Forgetting Me..

                        

My first recipe was tea. I made it at around 7 years of age. From a very young age, cooking was my expertise. I would go on to make big recipes under the supervision of my mom and grand mom. Many times, I would put a different amount of sugar or salt in the recipe, regardless of what my mom told me. It would turn out to be perfect. That is what nobody realized till then. TOO PERFECT.I made my first lunch at 13. Everyone loved it. Everyone ignored the fact that I made the dessert with my own recipe. No one taught me how to do it.

Five days later, I was peeling onions with my grand mom. I did it because I was terribly bored, but then I realized that I wasn’t crying. My grand mom then said that she had washed them, and so the tears don’t come and that was that.

Unusually, and I had no idea why I volunteered to, but the next day, I was again chopping onions because apparently my dad threw them away thinking they were old, or so mom claimed. Again, I didn’t cry. And they weren’t washed, they were fresh. And I had a stupid mad urge to eat them all. I, who loved cooking but hated eating, wanted to eat them all. How stupid, I thought. And so I shrugged it away but this continued for 3 days. Then it stopped.

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“People hear stories about saving themselves from their instincts, but how ironic that you shall doom from ‘em” I woke up with a start. I never had nightmares. Never. Shaken by the dream, I went to have some water. What instincts? What doom? I thought. Snap. Click, snap, click. My hands were folded backwards. A man, or at least someone spoke something “ How ironic. You idiot. I tried to save you. I gave you a chance . Missed it, huh? Now suffer.” “I’m sorry” I whispered. Surprisingly, no one else woke up. “ Master, spare this one, she won’t do anything” the voice started pleading to some fog that just appeared. Whatever this thing was it pleading to, it couldn’t be any good. The fog spoke “There is no turning back, little one. What must be done, should be done.” It spoke with a clear, charming voice, and sprayed a steam of water at me. “ Don’t worry, you are completely safe IF you figure this out.” It said. “Figure what out?” I asked. “ That which you must.” It said with a sinister smile and was about to say something more, when it vanished, only for someone else to crash in the kitchen. Was this about the onions? It seemed so stupid but that could only be the ‘supernatural’ thing to happen to me in the past few days.

“ Oh damn it. If only you didn’t fuss about your precious gun. What good has it done? Anyways we lost. We earned nothing.” Said yet another voice to someone else. They rescued me and told me something that haunted me…forever.

 I successfully fooled my family into thinking that I wasn’t cooking because I burnt my hand while cooking. They’re disappointed, but they understand. I didn’t tell about this to anyone. However, I finally broke down in front of my best friends and told them. They didn’t believe me, which wasn’t surprising.

And then things happened I don’t like to talk about.

There were elementals, assigned to different people in the universe. I was one of them. We control our respective elementals. We are supposed to protect the elementals from harm. But some of our rivals, which include the fog, think we will use our powers to kill off the entire universe. The two people who rescued me were our allies, but the rivals managed to take just my powers. Everyone else was fine. I never cooked again, because if I do, my elemental will be erased from the entire world, so everyone will die of hunger. The onions were supposed to repel the spell, which I later learnt. I tried to find the other people who controlled the elementals. I couldn’t. They must be galaxies away. I was the only one on the earth, or so I know. They took a part of me forever.

 Yet here I am, a 35-year old scientist, single, writing this while sipping coffee in Venice. All because of a bunch of onions.