I wanted to write bad stuff about you and hide them all behind some complicated play of words. Instead I feel like crying because my thoughts keep turning back to myself like a strong search light, and all I see is my flawed self, and yet even then, I can’t see me perfectly, nor can I see all of me.
You’re tall and graceful, including in that purple sari, your beauty is understated and subtle, and yet you dress and hold yourself so smartly. You seem to conform in ways I never could, and stand out in ways I didn’t. A flower should be in your scarf, tucked in just above your ear. The people you hang out with are coloured by you. They all seem happier simpler people, even in their brightest be-deck-ery, their most elaborate painted faces and lovely straight-not-curly hairdos. Its fun rendering it all in gold, except you look better in silver and purple, back straight, bag shiny, and your book of dreams in your hands, clasped close to your chest.
I used to know another girl who shared your name. She too wanted to run to far away places, to Paris or New York or Auckland or Sydney, she too wanted to live uninhibited by family. She’s not in Facebook world anymore, I don’t know what happened to her.
I try to point out your flaws in my usual cynical way, and all I see are my own back lit by the setting sun, all I know is that we all sin, and I just have them hidden better due to no fault of yours or mine, due to living in a different country from the native land, due to being able to chose what person I wanna be to everyone else back home. Its both easier and harder than it sounds.
Now that you’re almost done with your degree from that prestigious university in Dhaka, what do you see from your high vantage point? What difference does it make? What dreams do you see?
The biggest thing that confuses me is how, although not more than four years separate us, I no longer feel that understanding of fellow youth, an automatic grasping of whats what and whats not, of you and your generation. I know I would be dubbed that frumpy goody goody from whom all things should be hidden to avoid any trouble whatsoever. Its such a silly thing, I think I don’t really care, I always face that perception anyway and sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn’t, yet now I feel again that search light.
Do you think I don’t know that, or that I never changed? That perceptions never drove me to desperation? Stay in your assumptions, it just fits the pattern of your portrait better. There are things in me and my history that I will always hate and your perception cannot take that vantage point away from me.
Until today, I felt I was one person, and after today I feel I will be another, and I feel that every day. Why have I become so strong and nothing else? Why am I so defensive and insistent of my truth? And yet its beyond my control in so many ways. Its sometimes an entirely outside force that drives me. I hate that person who acts all superior to you and your family, in every way just because that is their personal private opinion- that they are the best example and no one else. That is arrogance. A better way would have been to say that “I follow someone about whom there is enough valid evidence to be the best of examples- and that is who I am, and it is your freedom to choose”. But if that example is yourself-and you act without any true teacher or guide- or feeling the need for one- than its just arrogance and it spirals into a lack of self awareness and reflection, a lack of trying to be a better person on any level, especially in your heart. What exactly did that person do to me or anyone else, that I should consider that person the best of examples? A person who never bothered to come in the most difficult of times for those they claimed to love.
