CXXIX. Wronged -

Those words hit me like a ton of bricks; my facial expression went unmoved, as if Medusa’s head had made a premature Halloween entrance and we had just made eye contact. I was unable to adjust my muscles, a rarity for someone who involuntarily expresses, especially those tendons and tissues that form the perimeter of my rather large eyes.

Like a truck just struck me, not that I would ever want to know what that would feel like, but I imagine would at the very least cause pure shock, I remained motionless.

I am making analogies in an effort to relay the pure shock of what I was told. I was not surprised necessarily, taken off guard perhaps… It just dawned on me, like a conglomerate of clouds had at that moment gathered above my head, or rather, above the car in which I was sitting in at the time.

I, who has to adjust, less so now, after having bruised my tailbone when I slipped on snow and landed flat on my back during my frightening lightweight 90 pound freshman days of college, and I, the avid walker, remained motionless.

Not now, I kept thinking. Really - now of all times? Now is the turning point for the better. All those years, all that planning, all for naught? No, that cannot be. That’s not right.

All throughout the already hellish internship-consuming day, my mind was preoccupied with the quote unquote news, or rather, untimely, development. I exited the end-of-the-day public transportation scene and sat in a car, a different one from this morning, reliving the lack of dialogue that had occurred: being told something and responding only with a frozen look.

Silence for some time, aside from television noise, and the words told to me this morning replaying in my head.

I could no longer withhold my melancholy, my stress, my feeling of having been wronged.

Like a whistling pressure cooker, a stalemate in every Indian household, I slowly, and steadily released my anger in a crescendo - first inquiring as to whether word of what I was told had passed to another pair of ears and then upon hearing validation that it did,vocalizing dissent.

This, that, and the other - was this development so inconspicuous that someone could not notice the wrongness of it all?

We’re, after so many years, equivalent to some several thousand thread-count and you have the (expletive in the form of a gerund) audacity to pick on a single strand and pull on it until all the stitching becomes undone and we become threadbare, at square-one once more? How? Why are you doing this?

Exasperation causes me to wonder if I was in the wrong: All these internal ties and -

- but I’m not saying to sever any tie. The tie is still there but there is cause for concern when that tie overlaps with the other ties because it inevitably will result in one big knot.

I am not wrong for believing that what seems to be transpiring, will result in no good happening.

The wheels are turning for each of us, hopefully they’re headed in the right direction, no longer turning on roundabouts, but suddenly I sense a change in gears, our bodies equivalent to a staggering car that has not yet stopped and God willing won’t stop.

This “new development” having materialized will be crippling if measures aren’t taken by the only person with the authority to do so, and taken soon.

I was so looking forward to this holiday season, to taking the GRE and exiting with a hopefully positive outcome, to sending in strong grad school applications by the deadline, to the soon to be home of my adulthood.

I am still looking forward to all of this but there is a haziness forming in front of these twinkling eyes, akin to the effect that cataracts that come with old age have.