Trails of an Aspiring Change

It's mid-October, and I feel like the fallen leaves that seem to have encountered their definite end but actually continue with their cyclic, unrushed lives, indulging in halfhearted conversations with my own self over the change that one mind believes to be inevitable, whereas the other negates.

- by Sreelekha Chatterjee

While rowing the boat of my expectations, I see the waters of my discontent rise and fall rhythmically, akin to the autumn wind—a mixture of refreshing and brisk, cold air—whipping past and through the trees and the insides of all individuals. The pacts of rebirth seem to dominate in nature over this immense plentitude of readiness to dissolve into mere nothingness from being a valuable something.

I have been living with this guilt for the past couple of days amid the tingling silence of my mind. Battling solitary, fanatic thoughts of repelling transition that I believe have been heard and understood by my inner self, a strange weariness predominates. Resisting change has been a usual thing for me. I seem to have developed immense faith in the powers of resistance. When my husband got a job overseas, I ensured that he never took it up. My parents-in-law wanted us to shift to their ancestral home in another part of the city, to which I vehemently opposed and insisted on staying in our apartment in the heart of the city. Initially, my son, Kunal, wasn't comfortable socially, studying in a posh school, but I never allowed him to move to any other school that would have lessened the pressure on him. I am glad I did, and because of that schooling, he has been a successful man, working in a multinational company.

I have never burdened myself with these thoughts, never felt the guilt. But recently, the letter in his name that arrived from a foreign country troubled me to the core, when I hid it carefully in my personal safe in my room. I have always found the strength to crush and resist every change in its primordial state, but this one seems to be different from all the previous ones with which I am repeatedly unable to reason out in my favor.