Rains that don’t make your clothes wet…
It was a quiet afternoon of a Wednesday in August. It had been sunny for most of the week, but the weather today was quite unlike the last few days. While looking at the dark clouds gathered above his head, Yash could comfortably guess that it could very well rain today. In some sense, it was a bit of relief, though, from the week full of sweaty weather in Mumbai. Everyone else he knew was busy at their offices and Yash was alone, calmly sitting on the balcony of his quarters, sipping coffee that he made for himself and feeling the breeze caress his cheeks.
Yash had taken a leave from his office citing urgent work as an excuse that didn’t really exist. The reason was nothing else, but he was just fatigued by his boring colleagues and exasperating boss and wanted to take some time off for himself. Another reason why he hated his current job was also that he had a very low salary, was not given a single raise in the last 3 years and the job wasn’t worth even a quarter of the hard work he put in to get it.
Frankly, He didn’t have many friends and the few he considered as his friends didn’t truly act like so. He’d often take out time to help them with their things, but when it came to helping Yash, everybody bailed, making an excuse that he could easily guess to be false. Still, for the sake of having someone to hang out with, he had these so-called friends.
Yash lived alone in a township accommodation provided by the company for which he worked. His family lived far away in Kota. Yash undoubtedly loved his family and would die for them just like everyone would for their family. But he didn’t consider himself close to his family. He had come this far from his home, having a dream to help his family achieve financial stability. He worked hard and earned for them and his family too was always ready to support him, but he just really could not open up to his family about his hidden secrets. The secrets which ate him every day from inside, and tore him apart piece by piece.
He didn’t really have any love life, either. His interaction with the females had always been limited because of the situations in his school and college life. Supposedly because no girl ever came close to him romantically in school or college. He couldn’t blame them either, as he knew the fact that girls never make the first move. At the same time, he too was very shy to do so. He met girls, though, but could never really be close to them. Honestly, he did connect to some of them emotionally, but they didn’t lean in the same way. Or maybe they did… He couldn’t precisely tell, as he never made the first move to ask them out on a date. He thought they never gave him enough signals, but what was he? A faulty antenna, maybe…
So while he sat in his chair on the balcony, diving deep into his thoughts, contemplating his existence, he tried to differentiate whether he was in solitude or was he really so lonely. One thought that put knives through his heart every second was the fact that the people to whom he gave utmost preference in his life, he wasn’t having even half of the significance in theirs. He cared for all of them and helped them in their needs but nobody thought of him and nobody called him to ask him how he was doing. Every one of them took him for granted. He specifically helped these people when they felt exactly the same, exactly as lonely but today no one was around to help him. He knew he couldn’t really do anything to make them feel his worth but his heart ached to feel even the slightest bit of comfort from a person who’d understand him.
His thoughts ran wild on the open field of negativity and it occurred to him the one sentence he once read in an article on Medium which said,
It’s life. Joy or sorrow, sweetness or bitterness, affection or hatred, in the end, it’s only you and you alone.
Yash kept sitting there for a while contemplating life. The time passed by and without him knowing, the afternoon turned into evening. The dark clouds had gone away without shedding the water in them. The land of Mumbai was dry. Still, there was one thing wet. Yash’s eyes… soaked in the rain of sadness which didn’t make his clothes wet.
