(On your) Mark

I have a few marks on my right cheek. The kinds that girls have if they touched their face with their nails. Yeah, that kind. Until a while back, I did not give a damn. Now, I do. I mean, since the last 3 days I’ve been noticing them and they’re irritating me. They shouldn’t be there, I’ve been telling myself. Being the I-don’t-know-how-to-use-foundation girl that I am, at one time I couldn’t care less about their existence, but suddenly, whoosh, I give a damn! And now, I wonder why. They’ve been there for quite long, and they are almost redundant and worthy of being ignored. Nothing so great. Then why am I fretting?

***

It’s been there always. And I’ve been oblivious to it, because I’ve had better pursuits. At least, I’d like to believe that they were better pursuits. There was something to do. A job to accomplish. At least, I thought that it was. We were getting somewhere. We were trying to get somewhere. We were toiling against our wishes in order to land jobs, and in order to be able to make money to buy whatever we liked. So, now that we have, where do we go from here? What next? A new course. (Pun intended.) A new journey, perhaps? Something to build a career on. Something to make your resume look impressive? Or something to make yourself more impressive. A guitar, maybe. Or maybe, a trip to a place that we’ve never seen before. What next? I ask myself that question a lot of times these days. I have not asked for opinion from others as to what I should do next. If you ask why, the answer is pretty simple. It’s because this is my life. I need to live it the way I want to. (No, that does not sound as rebellious as you think it does.) It’s just that I’ve been watching life closely for sometime now and I have been telling myself that there is so much to do. So many things that we did not even fathom that could exist while trying to get where we are today.

I have a weird feeling that tells me that I need to get some direction in life. And so, I want to chart a course and see how it starts falling apart. I want to run to save it and hold it in my hands. I want a finish line. An end that I can see. A track that I can run on. And I want it to seem like an impossible task. I want to do something that everyone thinks I couldn’t do. I want to do more than what i am currently doing. The words that I’ve been telling myself are “radical change”. I want a radical change in my life. I want to see if I have the strength to bring about that kind of a change.

And I’m sure that the “something” is right here; somewhere in my vicinity, and i’m not able to see. It’s right here. I need to just look more carefully.

***

The marks on my face have been there for as long as I have known. I’ve just not been looking carefully.

– Sameen