Can you survive this thrilling mind game?

The “ONE-TICKET RIDE”

~Travails of a perfect soul

The ordinary world in general is not typically normal. It is home to some fiendish feelings, some chilling nerves and just a crazy lot of surviving beings. 

‘Everything cannot be and isn’t perfect’, she had heard it but what possibly could she to do when she heard something more than this? Like some really powerful persistent echoes pulling her onto an intangible plane of penancing guilt or like the never fading tick tock of warnings sprinting in her mind.

It was all such an inexplicable environment but she would stun to know how everybody else nodded their heads in agreement upon listening to her unrest, and adequately enough to make her believe that it was a One-ticket ride, up and down the hill until a straight route was to be taken. ONE-TICKET RIDE: one hell of a psychological travel meant to be undertaken all alone.

She felt she was different, at least from the people around in her eyes, who if not in real but pretended to be okay and happy with most of the common and/or unclassified things, revel in the given chaos and simply live without terms. 

This knowing began to boil up through years and had started to make things worse for her. It left her to an inconclusive question; if all this while she was perfect in her own way or perfect in a way that the people around her wanted her to see. 

At times, they said to her, “Hey, sweetie! You must take things slow, you’ll get it once it’s the right time.” At other times, they remarked, “Oh! Our dear girl, we know how gracefully you would perfect it. You’ve got some real gifts.” To her, such approvals seemed as scary as the denials that depressed her. 

Her fragile mind strumming through the screaming strings of perfection could no longer make music. A confused song composed out of delicate notes twining between living to order yet living with disorder became the eventual tone of her messed-up life. 

So, for once and for all, she mustered her residual courage and embarked on her lone travel. Nonetheless, she severed the tests during her One-ticket ride: days in the darkness, nights in the anxieties, curses of the echoes, rebounds of entreaties, wars with the skins; but only to never spot the straight route.

THE STRAIGHT ROUTE

It wasn’t until she ceased to settle with those screeching voices inside her mind that the flashlight in her hand, cutting through the white dusty air-flakes fell on an erect signboard pointing in the direction of the straight route. The widely spaced faint letters on it read: 

‘ ₦ ¤   ┱ ↺ R ₦ I 𝆧 ₲    ฿ ₳ ¢ ₭   

₣r ¤ ₥ ╠╣🝗R🝗’   

Immediately, a set of new warnings outpacing the rate of her breaths began

to curl up her mind…tick-tock…tick-tock, and before these could rise to the crescendo, she crashed to the ground with a loud thump. The next moment, when her swelled-up reddish black eyes lay open, she found herself holding tight onto the crumbled piece of travel-ticket in her hand. 

Suddenly, a strong swoosh of the wind tossed the ticket to a distance in its wide arms and she ran behind it (breathing heavily) to grab it until it itself rest at the base of the signboard. She lifted it from the ground, brushed aside the dirt and flipped it over. 

A one-lined sentence inked in a bizarre font on the backside of the little ticket before her said:  ‘You are perfectly normal till you end up becoming gravely perfect’
          

 ⚘  ⚘  ⚘  ⚘  ⚘

Story By: 

Agrita Arora