The Destructive Kid

I was six when I accidentally broke the china vase that my mother had bought when she had visited Thailand. She loved it, perhaps more than she loved me – she used to clean it everyday very carefully, wiping off every dust particle and we, kids, weren’t allowed to even roam around it. For my family, it wouldn’t have been a great deal if we all woke up one day and saw red bars with silver poles covering the vase.

So, I was afraid, very afraid, imagining how she’d react when she sees her vase smashed to smithereens. The broken bits lying on the floor gave my anxiety, I knew I wouldn’t ever be able to glue them together. It had to be replaced.

As expected, I was grounded for a month.

I was nine when I had a cute little pink magnet box with a small sharpener section made out of glass. I showed it off in my school for an entire week, and I think I made more friends that week than I would have made the entire year.

One day in school, while doing my classwork, I broke my pencil. But when I picked up the box to sharpen it, I accidentally dropped it. I had held it tight, with my fingers clenching the metal sides of the box, I couldn’t understand how could I just drop the box. But somehow, it happened, and since it was so delicate, it broke.

I remember crying the entire time during the lunch break and I had no friend next to me to wipe off my tears. And that’s how I learnt how friends can also be fake and materialistic sometimes.

I didn’t throw away the broken parts of my box for the entire year.

My father once told me, “you’re a very destructive kid.”

I was 13 when I’d keep my friendship bands in a little glass box. Those bands were in fashion those days, and more the bands, the more popular you were believed to be. I used to fill my hands with the bands till my triceps. I would keep those bands, all aligned together, in the box which my sister had brought for me from an exhibition. She found it to be very pretty with the little pink bow on the top and small red hearts painted on the sides. She had also made stickers with the letters of my name and had pasted them on the top. I remember hugging her tightest the day she brought me the box, but also fought with her the following night for not sharing her chocolate with me – sibling relationships are weird you see.

That year, I collected around 31 bands. When I came home, I aligned all the bands together, took out the box from my cupboard and there again, I dropped it. I had held it, right there in my hands, but even then it slipped off my hands, and I silently saw the box, a piece of my heart, shattered to pieces. The same day, one of the shards pierced my foot, and I had walked around wearing a band-aid for the next one week.

I was 16, when I met a boy, a charming senior, and we dated briefly. Soon enough, after the pretty phase of the relationship ended, I saw him drift apart, and eventually breaking up with me. He ripped my heart off my body and broke it right in front of my eyes, and all I could do was shed tears.

I trusted the person, loved him enough to give him my heart, but he broke it down into pieces.

I was 17 when I needed a person to rely on, I was broken and lost and I had someone to guide me through the darkness and bring me home to light, to the light that could fix the cracks in my heart.

But I ended up breaking his heart. Just like other things I broke as a kid, I broke the heart of one person who was always by my side, making me feel home in his company, telling me that everything will be fine.

I snapped my breathing machine, I took my life support away, I broke it, I broke him.

I am 19 now and I sit there silently every day trying to recall everything, every little thing that I had been breaking since when I was a kid including myself and a full grown human.

I had all of them, all of the things clenched so hard with my fingers yet they slipped away. They did and nothing or no one is going to come back to me.

Maybe, I am a very destructive kid.

Prishita Kalra is an avid reader and a writer who shares through writing, finding her way through life. 

Featured image credit: Juhee Bae/Pixabay