Over the Hill
I am an ordinary soul.
No. That’s not true. But if you ever ask me, that’s what I will say. Yet I know. I am living a lie. Cause lying is easy.
The truth is I am an extraordinary soul.
But I have neither the courage nor the will to live like one. So I hide behind a million irrelevant excuses and pass my days. In shame. Shame that melts my insides and molds everything within into a simmering hate for this world.
Ordinary is easy. Extraordinary is responsibility.
For a long while I told myself that the society didn’t take kindly to extraordinary mortals. But that was one of the million excuses I used to hide from my shame. One that my brothers and sisters repeated along with me. We said, ‘to be accepted we have to be ordinary.’
I never thought, what if the society was made up of souls like me? All extraordinary yet hiding behind a million excuses they cloak themselves with. I never thought that. I was too busy thinking what they were thinking about me.
I don’t really know when ‘to be accepted’ became the purpose of life. But it did.
It was the silent prayer on my lips. Day and night. Yet I told myself I was singing the glory of life. All the while repeating, ‘Please accept me. I too want to be happy.’ Extraordinary was a dream. I tried to believe it to be so. Because it meant being alone and cold in this strange world.
So I tried hard to see, hear and feel what was accepted. What was ordinary. I didn’t know what they were. Extraordinary filled my heart and mind. And I wanted to survive. I needed to find and learn the accepted things.
And with time I saw it take shape in front of me. The ordinary things. In the shape of a colorless sky it hung upon my life. It didn’t feel alright when I first saw it. It feels wrong even now. But not as much as it used to once upon a time. And moreover, what most matters is I am accepted. Isn’t it? Though, sometimes, I still wonder why I am not happy.
Not all the time am I unhappy. It’s mostly when the extraordinary refuses to sit back and see life pass by. When an extraordinary rhyme in my head cries for freedom to be. I guess it wants to play out in the world. An extraordinary picture in my mind pleads to be given shape on the canvas that I hardly touch anymore. An extraordinary story in my heart begs to be told. I have that sinking feeling inside of me whenever an extraordinary love within my soul prays to be let free. Then I choke on an extraordinary cry, a cry that rises from the very pit of my stomach and racks the very core of my spirit. Recently I have learned to turn away my face or hide from their sight.
I convince myself. I am ordinary.
With every single living, breathing fiber in my body, I have sought and embraced ordinary. I have embraced it with open arms.
Today, I sit silently amidst ordinary friends. I still don’t know how to talk about ordinary things. In an ordinary love I try to count my blessings. ‘Compromise’ is a virtue, they tell me. I spend my time doing ordinary work, living an ordinary life, seeing ordinary things and trying to believe this is life. Just before this, I mumbled my gratitude for an ordinary day that went by. That is when I realized something.
I have a million excuses to exist today, but not a single reason to live.
