This is about a boy who had an imaginative mind for as long as he could remember. He would invent animals and vehicles and fighter planes and imaginary missions. He would watch the sunlight being reflected from the surface of water for long whiles and blow soap bubble palaces when he was really small. This is about a boy who once filled up a blank labeled Guardian with the words ‘Mom/Dad’.

This is about a boy who was good at spelling from very early years, and owed it to the many books he read at home. His fertile imagination was also one product of the numerous stories he read. He would find out little things he was good at and invent games that required those specific talents and play them with his school friends, emerging as the winner most of the time, of course.

This is about a boy who developed a soft spot for girls much, much before his friends did, and sought to show off to a particular one or two of them and feel stupid about it later on when he was older.

This is about a boy who loved nature always, and could never stand a leaf being plucked from a tree, or even a flower. He could also never come to terms with the idea that a certain plant belonged to this neighbour or that person, because he never really could figure out how a living thing, with a life to lead and death to die, could ever belong to some other living thing, with its own life to live and death to die. And yes, he loved the rain too. He was, however, exceptionally afraid of spiders, and – here’s the strange part – butterflies and moths, especially the ones with big wings.

He was also very drawn to invent and manufacture things on his own, and he would build houses from old shoe-boxes, and speed-boats from craft paper, and he once built a Spiderman model from some plastic clay. Three or four cartoon posters also came off his hands. Most of his creations, however, were eventually lost or damaged due to negligence.

This is about a boy who had a number of crushes early in life, but could never hang onto them. This is about a boy who, as he grew with time, changed remarkably. He learnt how to masturbate, and then almost killed himself mentally trying to forget it. He was also a boy who, instead of enjoying the moment, fell to wondering about the strange connection between processes in his body and thoughts in his mind when an orgasm occurred. He was a boy who had rebellious, out-of-the-world philosophy in his head, and thought himself special for that. He was a boy who managed to fall in love after a long string of crushes, but only for three days before the girl decided that it wouldn’t work out. It was a very prudent decision, as the boy came to realize later. The girl never really could have been all that he wanted from love and he himself wasn’t half what the girl wanted.

He was a boy whose insides sometimes became more powerful than his outside, and he would fight. Fight for as long the last pulse of will lived in him, against an unexplainable, incomprehensible force inside that he couldn’t explain to his friends. He started to get depressed more and more often, and slowly, gradually, inconspicuously, it no longer remained momentary depression, no longer a state of mind, but rather his mind itself, his nature. He became a quieter boy, and in some ways he liked the change, as in other ways he hated it like hell.

He also hated authority and control, especially at home. He wished his life were a bit more like some of his other friends’ whose parents were a lot cooler than his. Pressure at school and suppression at home led him often to think how it would be if somehow his death became predetermined, preordained. He had daydreams of having cancer, having once seen one of his teachers infected with it. He wondered how many of the people he knew would miss him, how many of his friends would never want to let him go. Deep inside, he felt a terrible, terrible hankering for a person who would miss him like a dead man misses his life, and never want to let go. He treasured this frame in his mind, waiting for someday when he could find a picture to fit it.

And then, he met a girl on the internet one day, and she turned out to be from his own school, although she was a year above him. They came to know each other better through phone calls, and slowly moved to a position where they could confide in each other, say things that would otherwise remain inside, and value each other for that. They told stories about their lives, things they had seen, places they had been to. And this is about a boy who had seen and experienced a lot of things, and so he never ran out of things to say. Shortly after, they knew they were in love, and as far as I know, they are still in love.

So, this is about a boy who had led quite a life in the first half of it, and this is about a boy who understood how his life had not been normal, and how it deserved to be written down somewhere.

And this is about a boy who chose to write this down to tell the story of his life.

— 1Life.