Dua · Reveries
One year outThe Year I Did Not Cry
One year ago today I walked out of Cadet College.
Six years in that place. It gave me so much that was precious and so much that was horror, and for all six of those years every prayer I made had the same urge folded inside it. Get me out of here.
Here is the strange part. In the years before mine, every time a senior batch passed out, I cried. Badly. Unexpectedly. Uncontrollably. Then my own turn came and I was cheerful. Calm. Happy. My classmates wept around me and I stood there and waited for it to be over, end to end.
Life has not been the same anywhere since.
You come out and suddenly the whole world is about settling into a good university and building a good career. There were three roads in front of me. The military, which I never wanted. A university here in the country, which I never wanted either. Or somewhere else entirely.
I kept the options open anyway. I enrolled at an IELTS centre with one hand and applied for varsity admission with the other, and never attended a single admission coaching class. Things were going fine. My family were abroad, so I was living a good life, and living it alone.
October
Then came October, and it came all at once.
I appeared for the ISSB and did not make it through. No worries. You cannot really lose something you never wanted in the first place.
On the sixteenth I sat for the IELTS and scored 8, which was absolutely tremendous on my part. Two days later the HSC results came out and I had a golden A plus. A plus in every single subject. And the highest marks in the Sylhet Board.
One month. One rejection I had asked for, and two results I had not dared to expect.
After that there was only one direction I could look in. Abroad. I signed with an agency and started applying. A lot of places. I made it onto the waiting list at NYU, which is not nothing, and is not quite something either. Since then life has gone up and down and up again, and I still have not made it to the institute I actually want.
But something good came out of it. I got employed at the very same agency I had been a client of. My first formal job. My own earnings. That one was massive.
Love
Love appeared a lot of times in that year.
An unwanted love came back.
Then a love that had no future, and I tried anyway.
Then love was flowing without an aim.
I do not know what love finds in me.
Today is the twenty fifth of August.
In exactly seven days I fly to Malaysia. The visa is done. I do not know where this life is going to take me.
I only know that I want to become successful.
Dua 006 · End of entry