On Home

The sun was fading, shrinking slowly through the dark, tinted windows. The people walking around me were sombre, almost funereal. They were going about their own work, deliberately, slowly, almost trying to avoid eye contact. I think I was the only one who was shocked, the only one who showed the mildest surprise. Everyone else seemed to have accepted that the end of the world was eight years away. They seemed to have altered their behaviour altogether; their way of looking at me, their way of smiling patiently, like I was a small child who had to be looked after. I don't remember screaming, just looking around, dazed and very worried.Sadaf* came and smiled, as if she'd won a moral victory. I think she had. I listened to her with more patience and less disdain than I ever had. It seemed that she wasn't lying, for once. Babar* came and told me that it was true, and showed surprise that I didn't know already. He was patient too. All this patience had me at the end of my own. I could not understand them taking it so lightly, accepting fate so easily. I thought of her, and wondered how she'd feel with fate having been decided. Was she going to alter herself too? Would she be so docile? I couldn't predict her reaction. It made me very uneasy.

The sun was going to shrink and die. That was what they all knew and I didn't. The world was going to end, declining slowly over a eight year span. I woke up some point after that and was unsure how much was true, and my very first, and very real, concern, was how I'd change. What I would become, what I would give up, what I'd cure and what if, all the what ifs. I remember sleeping for half an hour more after that. The same slow, dark movements continued. When I eventually woke up, and this was a good half hour after the first time, I checked the time. It was 1. It took five minutes to realize that all of it wasn't true. It smelt of Donnie Darko and Rain and a Disprin-like sun.

* All the names are changed, of course.