Searching for Tomorrow

Singularity

Rachel used to be somebody, though. A girl who could write well. A girl who could act, sing and dance- well, privately. A girl whose head was stuffed with dreams, with random lines from songs, with verses of poetry, with dialogues from movies.

It was her mother who was partly to blame for her character. A rather sharp, quick witted woman who possessed a child like intuition and a thoroughly old fashioned mindset, she subjected her child to sessions of reading children's classics from a very young age.

While other girls flitted through the world of ballet and Barbie, Rachel was speeding through Roald Dahl, Astrid Lindgren and LM Montgomery, often spending days buried under the famous five series.

The other children thought she was a quaint little thing- tiny Rachel Leigh with her pale oval face and round glasses who sat in a corner of the classroom and read books that no one had heard of. They did not engage in much conversation with her- the conversations that they did have left them with a feeling of lingering inferiority. They imagined that she felt awkward about herself, and were patronizingly kind.

But contrary to their beliefs, Rachel prided herself on her singularity. She relished the thought that her intellectual capacity was higher than that of her peers, and had started using phrases like 'pandemonium is about to erupt!' while describing the heavy tension before the mass of students trampled down the stairs.

She could also sing and dance- not spectacularly, but with a sort of ethereal charm that was quite uncommon. Under the watchful eye of her teacher, Mrs. Cuthbert, she began singing in choirs and choruses, humming 'Daisy bell' under her breath while her friends gushed about Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. She did not mind the fact that she did not fit in- all the heroines of the books she had read did not fit in either, and they always seemed to have the most amazing lives. The notion had firmly been set that 'unique' was what the world desired.

Rachel shunned the hearty, energetic characters of her generation, and preferred the mellow dignity of the 1920's- when the world was at the cusp of a technological and cultural boom.

On the whole, she remained an enigma to her peers, a delight to her parents, and a thoroughly marvelous companion to herself. Her thoughts were often in third person, as though her mind itself was a story book, narrating minute-by-minute the story of her life.

As I am now.