Evening Snack

Whenever someone asks me how my school life was, now that I am in college I always attempt to explain to them very elaborately(although I have a feeling that they lose track of it and get bored midway) that it was simply marvelous. Teachers always praised me back in school for maintaining a cent percent attendance, but I failed to make them realize that it was not my credit at all. What would I have done all day without seeing my friends? Gradually a fear crept inside me that if, I someday, miss school something so legendary would happen that I would regret missing it my entire life; thus it was a safe option to go to school every single day so that I missed nothing.

But, the funny part was that when I returned back to an empty home( because I have working parents), my life without school felt aimless. Our beloved guardians would say that “ These are baseless talks dear, you could just have started studying after returning from school!”, but somehow I didn’t feel like studying at all after spending my whole enjoyable day at school and yes, I have no better excuses to provide for my lack of interest in academics immediately after returning from my second home. Thus most of the time after coming back home, I went through all those Whatsapp messages at least a dozen times, swiped up and down my Facebook news feed for a minimum amount of virtual engagement( and failed to find it) and then suddenly realized that I had no other social media applications on my phone. So, after a silent lunch with nobody but myself as a company, I would switch on the room’s air conditioner and comfortably creep into bed for a good afternoon nap.

Here comes the twist in this apparently mundane narration of my aimless teenage life. I would always be woken up by the sound of the doorbell. As I slowly rubbed my sleepy eyes and opened the door( Although my mom had literally ordered me to ask who was on the other side of the door before opening it) and always saw my mom smiling on the other side of the threshold holding a packet – my evening snack. That was my inspiration for spending those few hours after coming back home from school. That was so important for me back then. Be it a roll, a packet of plain chips, a cake or pastry, a sandwich or anything else, the evening snack was a very vital part of my life. I remember getting so angry at mom when she forgot to bring my usual evening snack one day(Yes, very mature of me indeed; I know).

College changed this one aspect of my life forever. I spent the entire day in college and returned home very late. You may ask why anything at all changed because every day I had my usual evening snack outside college or in one of its canteens, but somehow it tasted different. I figured out why this equally delicious evening snack never tasted like before. For one, I was far away from that old room of mine where I used to patiently wait for my evening snack and for another, the snack I ate was not brought by mom.