A Bowl of Elusive

Of all the futile exercises I indulge in periodically, this one is my favorite: I try to map the points in time, where I could go back – with my current knowledge of how things eventually turned out, and do things differently, and see how my life is affected by it. Clearly, I don’t think my life turned out all that well. I know being content with one’s reality is aspirational, but it has never been something I flourished at. So every other day, I think about which pivotal point in time I could go back to and change something so that I would be in a different place in life. So far, I haven’t been able to find that one point that could set everything on the right course. Let me illustrate my point with a few examples. Back in seventh grade, I moved to a posh new school and when formulas and molecule balancing were being taught, I didn’t understand the concept – this ensured that I would never get a hang of chemistry and kept living in terror of the chemistry exams till twelfth grade, aft

Raunak happens to glow in the dark. Rather brightly. Its a medical condition and very little is known about it. I won't bore you with the details or the name of the condition as that's not relevant to my story. Just know that Raunak starts glowing as soon as its dark. He glows like a bulb and sometimes he is hard to look at. So my question is, how is he supposed to find love? You see Raunak, like any other guy of his age, yearns for romance. He wishes he had someone he could fall for. But the harsh truth is that it is very hard for a glow-stick to find love. And he has tried. All dating customs seem hell bent on sabotaging Raunak's plans. Dates are usually dinner dates. Those don't work well for him. Oh, how he wishes people went to morning dates. The last time he managed to ask a girl out, they met for lunch. He'd been upfront about his condition and she seemed to be genuinely cool about it. That is until it got dark. Once it did, she started taking