Change

Some time in the last few years, she changed irreversibly. The realization of it dawns on her sometimes for a few fleeting seconds, in brief dreams when she's half asleep and she feels like she just slipped off the edge of a cliff, or in that headrush when she gets up too quickly from the bed. But then, these are very short insignificant moments and she does not want to make much of it. She is good at deceiving herself. So are a lot of people she knows. She has learnt to remain quiet, but deep down she knows, that her self of a few years back, the one closer to a child, would not have approved of a lot that she approves of now. Some time in the past few years, everything that seemed fair and just as a child, is now hushed away in boxes labeled 'over-simplified' or 'silly' or 'socialist'. Sometime recently, she started to understand the words taboo and censorship, and  realized that democracy is not always 'better' than dictatorship, and freedom is not always better than bondage, that you need to let go of self respect sometimes and label it sacrifice and love, that a mind without fear is a bookish concept, and that most of the times, its too much to expect humanity from human beings. The thoughts give her head a spin sometimes, so she shuts the lid on them tight, and places a heavy object over them, like a dream or a nostalgia. Strange thoughts, you'd say, for Christmas eve. But she does not exercise much control over them, specially on occasions like these. She, is just a bundle of pronouns after all, she could be me, yes, but she could be them, or you, or no one at all.