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| The Dazzle! |
He woke up to the smell of his own vomit by the roadside. He had no idea at what point last night had he fallen in that ditch. It was absolutely not how he had envisioned this morning to be, not even remotely close. Yesterday was his twenty first birthday. He had been planning and looking forward to yesterday for many past weeks.
His conservative parents had blindly trusted their obedient son as he had lied to them last night. He had always done everything by the book to their knowledge. He had even accepted their advice after high school and was going to the nearby college while residing with them. They had no idea that a year into college things had taken a turn. He had met a few peers who had introduced him to some forbidden pleasures in the coming years and those same friends had made arrangements to make this birthday a special occasion to remember.
He had met his friends at the night club with a racing heart. His fingers trembled with nervous excitement when he touched the ID card in his pocket that felt like a trophy validating his triumphal entry. Although he had crossed some limits in the recent past but he still was a virgin and despite all the peer pressure he had, so far, avoided the taste of alcohol. Tonight all of this was about to change.
He immediately liked the girl his friends had brought along and whom he had striped naked in his imagination many times over within a few minutes of Introduction. She seemed all game for it with her seductive touches and flirty moves. Soon the champagne bottle appeared and was opened. He remembered the first sip of alcohol and how he had tried to hide his dislike for that taste in loud laughter and tried to finish the whole thing in hasty big gulps. He also remembered that his friends kept on filling his glass and he kept on raising his voice.
Everything was going as planned with all the fun, laughter and the girl in his arms when suddenly he had a vision. No matter how hard he had tried after that, he simply could not shake that vision out of his mind. He tried for some time and then abruptly got up. His friends were so busy making out with their own girlfriends that no one even noticed and the girl with him probably thought that he was going for a leak.
He had left the noisy bar and wandered aimlessly like a lost soul for hours before passing out in a ditch alongside a road and that's where he had found himself in the morning. He held his throbbing head in hands and tried to recall last night's events. Everything else was a little hazy except that vision and a clarity. With absolute surety he knew that his life was going to be haunted forever by that vision like a ghost and he was never ever going to taste another sip of alcohol in his life.
In his vision he had seen a boy turning twenty One. This boy was no stranger to alcohol. In fact he was hooked on to drugs, a junkie and had already impregnated numerous girls. He was celebrating his twenty first birthday at a joint with a hooker dancing in his lap. An old man stood a distance from the boy in that vision. The old man's back and shoulders were bent as if he was carrying an unseen heavy burden. The old man's wrinkles were wet with tears and an unbearably excruciating pain was written on his face.
That vision had shook him to the very bones. The boy in his vision was his unborn future son and the old man was his dad who was praying his night prayer at the very time of the vision! He knew that for the rest of his life he was going to do everything possible to make sure that this vision remained just that, a vision and did not turn into reality.
