Those 10 minutes.
It is a Sunday morning. You wake up late giving up on lot of plans of running, swimming and taking life head on; plans made while on the pillow last night. You wake up in the same pile of dirt like everyday, feeling miserable on how you miss her and fail to make her understand any of your feelings. How she is everything to you and you are no one to her. You send her the customary morning wish on WhatsApp anticipating cluelessly when will the tick turn double and then blue and what would the response be, if any. It all happens immediately and suddenly you do not know what to do. The conversations have frozen long back. You feel more miserable. But the response helps the anxiety not to grow any further. You wish her a good day and hope to take leave. She says she is going for river rafting. You wish her good luck and the forced conversation ends. The ticks remain grey.
There is only so much that you want, and life does not even yield you an inch in that. You keep tossing up between insecurity, depression, anxiety and obsession. You try and find solace in the dating apps, trying to strike a conversation with any random stranger. You go and find people who could replace her. There are bunch of smart, good looking, educated, successful ones out there, but none like her. The morning gives way to noon and you have just been able to brush your teeth. The other Sunday chores are yet to be done.
While you are ordering some fruits and essentials from grophers, the phone vibrates. The oldish 4S delays the display that makes you hope for her name to appear on the screen. A gamut of emotions run inside you for these few seconds. Unfortunately, it is an unknown number. You thinking it to be some automated sales call that has been bugging you once everyday, pick it up.
A radiant and lively female voice comes up from the other end. She confirms your name and introduces herself as a computer science teacher of a middle and high school in Gurgaon. She attended one of your sessions for high school teachers in Delhi and explains how she was impressed. She invites you to come to her school and inspire her students. She keeps talking for 10 minutes about how she liked what you talked in the month of December last year. Last year! Did that ever happen, you ask yourself. You patiently listen to all that she has to say while munching on an apple that you managed to grab in between. You do not even realise that these 10 minutes have pepped you up. You suddenly feel that you are still important to some people in this universe. There are some things that you can still do. That life is still worth living even if it is without love.
Those 10 minutes from a stranger is all that you needed to turn the day and take it head on. There is a lot yet to be done.
