Peace is in the teachers’ words, in the few textbooks and the bright laptop screen. Peace is in the only two friends in this city of millions. Peace is in closing your eyes and going to the land of your memories and faces dear to you. The pervading feeling is of loneliness and the sense of failing somewhere in making new companions. Your friends from back home tell you that it has been only a couple of days, that settling in a place takes time. But your head doesn’t listen to it. You see your seniors with their friends and you think how much time will it take for me to get friends like that here? You see your batchmates tumbling along, probably feeling the same way, but it bears no balm to you. You remember your old friends, the ones you made in the kindergarten, the ones you made in your first school and the ones you made in the school that really became your own. That only pushes you back into more depression. Texts, calls, mails, chats. Minutes of that lost feeling and hours of groans. You’re told that the first year is the hardest, that the fun begins the next year. But your brain is already drowned under the bio-chemical responsible for lonesomeness.

Peace is relative.

Peace is retail therapy.