END OF BEGINNING?

 

~HOW DO I DESCRIBE THIS FEELING?

6th MAY 2025'

FROM THE THIRD FLOOR WINDOW SEAT

There’s something strange about sitting in a classroom again — not just the physicality of it, not just the worn wooden desk under my palms.

It’s deeper. Like I’ve returned not to a building, but to a former version of myself — a self that feels faintly foreign now.

A girl who once thought success was linear and the world was a solvable equation. I still believe in solving, but now I know the variables bite back.

After a year away — a year of breathing slow, thinking fast, reading like oxygen, and unlearning things that once seemed gospel — I’m back in the system.

But I am not who I was.

When I glance outside the window now, Just glass. Steel. Sky.

The skyline of this city cuts across the horizon like a bar code for ambition.

Towering SUPERNOVA SPIRA BUILDING stand like prud monuments to capitalism and competition, glittering not with innocence, but with the pulse of urgency.

You know I love watching that building – that many times I see it from the violet line metros and the lanes while coming back from Noida or just looking at it from my terrace while sun rises at dawn.

It reminds me of the same tallest building in the video game of GTA~SAN ANDREAS .

Where Fiction Meets Steel and Sky

Watching the Supernova Spira in Noida,

I felt something strange stir—an echo from another time, another city, built not of concrete, but of pixels and dreams.

For a second, I wasn't in India , but near Los Santos Tower,

looming over a foggy city full of chaos, beats, and codes.

—or as I knew it in my teenage years, that one building in GTA: San Andreas.

I used to jetpack to its roof, parachute off into the pixelated sunset, chasing the thrill of imagined freedom.

And now, here I m, sitting in real life at the view of a tower that felt eerily familiar, as though the game had rendered itself into reality.

—only this time, there are no cheat codes.

And yet, somewhere between the sirens below and the skyscrapers above,

I feel it — the thrum in my chest, louder than traffic, more enduring than deadlines: *potential.*

It’s a heavy word. One that people like to throw at youth like confetti, not realizing it lands like stone.

*You have so much potential.*

As if we’re not already carrying enough — climate anxiety, precarity in all terms, the threat of war, the burden of brilliance.

But still, I carry it. And yes, I know what I’m made of.

Sometimes I feel like a storm barely held in human skin — ideas crash inside me faster than I can write them down.

I walk through school corridors with a thousand unnamed theories swirling in my mind, questions about justice and policy and belonging that don’t fit neatly into standardized tests.

My palm stained with ink. I don’t want to just ace the system. I want to reinvent the architecture of it.

I feel a cold draft under the door of the future.

The news hums like a distant siren — talks of rising tension, militarised borders, a nation split between fear and fury. There’s an unease in the air, a pre-war kind of hush.

People don’t say it aloud yet, but it’s in their eyes — even the grown-ups are scared.

I don’t quite know how to put it, but I feel like I’ve stepped back into my life with new eyes.

2 years ago, when I sat by my window on the backseat of classroom and looked out at the trees,I felt the world move gently.

Now, I sit by the window in my new classroom, I see tall buildings, sharp and shining, stretching up into the clouds like questions I don’t yet know how to answer.

The city feels like it’s always rushing forward. Everyone walks fast, talks fast, thinks fast. And me — well, I’m trying to keep up. But more than that, I’m trying to hold on to myself in the rush of it all. I suppose it’s what growing up means.

*What can I do?*

Maybe that’s how change begins — not with grand gestures, but with quiet courage.

It feels strange, standing here at the edge of childhood and something bigger. Soon I’ll be eighteen.

Soon I’ll leave behind the safety of classrooms and step into the larger world. Everyone keeps calling it a beginning, but to me, it feels more like the end of the beginning.

As if I’ve been preparing all this time without knowing what for — and now, I’m about to find out.

And here I am, seventeen-almost-eighteen, caught in this impossible duality:

Potential and peril.

An education rooted in dreams, in a world setting itself on fire.

I study revolutions in my textbooks, while suspecting I might live through one.

I annotate treaties while imagining the headlines of tomorrow.

I prep for college applications while wondering if I’ll need to protest before I graduate.

I am a student, yes. But I am also a citizen. And sometimes, I don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

What is fear, if not proof that you have something worth protecting?

What is potential, if not power waiting to be directed?

My education is not just for me. It’s a weapon, a bridge, a map.

I study so that I can serve.

So that I can think critically, fight ethically, build systems that honour humanity not just in theory but in practice. That’s the dream, isn’t it? Not just to succeed, but to matter.

This isn’t just the return to school. It’s the quiet preface to a life that wants to change something.

And yes — I’m afraid. But I’m also ready.

Because this isn’t the beginning anymore.

It’s the end of the beginning.

And I know what I’m made of.

—

C.P.