You wake up with tightness across your chest, and your mind is racing frantically in a closed loop, as if attaining a certain speed threshold would eject it out of the orbit into space. Your eyes take a few seconds to adjust and are able to recognize whatever you have woken up to facing. Your dream takes almost the same time to blur somewhere between something and everything. By the time you realize where you are and what you were doing, your dream blends in the archive of dreams you have seen all your life, and suddenly you are unsure about which part of the memory of the fading dream woke you up, and which just refreshed one of the forgotten ones.
In attempts to clear the raising fog in your head before the dream vanishes, you find yourself between the hodgepodge of now varied floating figments, and the exact feeling you were immersed in through the third act, in your body. You realize that the dream had taken a page out of your memories, and you find yourself where that bookmark is placed, going through it again. However, even though you are now fully here, on your bed with your back rested against the wall, playing the distant memory in your head, it doesn’t leave you with the increased heart rate, which the dream brought you.
The pages turned are a tad bit dusty, but you find what you are looking for. A memory, of you sitting alone on a bench of three in a classroom. You look around, and find similar uniforms hunched over their respective tables, with the only sound of nibs scribbling against the batches of paper. Your stare down at the Maths paper of your class 12 board exams in your hand. You look at your watch and find that there is an hour to go. But you don’t have anything to write. Because you don’t know anything. You know you are going to fail. You look at the clock again. You have still an hour left. Still nothing to write. Because you still don’t know anything. Still going to fail. You look up. People still scribbling furiously. You can’t pretend. You are thinking why you didn’t study. Why couldn’t you study? How’s your life going to be? After you fail? 12 Boards are crucial, right? How would you get admission in any college? How will you be able to carry this all your life, that the kid who was considered brilliant at academics has flunked his final exam? That too Maths, a subject of choice? Do you have answers? DO YOU? You seek a straw that can help you keep afloat for next sixty minutes, so that can figure out how to survive the rest of your life. You put everything off the burner and let it settle. Let yourself settle, so that you can acknowledge that you fucked up. That you’ll have to move through and beyond this fuck up. But first, face this fuck up.
The walls of the classroom melds back into your room. You remind yourself, that there won’t be another Maths exam anymore. That you’ll never find yourself in that situation ever again.
And here we are, wondering why you are having these dreams again.
ABSINRAW 
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