Deflated Expectations

She couldn’t get any bluer. She wanted to believe that it is just one of those days when nothing seems to be going right…nothing seems to be moving at all.
She did get these constant bouts of feeling worthless. On such occasions she would turn to her friends just hoping for a listening ear. Again, she was quite aware of the fact that she’s been taking up whining almost like a pastime thing to do. Only difference was, she knew that wasn’t the case.

The fact that she made no difference to anybody’s life bothered her. The fact that her walking into the sea one fine morning would probably call for a couple of days of mourning, that too amongst a select few. Even this thought was dreadful for her, for she was never too sure if they would mourn out of genuine hurt or because it is the done thing in the society. She couldn’t really blame them for their dependence on the social norms for even she went all ‘tch tch’ whenever she heard about some stranger who is remotely related to her friend’s sister’s brother-in-law. “Poor thing, so young he was…, “she would sigh. She too did belong to the society after all. And being a hypocrite was also a done thing.
Coming back to our suffering-heroines story…she was just running away from expectations.

What she didn’t realise was it was not her problem that people had high expectations of her. All she could see, magnified under the microscopic gaze of all her relatives, was that she was just letting them down.
What she didn’t realise was it was to her moral-social responsibility to please one and all.

Her issue was, she could not please any one.
Now, if I was to give her a pep talk I would give her the stock –“it is all about pleasing yourself, hun”. I have a good mind not to do that to her though. I knew her. For her, a few people mattered, and she couldn’t even please them. There! That was the end of the story.

She decided to walk out. Walk out of everybody’s life. Though not walk into the sea. She was scared of the waves, of height and of lizards. She was also beginning to get scared of people. Even when she held her cousins baby-girl, she thought she saw disappointment in that baby’s eyes. “Hold me properly you over-grown imbecile. You are giving me a pain in the neck, “ the 28-day-old seemed to say.