Ho Hum - I

This is Part One of a five part story I'm writing on request by Skaty, as a birthday gift. So it's all HER fault.

Ordinary. That's not always a very nice way to be. It is comforting and secure most of the time, but always? What if, at every moment of your life, you were the one people used as the definitive example of 'Normal'? What if you never transcended everyday life for a bit of shimmer and sparkle? Well, that was me. Jane Doe. That isn't my name, but it should've been. I had the soul of a drama queen trapped inside the body of the most inconspicuous person on the planet. My biggest grouse was that nothing, but nothing, ever happened to me.

I was the third child to my parents who had drunk so deeply of the joys of parenthood with my two elder siblings that my birth simply underwhelmed them. It wasn't as if my siblings were spectacularly talented, but I was the background which made their less than extraordinary achievements stand out. People say things like 'I was an average student', but it would be more apt for me to say that my averageness was so ingrained in me that it was the special something that I brought to everything I was or I did. I studied ordinarily, played humdrum tennis, sang unexcitingly, developed my game of golf from mindnumbing to dull and cooked the proverbial 'daal baraabar' variety of food. I finished college, like a lot of people do. Then I got a job after doing nothing for a while, which a lot of other people do as well. I met a boy whose idea of a passionate declaration of love was 'You have nice eyes and I like your shoes'. I figured that the way I felt about him was the Jane Doe version of love, so I went along with it and let him be The One who completed my mundane self.

It wasn't as though I didn't indulge the drama queen in me. I did the entire sitting-at-the-window-and-sighing-at-the-rain routine, but the trouble was that no one noticed. I clutched at my heart, batted my eyelashes and developed some other mannerisms, but they repelled me so much that I went back to being placid. I even tried wearing loud colours, but they made my digestion go haywire and I had to go back to wearing brown. I tried writing poetry but then people started to borrow my poems for help on nights of insomnia, so I stopped that as well. I just couldn't seem to catch a break.

Well, till about a month ago...