, ‘My soul and my body have been torn apart, and I need to choose one to follow, I’m choosing my soul’.

He hit the ground with a loud thud. It took a few seconds, but the pain began to seep in. Eventually, he did start crying and screaming. But still not out of regret, but out of excruciating pain. He could feel his head being cracked open. It would be just a few seconds before he goes into sleep. That’s what death is supposed to be like, isn’t it? But something strange happened instead. The pain stopped. It’s as if a moment ago, blood was rushing out of his head, but someone just turned the taps off it. Instead of going into the deeper sleep, he started feeling more and more awake, more and more conscious. He started hearing a ringing sound that grew in volume.

Louder and louder and louder...

Until he opened his eyes, to find the sun shining on his eyes. Contemplating death might seem like a sad thing, but sometimes it’s the thought of death that gives you the courage to change the course of your life. Advait never wrote a suicide note, but when he had to tell people how he decided to leave a conventionally respectful life and jump into the risky career of being a writer, he would say the same thing. He chose his soul.

Can a single night be the cause of flipping the switch in your life? Sometimes, Yes.

.    .    .