Empathy is so easy to come when life makes you so many people so fast. I have been a friendless introvert, I have been roaming on the streets with friends so long I forgot to sleep, I have been the long oily haired, trying-too-hard girl who would get you mummy cooked home food and I have been the messy bun-ed girl wearing pajamas to PVR who got you mummy cooked home food. I have been ‘watched so much Friends they came in my dream’. I have been ‘read so much Tom Sawyer I cried he is not real’. Been in love so much I wore a saree drunk on wine and cried, and so out of it that I unfollowed a Facebook page that posted too many love-lorn quotes. I prayed for humankind to be less obsessed with love. I have eaten the pasta Pesto because it was too much confrontation to ask the waiter to get my Alfredo. I, overnight, turned into a girl who on being asked to not go around with boys asked her teacher to mind his own business.
I stuck with some people I became. I have held close to me this girl who talks too much to too many people. She annoys some but she manages to find people who stick. The little person inside me, let’s call her L, who is lazy, wears a ‘books over people’ teeshirt, is addicted to Modern Family, stays in a blanket with her left leg stuck out, tries to stop poor E who likes to go out, start a conversation with a man on the bench outside the petrol pump. L fears embarrassment E thinks. But I am fond of E. She gets me all the juice. Not knowledge, that’s not what I am after. Just a pair of new insights.
Some things she heard people say:
“I want to be a song when I die.”
“If you go to reliance fresh with someone, you have to get married to them. It’s a rule.”
“There is a tiny penguin-like looking bird that sits outside my window. Its bottom looks like it has been spray-painted yellow. It is too noisy for its size. Just like you.”
“What if the world and you are just mirrors?”
“What I like about you is that you are a weirdo who hates potato and paneer and you will fucking steal dhemsa from people’s tiffins.”
“I am just feeling my leg hair from over my leggings. It’s so weird.”
“So what if the world is obsessed with love. Some people like it. Let them.”
“Act evolved, bro.”