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Last Monday, despite the blues, Zerina paid for a paper wrist-band. It was her entry into a theme park. She'd lost all hope of writing a novel the day she decided she would — it was a bit of a bummer.
The sun was out, and the clouds were tucked away at the horizons as she walked under the unnaturally blue sky. There were shrieks of delightful screams, children soared in happiness all around her. She only had one mission: get inspiration.
Zerina felt like a dark cloud among the cheerful customers of the theme park, her own struggles with the mind disallowed her to jump onto a ride like the rest of them. Aah, what a cruel world — if it were a person, she'd give them an earful.
It wasn't until she saw a little girl trip and drop her strawberry flavoured ice cream until the thought struck her — who said there wasn't a place on dunya that wasn't filled with trails? A boy walked over and offered the girl his vanilla ice cream, and Zerina smiled. They'd make such a pretty love story — a simple one.
Then she paused, 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦?
There was no such word, if life had taught her anything about the way it carried out tales, it was anything but. Three hours later, she was amazed at how collective her thoughts were. Despite the differences between her and the girl, despite the varying degrees of trials they went through — there's something about every one of them that brings heartbreak into picture.
A person is more than what we see, much more than what they show. To put it simply, Zerina thought we were like a book, with layers and layers of pages, strung and held between clusters of words and sentences. Every different turn of life offered her time, but like a miserly aunt — it expected her to change shape within a matter of days. Every rerouting of a path she had taken, thinking it was the right one, was bent to make her walk upside down until she came to her senses. And she thought — are we really what we think we are? Or are we made up of familiar ingredients on different scales?
She remembered all the rides she took when she was young, the merry go-arounds, the water parks, the bumper car rides, the scary roller coasters and the ferris wheel. She remembered the way she stood in line — with a childish certainty that her turn would surely come and she'd figure out what the thrill was all about. Perhaps she was still standing in line, still waiting for someone to pull her strings and make her work. Perhaps the twist was — she was the only one in the line this time. And that meant she needed to walk forward, instead of wait. She'd found her answer — the story mattered less, the lessons matter more.
Because if one holy book can withhold such prime nuances of life, don't we all seek the same thing at the end of the day? 𝘚𝘢𝘣𝘳.
