Page 25 - You Only Live Once [BooksLD]

I travel, when in doubt, when nothing works out, when laughter seems hard,
and relationships fall apart! Buying a ticket of the Konkan Kanya Express
every Friday night means buying a ticket to freedom for me.

I am a final year engineering student at Goa Institute of Management and
Technology who bagged a summer internship in Pune at HSBC in their IT
team. I should have been back to my college by November, but my boss
Akshaye and the company wanted me to stay. It’s a paid internship so
neither my college nor I had apprehensions about it. My college’s only

concern was that the final year college placement season is around the
corner. But Askhaye asked them not to worry as he will most likely recruit
me in his team.

My boss Akshaye often tells me that hard work can take you places in
life. He started as an Airtel sim sales executive somewhere in Nashik,
which is far from being the corporate hub of India, and has grown to
become the Vice President - IT of the APAC region. Amazing, isn’t he?
Three months into the internship, he knew there was something up with

me. Maybe the stipend was the only reason I chose to stick around.
There’s a lot going on in my head right now. It is not just the career that
I’m unsure of, I recently broke up with my college senior and live-in

partner, Tara. She is the one I fell in love with on the first day of college,
she has been the only one so far. I was meek and shy as a school kid. I was
not the kind who would simply approach girls. She suggested that we leave
the hostel and move-in together, but is now settled in the UK with her
husband. Recent? Yeah, it has been only seven months. College
relationships usually only last until the last day of college. Mine was one
such relationship for sure.

My weekends meant listening to stories from her, watching Netflix , and
drinking beer together. Now that I live with a couple of broke bachelors
looking for jobs in IT, I don’t feel like spending my weekends in Pune.
Every weekend that I do, I feel like evaporating into nothingness. Maybe

that’s the reason I travel, far from my city, to the sea and beyond.
Life has become a party of the kind where you feel deserted in the
company of others. Not just plain and simple lonely, but precisely one
where you feel hollow, every second. I meditate, I run, I run fast. Then

order pizzas at last. I scream, scream harder into the shield of my pillow.
Tara, someday I will definitely get over the thoughts of meeting you again.