Today ‘was’ one of those many days when her stomach flinched in the morning as she stepped out of the house and there was this voice in her head echoing, “It’s not working out!” She had started to feel like that quite a lot lately. Habitual as it is for her, she siloed herself in a crowded train and started reading. Have you ever realized this, but we all live in spaces, spaces that are comfortable to us, spaces that we choose not to share, spaces where we are just confined to ourselves, spaces where we are not held accountable to anyone but us, spaces with vacuum, spaces with possibilities – all temporary, all amorphous. Retiring to that space, she stood dead shuffling the pages of a book that talked about ‘honor’ and there she read this line – “When I look back on the mistakes I made, they all have one thing in common – I was tired”. Suddenly as if looking for more, it registered to her ‘why did no one ask – ‘Tired of?” She tried to tie the threads together to understand what was the protagonist tired of, read further and it was no where related to the reasons she had pinned in her mind. Possible! Two people can be tired of entirely different reasons. While the protagonist, ‘the most wise’ by virtue of being the eldest daughter was tired under the burden of bringing shame and disgrace to her family by daring to love someone, by pursuing happiness. She was tired sewing cracks wide open of an abandoned heart deprived of love and belonging.

Real Life Heroes – By Manvi