Aima enters the hall full of students and walks through a big laughter with a lonely vibe. It is not the first time she walked through the crowd. A friend who awaits by the wendy machine knows that this is how she is, since day one. Even after being a part of extra curricular activities and achieving highest scores in studies, she is familiar to almost everyone but friends with no one. A friend she walks up to takes out crisps of the wendy machine and give it to her. She never hangs out with Aima as she is comfortable keeping this friendship within the institute. Even after months of interaction, her friend could not get to know what she feels inside.
On the day she goes back home, she finds her sister waiting for her in her room. They both get excited to see each other and interact for a while. After some minutes of having a wholesome conversation, her sister realizes and tells her that she has changed. The stories she told her about her academic life had no one in it. It has been months since she joined the institute, and her sister finds it weird. After asking too much about it, she explains that she does not even know why she keeps herself away from people. That one sentence hooked her sister, “I feel like a victim, I have lost my courage to expect from others.” Her sister knew how to console her as she was aware of how her closed ones let her down before. Believing in her sister she gets a little courage to trust in others make more friends.
She starts spending more time with the people she studied with. Her friend could see the change in her, but never asks about it. As her social circle gets bigger, her friend starts stepping away from her. The day comes when she feels confident and expressive enough to socialize alone but misses her friend deep inside. As she notices gossips about her friend ghosting her, she starts losing people in her circle. The belief she had constructed about people around her began to shatter. She stops by the lake she used to visit when her mother died and sits on the bank with an outburst of tears. “No one is genuine!” she speaks in her head. As she turns right with tears spilling out of her eyes. She sees her friend through her blurry vision. She notices that she is weeping as well. Aima walks up to her and asks about everything that had created chaos between them.
The answer she finds is FEAR of losing her as her friend observed how much she got involved in making new friends. Her friend was not used to her this way. She felt insecure. She felt like “No one is genuine”. There she realized that it is not always you who feels genuinely for others. There is someone out there who is just as genuine as you. Just as Aima became a doubtful and hurtful character in her friend’s story, everyone makes a good or bad character in everyone’s story depending on his actions and their perceptions.
(My story is a great example of how a character develops its personality influenced by the events as the story proceeds)
By Arbish Fatima
https://arbishfatyma.blogspot.com/2021/04/character-sketch-by-actions-fiction.html
Comments