high school | existabovethenoise

It is almost 8pm at the Red Fort, and there’s been no reason to stick around to listen to the rest of the ‘Sound and Light’ show. The show gives an audio version of the history of the monument – those who lived there, in palace and imprisoned. But, we were already at the point when Mahatma Gandhi started to reject British colonial and cultural superiority. So, we knew the end of that story. It’s Diwali, after all, and we’re just a stone’s throw away from Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk – a site my companion for the evening hasn’t seen yet.

Her father is Guyanese Indian and she’s in India for the first time, in Delhi for just one day, and back in my life after ten years. We went to high school together and happened to be connected on facebook – and so, the stars aligned for an evening under Lakshmi’s lights. As we exit the show, we pass by the closed stalls and deserted shops. But one remains open. They have jewelry and bangles, and sheeshah pipes and pens – and this is her only night in Delhi. So, we stop. And so the shopkeepers, too, must stop. Their ‘puja’ that is. But, they say, ‘we are praying to Lakshmi so that she brings prosperity and wealth into our shop, and you’re here when no one else is here and no other shop is open, but this one. So, she brings you in. We are happy. No problem.’

We shop and we bargain, and I beg the bhaiya to drop his price for a brass hookah for my high school chum. We banter a bit and I ask what is it they’re doing with the fruit for Lakshmi. “Do you eat it or throw it away tomorrow?” she asks. ‘We can give it away, but it must stay tonight for Lakshmi.’ “Ok, well I’m sorry. I feel bad that we interrupted your puja,” I say. ‘You know about my puja? I am so happy. You not from here and you know about my puja,’ he says with excitement. “Well, yes, you know about my President. I know about your puja,” I say with a head bob and a chuckle.

We bag our bundles and head to the Gurdwara for a loud scene of firecrackers and marigold dust. Yet it feels as if we’ve taken home more in our bags than just our trinkets.

My ears are ringing from the firecrackers in the street, launched by housewives and their school age children. This is not the part of Diwali that I like. I don’t like the chaos, but prefer the prayer – the oil and the lights, the fruit and the altars, the chants and the good intentions heard by Lakshmi-ji. I reach home focusing on a new day with a city full of her goodwill around me, and I know that I’m in for some changes.

In her own Shiva-esque (destructive) kind of way, good ole’ Lakshmi-ji has been bringing me prosperity and light ever sense. This week has been one of shedding spotlights on truths I would rather keep hidden. The relationship I am not over, the money I’m not spending well, the weight I’m not maintaining, the PhD program I haven’t decided on, the promotion I need to get, the onward assignment I’d better fight for, the aunt that’s in the hospital, the forgiveness I can’t give, the greatness that I need more convincing to believe I deserve…

And oh how much I need that light. What an exhale it is at that moment when you admit that you are not where you want to be, but that you know – without hesitation – that you will get there, you will live that reality, you will become what you seek. Lakshmi puja is about asking for divine intervention to improve well-being and enhance prosperity of all kinds. It is asking for help – something that I hate to do, but must damn well get better at – to be a better you (or me, I should say). I feel a respite in that; not a surrender, but a settling down like firecracker ashes on pavement.

Something quiets in my soul and a certain stamina regenerates itself. After all, Lakshmi is also characterized by a positive, results-oriented kind of energy. So, this is not your pansy, ‘wake up zestfully clean’ energy. This is your ‘extraordinary perseverance to push through emotional exhaustion to concur new stages of mental, physical, and spiritual wellness,’ kinda Shakti! Lakshmi ain’t no chump.

So, she put me to work. I blame her for making me call my ex to face some hard learned facts, but damn it if I can’t credit her for setting me straight! She got me tickets to an exclusive summit that put me face to face with a powerful professor at the university I’d like to attend for my PhD. Homegirl even had me sit down and go over my finances today, so I could ‘trim the fat’ and get on the good foot. This week she and I laughed, we cried (well, mostly, I cried). And she let me have a chocolate chip cookie after she saw that I weighed in 5 lbs lighter than 2 weeks ago. I mean, really, she and I have had an interesting week since that night in the Red Fort.

I’m not so sure what I did to deserve her attention in a city full of people beckoning her into their lives. Maybe I caught some residual puja purity or I was in the right place at the right time all too frequently this week. But what I do know for certain is that since Tuesday night, I’ve been sure that I have a star in my corner. And, with that, the future is looking mighty bright.

Nicole Young is currently a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is studying Education Policy. When she is not reading a million pages a night for class, her hobbies include loud laughing, eating, and pretending to be the star of her own music video/broadway musical.

“Don’t forget me” was scrawled in a particularly high school girl style, with flourishes and a smiley face, underneath a framed picture in my cousin’s room. The picture was of my little cousin holding another high school girl, presumably the one who wrote the note, on her back – piggy-back style. Both of them were grinning madly and you could almost hear the giggles through the picture. It was adorable and one of many in a carefully crafted collage. And as I sat on the edge of my cousin’s bed, talking to her about silly things as she did her hair in the bathroom mirror, it really touched me. The three words struck me in such a deep way that I paused and lost my train of thought. “What were you saying?” she asked. I grabbed for something and began again, all the time thinking about the little graduation collage.

What struck me the most was that the phrase, “Don’t forget me” is one I think about almost daily. I don’t want my friends or family to forget me as they go about living their lives. I don’t want ex-boyfriends to forget those special things, those uniquely us things, that we shared. I don’t want the world to forget me when I die. I don’t want my living to have been just another flash in the pan. I want my being here to have meant something and I know I’m not alone. Everyday I watch people make fools of themselves on reality TV or social media all in an attempt for their 15 minutes of fame. Anthropologists and pop culture junkies talk more and more about the unique accessibility the Internet has afforded our generation. And while they discuss the ability of one idea or event or name to quickly saturate every single media market in a matter of seconds and how that has forever changed the human race, for good or evil, no one ever talks about WHY people want those 15 minutes. Maybe everyone’s in on that part but me. Maybe inherent in the phrase “15 minutes of fame” is a perceived opportunity for immortality, but the idea is pretty novel to me.

Believing that no one else loves the way we do or feels sorrow’s depths the way we have, is an inherently human flaw. And as we chide the less talented for their tawdry hopes of gaining celebrity through being a contestant on “Flavor of Love” or even the next “Love and Hip Hop: ATL,” we, the more intelligent, driven people of the human race plot our own 15 minutes. We call it policy, or a contribution, or art, but at the end of the day our attempts to change our stars and make the world a better place are just a cry out against the fleeting nature of life. We don’t want to be forgotten. And this 17 year old girl, writing a note to her friend at graduation, summed up the feeling perfectly in 3 words. It’s amazing how young the awareness of loss begins and how hard we fight from the beginning of recognition to prevent it. We don’t want to lose that piggyback ride or the laughs that followed. We never want to forget that sunset. We hope that even when we’re gone, there will be someone left to remember or something left to remind them that we were here. And what happens in our eternal struggle to make our mark, is that in a particularly human way, we forget that our friends don’t want to be forgotten either. We neglect to tell them that we think of them and that they matter to us.

So there’s loss, the permanent kind, the type that is so final that it leaves us breathless. And then there is quasi loss: the gradual falling away that happens as you get a little older. The kind where something triggers a hilarious, warm memory and you want to talk to the one person who would remember and you realize that you’re not really friends anymore. Sure, you like each other’s statuses and peruse each other’s instagram photos, but you don’t TALK. You can’t remember the last time you spoke and more importantly, you don’t even know if they remember. Somehow it’s even worse. To know that you could reach out to that person if you just had their number and even if you do have there number, if you could get past that first awkward, “So what have you been UP to for the past…9 years.” But you don’t do it. And the moment passes and you’re left a little lonelier, wishing you were your 16 year old self, if only because that version of you would have been able to talk to them.

So then I’m right back to this girl’s three words and the question her message poses. What if you never get your 15 minutes? How do you make them not forget you? After a million years, how do you let them know you haven’t forgotten them? How do you fight the quasi loss that’s bound to come? I’m really no sage about these types of things, but I think you just tell them.

I think you brave the brief moment of discomfort (and the nervousness about rejection) and remind them that their life matters to someone that they don’t see every day. You message them and say that even though middle school was ages ago, you think of them every time Titanic comes on TV or let them know that your Sunday brunch ritual, no matter how long past, was one of the highlights of your 20s. Shoot them a text that conveys ‘yes, you are thought of and often.’ You don’t have to have those awkward phone conversations if you don’t want to and you can continue to skulk on each other’s Facebook pages afterward. But why wouldn’t you want them to know that you remember?

Because truthfully, aren’t we are all hoping that in the busyness of living, they don’t forget us?