Beginnings and Ends, Always. | Real Talk (working title) by Zarah Noorani
Zarah Noorani is a 21 year-old writer/editor/curator from Bombay, India who thoroughly enjoys mozzarella cheese and trashy Bollywood music (only up till 2013. She's not stupid). Real Talk (working title) is a space for her to rant, complain, act cool, and just... exist on the internet. The bi-monthly column explores themes of personal interest-driven stories and accounts, random musings and what seems to be the revolutionary epiphany-of-the-week.
Hello,
The end.
And that’s it! In this column entry, I’m taking complete liberty to start with the end. It’s a simple, humble beginning and I am happy to have come here. I am happy for you too. I sit here, at 3 pm - listening to trashy Bollywood (which I am now 100% sure is a whole genre), I notice that there is something so exciting about the end. Nothing can ever start without something else ending. If it hasn’t ended, the next thing hasn’t quite started yet or well, you’re simply wrong. But really, think about it. Isn’t the end the real beginning of everything? It is so silly to think that only a few years ago when I was at the deepest end of my teenage years, each end I encountered felt like the end of the world. There was no coming back from there. I… I would never experience true youth thereon forward. Or something equally if not more melodramatic than that. I’m so glad my parents said "no" to me for so many (I'll admit, *wayward) things growing up. It has really seasoned me for real-life life and not just the things we cook up in our heads.
I suppose each end makes us feel a (slightly) extreme feeling because we still feel that way well past our teenage years. An end is still an end. The event, the part of your life, the milkshake you were drinking so, so slowly to truly cherish it - will end. And that end will be sad. Or happy! Perhaps it is the temporary nature of permanence that shocks us the most. We either wish or dread ends. Tell me, did your last break-up hurt? Mine did, for a moment. What made me feel the worst about it was not that I got broken up WITH, but that we won’t be what we were anymore. That part of what I thought my life to have was over and no longer valid. The end of what I sought comfort in had arrived and it took me by surprise. Now, I don’t need to tell you that if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn't have seen the amazing things I have now, I wouldn’t have found a great friend in said partner. The end of that started several other things that I am forever grateful for, and similarly, each end is something to truly praise. It will be the start of something so unexpected, so heart-wrenching that you can’t say no.
I am currently making my way to some HUGE changes. I’m moving forward and I’m moving fast. It is daunting to say the least - leaving all that you know to be. Just be. In about 12 hours’ time, all of what I knew was home to me, will no longer be within my reach. I can no longer fantasize about being home, on my bed, drinking my coffee, looking out of my window. The sense of overwhelming amounts of aged cheese, the weird pang of paying your rent, the feeling of jolting awake from what could have been a well-deserved nap to meet a deadline awaits. I am generally a huge comfort-nostalgia person. I hold memories and people in them as dear to me as can be. It’s true, trust me. The dreaded Goodbye is an end, still. It is the end to what I found comfort in, and it is an end to what I could always fall back on. It feels weird, and it probably is weird too.
But you know, and I don’t want to once again end on the same shitty optimistic BS as everyone else, I know things will slowly find their place on my very humble scale of comfort. Everything eventually will. The end of permanence is particularly endearing because there is always something temporary waiting at the end of it all. And you? You just march on forward right into it. What else can you do? Go out there and explore. Comfort is perhaps meant to be broken, and everything's meant to end, because if it doesn’t, then it has only just begun.