The Journey

Nobody tells the story like it is, maybe for a reason, because we all like to believe in happy endings, or the sheer hope of having one.
No one will tell the story of the broken man, the one who lost, the villain who was defeated, the drunk who destroyed all that he had in the utter misery of his own insecurities, the woman who wronged all wrongs against one right, her right to tragedy, the mistress who was a lesson learned by another man for his wife, to be used till he was educated of rights and wrongs, the child who walks away as a bully while everyone finally realizes they can stand up to him.
Life is not perfect, we all understand time to time. What we forget, or what we choose to disregard is that people aren’t perfect either. They’re all molded into themselves, through a figment of their own imagination of what they should be like, or what they think, they best be.
We are all slaves to time, and even though we keep roaming in circles to make the time in our life matter, we can’t understand the concept of taking two giant steps forward and then consent to a fall. And we’re all unaware of the change that stands two feet away, if only we had the courage enough to say yes to it.
The story is not supposed to end; it’s always a beginning of another. The sad eyes that you see tomorrow have a story behind it, that started on a day like any other, just ended with grief that got hidden behind one person’s eyes, and a shine of hope in someone else’s the same day.
The legendary stories never revolve around the concept of happiness, there’s always a cynic, and there’s seldom an optimist, just one character, who is full of life, and full of hope, and sometimes, that’s all any story needs. It doesn’t matter if love wins, and it doesn’t matter if the hope dies down, what matters eventually is that, the story was told. That the people in those stories survived, and nobody was labeled, there were no wrongs, and there were no rights, there were just actions, and words, that stayed forever.
That’s when you come to the senses of a person who knows what it feels like to have an impact on someone’s life. Be it anyone. The identity of a person you broke, or the revolutionary change you brought in someone’s life. And every once in a while, there are those changes, that have an impact so strong, that time and place, has nothing to do with the fading away of it, and it remains a constant fire inside you, blazing, for every time you look back, it doesn’t put out, but grows stronger. There are no regrets, there is a just a string of hope that makes you put the blame on circumstance, or fate. You can be wronged, or you can be the wrong one, every once in a while, but in the story you tell, you begin from and end to, the same place everyone else does eventually, from dust, to dust.
You will be someone’s incomplete ending, somebody’s villain, or you may be the victim in a story of one person’s life, and you may be the bully in another, you may have stolen someone else’s glory, yet you might still be the one feeling robbed of their glory some other day. One story may begin with you, another may end with you. You will surely be the lesson learned for one person, and a need for another.
You will also, never know the purpose of your life, till you finally learn to let go trying to find meaning inside every mistake, or every piece of victory you achieve. For your victory, could be someone else’s defeat. A defeat you rarely care to notice. Another life, you don’t recognize you touched.
For whatever you are, and whatever you will be, is a discovery to yourself ultimately, for everyone carries their baggage, their regrets, their sorrows, their joys, and to each their own make sense perfectly, for, there are always those days that stay with us, those fulfilling moments, those enigmatic nights where all you follow is your instinct, one singular moment, where you finally find the significance of something greater. When the stormy night brings something unusual with it, or those ordinary summer days, which bring the heavenly smell of bloom and the first cloud of rain and you can feel something is about to change, or the casual way someone breathes beside you, or lets you lean on them, only because you have to, and you wonder, just a little beyond your own world. And it is not about the beginning or an end of a story then, it’s the journey from one to the other that matters.

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. THAT is their mystery and magic.”
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)