You Only Live Once

When in doubt, travel!

I travel, when in doubt, when nothing works out, when laughter seems hard, and relationships fall apart! Buying a ticket of the Konkan Kanya Express every Friday night means buying a ticket to freedom for me.

I am a final year engineering student at Goa Institute of Management and Technology who bagged a summer internship in Pune at HSBC in their IT team. I should have been back to my college by November, but my boss Akshaye and the company wanted me to stay. It's a paid internship so neither my college nor I had apprehensions about it. My college's only concern was that the final year college placement season is around the corner. But Askhaye asked them not to worry as he will most likely recruit me in his team.

My boss Akshaye often tells me that hard work can take you places in life. He started as an Airtel sim sales executive somewhere in Nashik, which is far from being the corporate hub of India, and has grown to become the Vice President—IT of the APAC region. Amazing, isn't he?

Three months into the internship, he knew there was something up with me. Maybe the stipend was the only reason I chose to stick around.

There's a lot going on in my head right now. It is not just the career that I'm unsure of, I recently broke up with my college senior and live-in partner, Tara. She is the one I fell in love with on the first day of college, she has been the only one so far. I was meek and shy as a school kid. I was not the kind who would simply approach girls. She suggested that we leave the hostel and move-in together, but is now settled in the UK with her husband. Recent? Yeah, it has been only seven months. College relationships usually only last until the last day of college. Mine was one such relationship for sure.

My weekends meant listening to stories from her, watching Netflix, and drinking beer together. Now that I live with a couple of broke bachelors looking for jobs in IT, I don't feel like spending my weekends in Pune. Every weekend that I do, I feel like evaporating into nothingness. Maybe that's the reason I travel, far from my city, to the sea and beyond.

Life has become a party of the kind where you feel deserted in the company of others. Not just plain and simple lonely, but precisely one where you feel hollow, every second. I meditate, I run, I run fast. Then order pizzas at last. I scream, scream harder into the shield of my pillow. Tara, someday I will definitely get over the thoughts of meeting you again.

Tara's wedding was a huge shock and brought out the comic in me. I had always wanted to tell jokes on stage but had repressed my passion for the fear of people not approving of it. After she left, I felt I had hardly anything to lose. I always had a flair for making people laugh, but this time I honestly asked myself, 'Can we celebrate pain?'