Moment Of Courage

By Ruchika Verma

It took one moment of perverse courage to do what I did.

But it is not about that moment - what do moments amount to anyway? They are just a fraction of our times that slip away as soon as we catch onto them. Moments are useless, moments are overrated. We just like to give them importance because they give a sense of nostalgia and security even when there is none.

What is a moment worth once it is gone? Nothing. It is gone, it only lives in the past from the time it slips away. We only tend to impose value on them because our mind is perverse - it attaches importance to the past because it is comforting.

I am one of those perverse minds but I am more evolved because I take comfort from the darkness of my past. A bad moment once gone is gone and will never return later. It is necessary to block out happy moments for the same reason - they are not going to return. Their memory only holds one back, seeping into a sense of nostalgia that does nothing but temper with present and evokes dissatisfaction and complaints that don't even exist.

I did not always think like that. Before I was the person I am today - moments were just moments for me. Here they come and here they go. I would snatch the ones I like and freeze them in my mind and try to get rid of the ones that would automatically freeze, I would attempt defrosting them with all my might. I never realised how much I froze my heart in that process.

My predicament started a few days before I started the final semester of college - most people dread it because it signified the end. However, I dreaded it because it signified one more term of agony and looking at people I couldn't care less about.

I have friends but I don't care for them. I have had relationships, I am not sure I can give two hoots for them now or gave a hoot back then. These people with faces that always seem to merge into one another with their ordinary features and mundane thoughts never interested me. But they always inspired my paintings.

My professor would always praise how seamlessly colours and patterns would merge into one another on my canvas, I would take the apparent praise with a smile. But within me, I would frown and reprimand myself for letting those common creatures affect my work. I wanted to escape them but I could not. They were sitting beside me, diagonal to me, in front of me, at the back, everywhere I turned my head, there they were - surrounded by colours, filling out empty canvases yet their faces blank like somebody just reversed their painting processes on themselves.

At this point, I probably sound very conceited, you may think I think I am better than them; that I think I am superior - intellectually, spiritually, mentally. Here is the harsh truth, I am and I know.

I am a genius and I have always known it. Nobody just wakes up one day and realises - oh, I am a genius. It is a fact that they have known all their lives, they don't need average people to tell them that, they are well aware of it.

It is only a matter of realising it. And genius people who are smart, they always have this realisation gnawing at their hearts, painfully, every minute, like a squirrel gnaws at a nut. However, geniuses who are not smart, wait for validation from an exterior source. They know it but their lack of self-awareness and self-esteem would never allow them to realise it.

Like this brunette sitting right in front of me. He is a genius, maybe even better than me. The only face which fails to merge in with others. A self-aware genius recognizes another, no matter how ignorant they are.

This brunette is my competitor, somebody I feel threatened by, somebody I am scared of. My only solace is the fact that he is not aware of it yet but what if one day he realises? Realises that he is a genius? Dethrones me at being the best?

I am not an egoist but being called the best my entire life - I know my ego would not be able to take it.

Whenever I see his canvases, a certain rage erupts which is only subdued by my appreciation. He does not know what he has. He is an idiot but he is also a genius, what an oxymoron-ic combination.

He is near perfect but he has a vice - he doesn't believe in himself. He doesn't recognise his genius like other people do, especially like I do. I recognise it better than everybody does because like every other perfect person, I have all but one vice as well - my obsession with his genius.

I can't take it, I can't see it, it enrages me, it fills my heart with venom that I wish to spew all over his pretty face so it would burn along with that exceptional mind of his - erasing him off the face of this earth.

So what do I do? The world is not wide enough for us two.

I know what you must be thinking, I talked about that one moment of perverse courage so I have in my sense of self-preservation, and to keep my self-worth intact, must have killed him. And I must be writing this because I am oh, so, consumed by guilt because just like Aron Burr after killing Hamilton felt - the world was wide enough for two. I must have realised that and now while I write these letters, my tears must be falling, the caustic tears that burn my hands as they fall and burn my being as they are released along with guilt and regret.

I must be consumed by the weight of all my sins realising how my genius was more of a curse than a boon.

That sounds plausible, right? But here is one thing, you must know - life does not work like that, according to your expectations. And that is exactly why moments are overrated because moments like these where you let your past experiences shade your present are the ones where you give into foolishness.

I did not kill him, no matter how many times the thought crossed my mind because he was my competitor. He was the un-realised genius who could surprise the world whereas I was the established one, my achievements would not inspire the awe his did. And an achievement is only an achievement if it inspires a sense of awe in you, else it is as good as an apple you know you are going to enjoy because you paid a good price for it.

And sometimes if you are unlucky, despite a good price your apple is rotten, it has a worm in it.

I was that worm in his life. I appreciated his genius too much to disrespect it but there was nothing like seeping into one person like a worm and eating them out hollow.

I did not kill him, I made him realise he was a genius, over time. I told him how brilliant he was, how genius his work was, and I made others tell him that too. I made others see it and believe it too. But I just did not do it with him, it took one moment of perverse courage but I decided I must do it for everyone.

Paint a face on each of these empty heads that surround me each day. Make them all genius. Tell them they are all geniuses. Create a circle of mutual admiration that did not value anyone as less than brilliant.

By the end of college, everybody was a genius, none of them realised they weren't but they all believed it because they all liked it. They all started to overestimate themselves, including the actual genius among the lot. They were all genius and hence they all blended together once again, blending into the colours on my canvas - too mediocre for them now. I was no longer the only genius, now they all were the genius - similar types of geniuses who revel in their common genius practices.

While I was relegated to what most people would call the lower strata of the intellectual class, nobody ever came close to me because while they all blended in their common geniuses, I stood out in my genius mediocrity.

By Ruchika Verma