I refuse.

I refuse to believe that one significant event from an interwoven unending sequence of events can be responsible for ‘You’. That the gravity of one moment is so profound that it can account for all the complex emotions of your heart and pragmatic reasoning of your mind.

24 Hours. 1, 440 minutes. Or 86,400 seconds multiplied with your years of existence is proportionally too wide a time range for ‘one event’ to change ‘You.’

You mature when that friend you tagged as your ‘best friend’ since high-school isn’t even aware of your existence when she moves to a different town to pursue her academics. You mature a little more when you realise that the yardstick of determining a friendship is not directly proportional to the frequency of their calls or messages but by a person’s ability to hold onto to you through your chaotic storms. And when you stumble upon the realisation that ‘people change’ and no matter how scared you are of being replaced or how hard you try to hold onto them, you eventually have to let go, acknowledge the person they have become and instead hold tighter  onto the memories you both made.

You grow strong when someone close dies. When one day they have a significant part to play in your life, and the next day they abruptly disappear into oblivion. You stare blankly at their lifeless body waiting for that familiar smile or touch their cold body desperately in search of the comforting warmth. When you force your mind to reminiscence every memory of that person, but time being the commanding master, you are left with only faded remembrance, you grow a little stronger.

You change when the person you love doesn’t love you back. You learn not to despise a person because they didn’t comply with your emotions or curse them to misery because the turn of events didn’t go in your favour. You instead learn to respect other’s sentiments, treat them well and move on knowing that the right person will find you eventually.

You become a better friend when instead of being critical and disapproving of your friend because she puffs a cigarette or drinks a bottle of Whiskey, you acknowledge the fact that every person has a different set of convictions and just because her’s are not in conformity with your’s is no reason for you to strain the friendship.

You become a little selfless when you give that extra scoop of ice-cream to your younger brother when he looks at you with his innocent eyes after finishing his own or when you decide to make the bed for the night glancing your mother’s tired face.

 You change when being honest in a deceptive world doesn’t fetch you anything. Where masquerade is the fashion and manipulation the law, your truth has little space to breathe. You either hold onto the person you choose to be strengthening your convictions an inch or choose to be one among those several imposters surviving in an unfair world.

You grow wise when instead of cheating in an exam to get full marks, you let that one or two marks slip by because you realise there is more to life than just ‘marks’, and giving up your integrity for an extra mark which will be lost to oblivion in the years to come would be a foolish thing to do.

You become a better person when you are there for someone who ill-treated you or wronged you in ways unknown in the past; when you continue holding onto the goodness in you when people around you stab it with all their might.

You learn to respect yourself when you set boundaries for how you want others to treat you. When you raise your voice at a lewd remark made at you under the garb of a joke or when you refuse to settle for anything that is less worthy of you, even when there are thousand eyes rolling at you.

All these little or big moments of your life, however you choose to remember them, together spin a bundle of experience which mould both your heart and mind to its present being.

I believe your heart is either sewed together by the strong jovial ribbons of strength, endurance and maturity or by the meek tangled threads of despair, struggle and hollowness; both of which is a cumulative outcome of the series of events you stumbled upon.

I believe that there exists a genesis to the person you have become, good or ugly and that one distinct particular event cannot be the only atom of your existence.

I refuse to define you by ‘one moment’ amidst 86,400 other multiplied interwoven moments.

Srijata Majumdar

2013-18