Strange Indeed!

Mails from home, deep inside my heart, where only strangers ever came;

Montessori, 2005.     

(The one where it began.)

There were major earthquakes from time to time in your heart this week. Most of them in the noon and some in the mornings. Since the first earthquake, a strange town came into being. Vaguely enough, the cranky, rosy-cheeked guy seems to be the reason every single time. There were earthquakes when he snatched the plow from your hand while playing in the garden, when he laughed his heart out on the swing and when he cried because he couldn’t keep the colors inside the line. More importantly, this entire week your home kept brimming with colors which only dimmed a ted when he left with his parents at off time.

This was the first flutter of my heart. I still think it was quite early for my heart to skip a beat. But heart really does beat on its own! There’s nothing to be done.

Class One, 2007.

(The one with unnoticed encounters.)

Your home had remained dull for an eternity. According to the Charts, the land of hatred occupied solely by arithmetic's sucked the vibrancy of your home. However, bursts of colors were seen in the gardens from time to time today. I am glad you have gifted my pale land with a season of colors. 

My class fellow from 1st, 2nd and 3rd standard. He was the cutest, serious little boy I had seen. I would dazedly stare at him work his way through class tasks all on his own.

It would weirdly make me flutter when we happened to end up together.

 Sometimes he would sit before me and turn around to ask for an extra pencil. Then he’d return it back to me in the last unit and run off to his friends.

On some mornings he would take my bus to school because he missed his own that came 5 minutes earlier (we had the same stop).

Oh and the early morning detentions together for not having trimmed nails.

We really had quite a history together. But only I seem to have lived it.

Class Four, 2010.

(The one where we end up strangers.)

The colors are making their way into your home again. I hope these colors go on and on … and deepens every time you sit beside him.

It was the longest! It was the deepest!

This time the flutter came around late. Maybe because this story starts with a ruckus.

I was in my new class, sitting all by myself, in peace and harmony. We were learning flora and fauna when out of nowhere a paper plane landed on the teacher’s desk. Funny, the maker of the plane had personalized it already.

Tada! Here was the first gift I was to get from my new class. The science teacher, enraged, called out the paper plane guy's name and made him my desk partner for the rest of the month.

“Help him become disciplined like yourself. Alright?”, the teacher had said.

A devilish grin he had passed.

“Screwed I am”, I had thought.

A few weeks… Within a few weeks, our worlds had changed. He had learned to manage discipline while I had managed to learn mischief.

It was impossible to keep a straight with him around. His all-day-long jokes, not leaving my side in P.E, noticing my little things… made my heart flutter.

Flutter like never before.

From that screwed week to all the weeks in the next five years to come, I thought of him of weekends, laughed at his jokes when I was home, and left for school way before assembly to meet him sooner than possible.

Those were the intoxicated days!

Nevertheless, after five years of ecstasy awaited the first day of grade 8.

The day we finally met after the summer break.

And he walked away with merely a nod.

O'Levels, 2017-18.

(The one with passing fancies.)

The guy with fractured hand and hairs all sprawled over his forehead left colors several times. The colors appeared and instantly disappeared. This is new in the history of your home.

Around this time, I had learned to enjoy the flutter but knew better than to get swayed by them.

The curly-haired boy left appreciably darker colors every time he read out his story in the creative writing class. He even caused a firework for the first time in the skies over your home. The time you almost bumped into this guy was felt inside your home like decades.

Sure he was one son of decades!

I just could not keep my eyes off him. Curly locks, black band ring around the thumb, sweetest deep voice, tall lean posture, He had definitely walked out of a comic book world. And don’t even get me started about the deadly penman he was. Only my ECG could explain that.

It’s ironic how he caused my heart so much trouble, back in the days, yet the only exchange we ever had had me apologizing to him. (A “sorry” for the bump that never happened.)

It is still hard to decide why he made me flutter? Was he a candy to my eye or Sophie Kinsella to my reader?

Med School Orientation day, 2021.

(The one unwantedly conceived.)

The dull of years was hindered today for a second. The same colors had disturbed again for longer than a second. It reminded me of the old days.

I was not ready to enjoy any flutter that day. For one, my jitters had already shunned me. For another, I had to save the flutter for the oath of Geneva.

Yet, somewhere disappointments and disappointments hence, I unabashedly admit;

 My heart S.T.O.P.P.E.D the moment I settled in the auditorium and looked up at the guy who had just entered.

This guy was straight out of Rainbow Rowel’s novels. He was park damn it!

By the end of the orientation, I knew naught of the oath but his name and the fact that we did not have the same days.

The new season is coursing through the walls of your home like an orchestra. You have turned the house into quite a beauty.

True. I could feel the quiet and the beauty.

 But hey there is always destiny. And it does what it does!

On one fateful Monday, I happened to read the timetable wrong and ended up in the lecture hall when I was supposed to be online.

“Great!”, I had thought.

“I would get to see him again”, I had thought.

 Only did destiny know, I was supposed to learn a little more than anatomy that day.

Seated back in the fourth row, I met with a girl pretty and sweet. We had instantly clicked. Learning about my dilemma, she promised, she'd be with me all day long. Our friendship seemed like the beginning of something real.

After a hearty exchange on med school hardships, she mentioned that a friend of hers will be joining us. I expressed my delight to meet her friend. And then she told me who her friend was. My Park!!

My Park and My newfound potential best friend were childhood best friends!

They lived abroad in the same area, attended the same school for 18 years, and had moved here now to attend the med school “together”.

Oh, the dilemma!

I couldn’t be grateful enough for their company, but it was troubling to be just one person away from My park.

That day, I went back home knowing I had to forget whatever ounce of flutter park had caused. I knew better than to dwell on a flutter that a soon-to-realize-his-love-for-his-female-best-friend guy caused.

X-x-x-x-X

The timeline of the small town has only been lived till here.

For the ever-so-many volcanic eruptions and twirling color mobs to happen in the small town deep inside my heart, I will be more than welcoming of the colorful seasons. Yet I will go about the strangers I have hosted in my heart for days and years, as estranged as natural.

Until I’m ready to let the flutters grow and the strangers know that I dwell on them in a place called home deep inside my heart.