Four, Five months (Before)

Four, or five months. One or two months of those had been of desperate thoughts and a first-hand crash course on life’s brutality. I got back from CT, sometime in February and everything was wrong, literally. I was having fresh issues with securing my degree and the financial atmosphere back at home was a disaster - Momsy had not been paid for some months and the election that was supposed to somehow deflect the wind of better fortunes our way had been postponed again, pushing our showers of potential blessings further into the future. Days without proper feeding and some without any kind of monetary competence started to become a norm for my family. I would go into some of the more gory details but that is not why I decided to write this article.

I don’t even know why I decided to write this article. I have been ‘deciding’ for months now and I have never been able to bring myself to utilize my poor writing skills. Now that I think about it, I may have been broken during that period. Somehow, I’d become a skeletal monument of lost glory and crushed desires. My soul could no longer find zest in life’s lessons, clinging only onto the thin veil of self assurance that was left from years of hardship and back-breaking toil. Perhaps, I should be grateful for the opportunity to experience life at its darkest, or perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps, I should be angry at how undeserving I was of such pain and lack. Or perhaps I should just look at it as a difficult exam half of the class is going to fail anyway. I really don’t know what to think.

They say there is always a light at the end of tunnel, and my light came about two months into my stay in this hellhole. Armed with pragmatism heavily induced with youthful naivety and a severely broken spirit, I’d decided to get a job. I signed up on those websites people say you can ‘easily’ get a job on, borrowed suits to go for interviews, lived on a daily diet of crushed hopes and deadened optimism. Nothing was happening, and it didn’t seem like anything was going to tilt the positive energy of the universe in my direction anytime within the foreseeable future either. My ribs had started to poke out like something from a CNN documentary about Africa’s forever-starving children, and the flesh around my collar bone had eroded like the soles of my favorite shoes. Then a totally random discussion led an old high school buddy of mine to suggest a job –as a content writer – to apply for. I sent the mail without giving it any conceivable chance of yielding any kind of result and forgot about it.

About two weeks later, deep into another hollow reach into the deepest recesses of my being, I received a reply to the mail saying I was to come in for an interview. A very thin flicker of light struggled for traction in my heart and then disappeared in the darkness of my soul almost as soon as it had appeared. On the big day, I dressed up with numb enthusiasm and willed myself into facing the day’s biggest event with shallow delight. At the end of the interview, the two pleasant men told me they would get back to me as early as the next day if I was going to be of any use to them. I dragged myself home assured of yet another failure, all the while thinking of every opportunity I’d ever missed in my miserable time on this planet. The next day, I waited in feeble anticipation, checking my phone lazily for confirmation of my worthlessness. Words fail me when I try to put the moment I saw the mail that I had gotten the job into any sensible means of communication. But I know I felt a rush of emotions, a hole had opened in the thick veneer of despair I had been stuck in, the universe had decided to bleed me of my desperation and the One Above had deemed it fit to soften the hard path I trudged on.

I resumed about two weeks later with refreshed optimism, anxious to begin the next, more promising chapter of my life.