Things that never happened to me
Feb. 4th, 2006 07:39 pm1. Despite having been born in Liverpool on a snowy day in 1987, she never gets that coveted British citizenship. Instead, her parents give up on the grey skies and go home after three years. She has a fairly quiet childhood as the only daughter of two practising doctors, living in a white house close to the south bank of the Yamuna. As a teenager, she goes to the same school her parents went to, and by the time she's eighteen, she speaks fluent Hindi and Bengali and almost-perfect English, and is ready to look into trying to apply to Oxford as an overseas student. On her first day in the West, she hears her own name pronounced correctly for the first time.
2. Something happens when she's thirteen. For some reason, there's a book she never reads and a day when she never turns the television on at the right moment. Fandom never happens. She's thirteen, and she thinks she has friends. She's fourteen, and she thinks it with a little less conviction. She's sixteen, and she's so unhappy, she doesn't even know she is. She's eighteen, and she's never really done much of anything.
3. She's born much, much earlier than she should have been. But she doesn't beat odds and hang on; she dies without having lived at all.
4. The grades don't quite happen. She ends up in Bristol, which is nice enough, with a very old friend from school, which is better than nice enough, and together they have to get up at seven thirty and walk forty-five minutes to get to lectures and giggle and bitch about their anatomy professors. She's happier than she thought she'd be, and the future starts to look sensible. When more old friends invite her up to Oxford during Michaelmas, she doesn't go.
I am now going to the library, and doing some actual work, because I am crap.
no subject
on 2006-02-04 11:49 pm (UTC)