Choices.

“Choices “ is a smaller word than destination, but “ choices” can ruin or make your destiny.

 They took Robert frost to a la la land he kind of hoped for and feebly wanted to be on, but left a forgotten road not taken. It made that aubade, sung by a solitary reaper, well known but left a dying ardent desire in Wordsworth to ask whether the song was for her lover or her solidarity. Choices that made W.E. Henley stand Invictus; made him the master of his soul while everyone was busy conquering the world. .Choices that made the brook to go on forever. Choices that made Sylvia commit suicide even after she saw that clinquant, tinsel-like depth in a simple mirror. Choices that led to the heart wrecking ephemeral of Antony and Cleopatra or the Romeo Juliet. A choice to choose one thought over another that made Wordsworth think he was as lonely as a cloud in the belt of dancing daffodils.

 I have also made certain choices; we all make them. The trick of life isn’t in making the right choices; it’s in accepting the wrong ones.  Hurting and redamancy are on one side of the coin and in the other is death. No one tosses it every time as we all assume it to. No one has to wait for this coin to toss to make a choice, we all choose consistently, regularly, and constantly.

Till the time we are alive, we only get the one side; the hurting that follows love, a love that follows hurt. And after the coin is flipped; it remains flipped. After a choice made it’s made. After a petal fell, it remains fallen.
A hurt once done is done forever.

Even I have got hurt when a friend I trusted with everything backstabbed me.  
I have got hurt when a girl who is extremely thoughtful (at times) used an unthinkable adjective before my asset.
I have got hurt when I needed to timely, remind a friend of mine what my kind of friendship is.
When someone I shared my secrets with couldn’t take a stand for them.
When people said they don’t care about my opinions; but were kind enough to give theirs, “I am hurt”.
When I lost a friend over a pity argument.
I was hurt when I had to stand up and shout on someone, mocking my problems, with eyes full of tears and a breaking, choked voice, “If you don’t know about me, shut up.”
I was hurt because there were my three pearls, friends, sitting in that vicinity who didn’t bother to speak up.
I was hurt because F.R.I.E.N.D.S made me laugh not “friends”.
Hurt because someone I cared for said, “I don’t care.”

Life isn’t a choice you make, but maybe your choice is the life you make. You don’t get to chose if you get hurt in this world or not, but you do have a say in who gets to hurt you.

And I love my choices.

Love all of those who have hurt me. Even the ones who didn’t care because now their cursing is an elegy for me; their monody a euphonious song to me; their personal grievance is a reminder of a special bond I had with them. Because my grudges are dissipated and they left me, an excellent raconteur, to tell you stories from your perspective. Yes, yours.

Because Romeo and Juliet thought they had tragic lives; Shakespeare thought their tragedy was worth writing and we, the audience, we put an adjective before their tragedy, before Shakespeare’s work that their story was “emotionally sad.”

Epics are meant to be written. Fortunately, a worthy story will find a worthy writer to sculpt it into a masterpiece, and unfortunately, a worthy story will also find audiences who never watched the full movie but are out to give remarks after watching the first 10 seconds of its trailer; audiences like the adjective extenders, the “I don’t care”-ers, the plagiarists, the one who vandalized that sculpture, the Brutus’.
But I had some people in the audience who understood the cracks, the scratches, the wounds, and a quiescent itching on the hands of the sculpture while he/she was sculpting this masterpiece. I had my adjective justifiers, the “I’ll care”-ers, the trademarked assets, the protectors, the Mark Antony kind of friends too.

And so I love my choices.

I don’t regret meeting them or losing them. Maybe they do.

 Some of them thankful to have met me. Some of them embracing that they’re still with me, some of them trying to block memories of me by listening to songs I never liked, few of them forgetting this nightmare like a usual dream and few sticking to the fact that they don’t care and they actually don’t; while all of them forgetting me and their choices.

But again, I like my choices;
And I will like my choices, even if they don’t like theirs.

Because “a” life is not defined by the choices you make individually, it’s all mutual choices of yours, of theirs and choices of everyone. Because the life of Romeo & Juliet is remembered not because of the main choices they made but the tiny choices the fate made, choices their parents made and a smaller choice of Shakespeare to write about them.

Because “your life”, only yours, is a consequence of your individual choice, maybe.