THE BEFORE AND THE AFTER

To

The Girl in a picture

There was a picture of a girl standing on the beach with her back towards the onlookers, just staring at the vast sea. Only a trail of her footprints in the white sand behind her, as if at the very next moment someone would call her into the sea and she would vanish. Maybe she was waiting for the tide. Or maybe she was planning to drown herself. 

There was her, this girl unnamed, and there was the white sand. Only stark footprints and an ethereal silence permeating the rest of the picture.

Frozen time.

So simple, yet so powerful. 

It was a picture I drew with crayons years later, and taped it to my cupboard. It was supposed to be inspirational.

But everything about it and my life right now is similar, almost tantamount to nothing. It’s a powerful ‘nothingness’. It can make you do things if you let it. But it can also engulf you if you so wished it. Being a teen, being a ‘new’ adult, is not worth more than that picture. It’s the first half of this life on earth, when you don’t know where you’re going. Are you going to make it big? Do you have the courage to plunge into a sea of possibilities? Did you do all that you were supposed to, to carve out a “successful” individual?

There are questions but no answers. 

Only Time has the power to answer.

Time and time again I’ve looked at that picture. My grandmother loved it. It was she who requested me to draw it for her. She loved it because she was secure. She was not on the precipice at that age. She was not forced to stare into an abyss of ‘before and after’. She was not being reprimanded for not ‘using’ time anymore than she was for using it however she wanted. 

Of course, I agree to competition. I agree to passion, courage, the drive and everything considered essential to make one’s self successful in this day and age. I agree to ‘living’ a life. But I don’t agree to being judged for it. What if I am not that individual, the one who derives a pleasure from winning every single time? Who decides whether 21st century’s young adults ought to win every battle or not? What if I never win? 

I believe that Time will condemn all individuals when it does. 

But we tend to do its job beforehand.

Now I would like to wait for my sentence, to let Time decide. I want to wait for the tide. 

The only part which bothers me is having to stare into the abyss, to stand at the precipice, to ‘not know’ the before and after. What sweet torture it is to be a ‘young adult’ without knowing anything about adulthood, to be encircled by swarming possibilities like a pair of vultures overhead, and to be wondering about yourself all the time. 

A terrible bouquet of innumerable hopes and innumerable fears. Lots of fear.

So in the end, I always find myself being drawn to that picture.

In the end I’m just a girl unnamed, standing on the beach with her back towards the world, staring into a huge sea of nothingness. 

All I have behind me are footprints in the sand.

All I have in front of me are the shadows and possibilities of Time.

Yours truly