No Name

"Follow the paths that the world's great personalities paved. Follow their rules and habits to gain the success they attained! To be like them do what they did!...." People advised me but what they failed to understand that I'm not them... 

''If you want success, be consistent, hard-working, and good! understood Elise?" and what I'd do? I'd nod. I always nodded at whatever they said. Everyone advised me one or the other thing, told me to follow Stephen Hawking and never give up, follow Mahatma Gandhi and always speak the truth and on and on... But no one, literally no one asked me what I wanted.

I don't mean that people like Hawking and Gandhi are not great, sure they are...if by all means, they are the greatest of all! period. What I'm trying to say is I'm not them! I'm no Mahatma Gandhi or Stephen Hawking!! I'm just Elise!

As I grew up I was showered with advice and words of wits. Everyone I knew showed me this perfect image of the person who they expected me to be. It was always about expectations, Of what they expected from me and what I expected from me. But while doing so no one told me about the pain, the betrayals, the hardships,...not a single soul showed the shadows that followed them as they showed me their virtues.

Growing with this unknown side of things I didn't know what to think or what to expect when I found myself in situations that were dark. I nurtured the holes I never knew about...It was oddly soothing yet painfully disturbing.

Time passed and I found myself disappointed in myself. I was no longer living for me but for the Elise that everyone engraved me to be. There is a thin line between learning from experiences and knowing the experiences. I learned the experiences and became the hollow shell that I am now. When you learn something it becomes you and that's what I became.....a mere replica of an ideal person ...but for the outside world. On the inside I was a broken,My smiles were my tears and my laughs were my voiceless cries.No one saw them, and if they did, no one gave a shit about them. 

In this pride and respect-driven society they wanted me to be elite and not Elise. But what happened can't be undone..but I can still dream of the life I'll never have and Wish...Wish that if only I had known the experiences they taught me instead of printing them on my soul...If only I had made my own experiences...If only I had heard myself and had become Elise ...just Elise and not the ideal being. Every night I wish that I didn't have expectations, that I didn't dream of what they made me see.. anyway what's done is done...

For I have to live in Shadow of those who are gone ...

For I have to be who I am not...

And I know...Every day as my trapped soul dies slowly...

I know I'll fade with no name to remind...

(note: story contains imaginary incidences and characters and has no personal relationship with the writer.)