Goldilocks; The College Years

She sat for hours at her kitchen table, drinking endless chai as she wondered who would have summoned her to the mountains, & why her of all people. A week after getting kicked out of college, when one of her professors found out about her habit & her means of supporting it when he happened across her late one night.

Did they know what happened? She hadn't been to the Himalayas since she was a little girl & even then it was just for a family holiday that got cut short when she misbehaved.

The sun rose & fell in the day, but these days she never noticed, her basement flat dark enough at the best of times, darker again when she pulled the blind down one day & didn't pull it up the next. The single fluorescent bulb that lit the room hummed light in an aura around itself, leaving large swathes of her bedsit in murky shadows, one of which included the kitchen table where she now sat, staring at the letter. She looked from it to the train ticket that was stapled alongside it. Old Delhi Station, around the corner from where she lived in a rough part of town, to Pathankot, an open return. She needed a reason to leave, & now she had one, albeit one that looked like a drunk four year old had written it blindfolded with the stub of a crayon.

She got up to bring more milk to the boil in a pot on her two ring stove that sat on the drying rack of a sink that constituted the entirety of her kitchen. A black bag clung to the sink's edge, teeming with all manner of new civilisations beginning to form constitutions in their mother tongue in the mould that hugged the pizza boxes & the half-full cartons of gone off milk, separated into layers from the length of their presence; cheese & water, a noble diet. Taking her chai to the bedroom, (a two step journey to the left of her kitchen), she put it down on a bedside locker in the shadows, pulled out a backpack & started throwing clothes around the room in a frenzy to make all proven psychopaths look like solid citizens with upstanding roles in the community.

That was two days ago. She didn't need to arrange much, there wasn't anyone who really cared whether she came or went anyway. An only child, orphaned at twelve when her parents died in a terrible accident involving an alligator & a banjo, she learnt the way of the world from a young age & grew into a beautiful & educated young woman with the taint of the human condition ingrained in her reckless abandon. The people who did care, she pushed away, fearing the feeling of getting too close to someone when you've seen how quickly life can take them from you. She took to reading, that break from the everyday & trip into the magical world of another's imagination drawing her from her own harsher realities. She was insightful, clever & had developed a dry wit of which her parents would have been proud had the octopus not taken exception to the alligator playing the banjo. Wrong place at the wrong time. It happens everyday.

Two days ago & still she wondered, looking at the letter as she climbed onto her bus. 'The world works in its own ways,' she said to herself as the only other passenger on the bus turned around to stare at the foreigner's arrival.