These Minutes

Through time, there have been certain places, people, emotions that evoke the same reactions. These people and places are what the very walls and the many dormitories are to a Harvard grad: the measure of all that she has worked for and all that she has aspired to be. The emotion rises from the pit of the stomach and traces its way up to the heart, chocking every little muscle and droplet of blood with the crux of its being. Pride, some people may call it. Arrogance. Lunacy even, at times.
When at that moment, that rising in the feeling, the climax of all those years of piling little things up, it does not matter what you choose to call the experience.
She looked up from the book she had tightly clutched in her hands for over two days now. Like a compelling tour de force, these two objects held on very tight to each other. She hoped that through its pages, she would some how find the answers to all that she seeked. If the book had a voice of its own, it would also have a story to tell. Truth be told, that was what she was thinking of at that precise moment: the story of the book she held. Where it came from, all the hands it passed. The stories each of the hands that held it that went untold.
Some of life’s greatest mysteries hold the answer in the question itself. They lie within the very confines of the human head. Why we react the way we do, why in the middle of a predicament there remains a fine hardy thread of hope clearly running through. Why the balance between hope and despair can tip either way.
That day, looking up at the sepia toned sky, she knew that it will not go on forever.
She knew that between the blinking cursor of her laptop and the crumbling brownish, severely underlined pages of her books, she held close to her two of her best friends life was willing to give her.
The rain decides to come down. Slow trickles of colourless liquid seamlessly taking the hand of all those immaculately written alphabets, to merge into something more singular, something more whimsical.
Those hands, as always, snatched the two of them away, wiped the droplets off so that the fabric that added meaning to unkempt dreams and lonely promises may somehow be personified again.
Not very far from where she sat, there is a lake that is enveloped by a marsh. Not very long ago, this lake was famous for reasons of it own. For having drowned in its ebb to go on, some voices that were never to be heard again.
It is a story that has crossed the minds of the people who live there at least once. The moment can be one of many: a walk uphill, rain, bad grades, bad teeth, good grades, good teeth.
It is the story of a hand that liked to tell stories. She was messed in the head, they said. Been in and out of the cuckoo house. But when the weight of being fell on her shoulders, she did not have the strength to have to endure this tumult any more. Her hands- pretty ones at that, that wrote in the loveliest of ways, that were long and slender and had stains from certain other habits- those very hands one day picked up some rocks to put in her pocket, so that if she were to walk into a lake, the weight of the stones would ensure a smooth, swift path to hitting rock bottom. Later when she did drown herself, the now blue and bloated hands were the first part of her to surface above the lake waters. What a way to bid one final goodbye.
If you look closely, every hand has a story to tell. While some of them may not make it through tunnels of time, some others appear and reappear. Moving fingers thus write them down, at times making it complete with a Virginia Woolf style suicide.