Will O' the Wisp

Sometimes you can't speak. You find yourself amidst so much happenings, good and bad, that you lose the strength to speak. The words in your head jumble up so badly that you also don't know what exactly to speak. The smallest words like no, yes, okay, thanks feel more difficult than the last novel you read aloud. But then you can't stay silent for long. You have to answer what happened to you. You have to go through interrogations and judgements. You have to know why this has happened to you and how you are better than so many other people. This continues for long. For longer than all the time you were feeling worse about yourself. The banyan tree which promised you to hide from the rest of the world either has died or is so far from you that even to reach it, you need to speak. Hence, you speak. You speak in the language of lesser loved people. But you speak.

The other ponds in the village are far away from hers. She desires to go there but she is too small to swim across rivers. The duckling doesn't like her pond at all because she is the only duckling there. She sees fishes, tadepoles, swans, flies but she doesn't see another duck. Still she assumes it to be her home. She doesn't understand home is where heart lies, she doesn't understand "family" is what we choose. She tries to swim in there, she tries to swim out of there, she can't. The little boy who comes to the pond everyday to complete his homework has grown older. He doesn't have homeworks to complete anymore. She doesn't grow. The paperboats sail away. The duckling tries to follow them. They drown. She doesn't. Sometimes they are picked by someone on the other side of the pond, she sails in vain. The flies buzz, the people talk, the birds chirp, every sound becomes malignant to her ears. She doesn't talk. She doesn't have an...