It was oddly refreshing that day. That day, that I can hardly forget. I think it had been raining. Monsoon was about to come in a month or so, and these were early showers.

I smoked a joint, grabbed my hoodie and started off out of my apartment. The air was chilly and clean – just the way I liked it. Raindrops had cleaned everything, everywhere. Maybe it was going to clean me too. Everything shone through water that had accumulated over them. I made my way across shining gray street.

The park was not far from where I lived. It was just a few turns away. It was not a large park. It was tiny – one of the ones you find inside a community. I had discovered it a week before and started visiting it every day since. It was always empty, at least at the hours I came in. I could hardly find a single soul there. Maybe one or two kids chatting up in some corner.

The park was covered by small buildings on all sides, but none of the buildings had windows over it. It felt like a secluded, fresh space – just the kind I like. It was wet that day. The rain had turned the ground to mud at spots where there was no grass. There was grass in the park, but there were large spaces where there wasn’t. The park did not feel well kept, but it did not seem unfriendly as well.

Over the last week that I had started visiting it, I would come in with my earphones and walk around with music in my ears. I would find a secluded corner of the park where I would stop and smoke cigarettes. There was no one around to see me, so it felt refreshing to come and spend some time here. I would spend hours here.

My relationship with parks continued for a couple of years after that. There was another park that I used to visit for a couple of years after this one. But this one holds a special place in my heart.

I continued roaming around the park for a couple of hours. It was slippery because of the mud that day, so I spent most of the time avoiding falling down that I forgot to think about what I had come there to think about. Or maybe subconsciously, I had.

When came back to my house where I was living at the time, it had already started to get dark outside. I came back and sat down on my bed. It was a small house, the smallest I had ever lived in. I was living there for six months now.

This room I was in was rather small too. There was a bed there and opposite the bed was an almirah. There wasn’t any space for anything else. And the bed wasn’t even real hard wood bed. I think it was a sofa-cum-bed that the owner of the house had decided to put in place of a real bed. It was made of steel that felt so nimble that I would often worry would break one day. The mattress was so shallow and hard that it felt painful to sleep there on some days. But it was the best I could get those days.

Outside the bedroom was a tiny living room with a tiny sofa and a fridge. The kitchen was built into a corner that I had never touched. I never liked that house. It was the smallest I had ever lived in, smaller than someone like me should live in. However, that’s just the power of time. Sometimes time takes you to some places you would never dream of going.

But that time was about to come to an end that day. Because it was my last day in that house. It was sometime in the last week of the month, and I knew I would need to go someplace else, because I did not have the money for rent for the next month. I had been thinking about it for the whole month and that day had finally come.

I was sitting on the ill-made bed and looking straight at the almirah in front of the bed. It was a steel almirah, the kind of almirah that one used to find in every house when I was a kid. And there was a mirror in that almirah. So when one was sitting on the bed, all he had to do was look straight ahead to look back at himself. And that day, I was looking back at myself.

My hair had grown too much along with my beard. And my face looked frail. I had dark circles underneath my eyes. I looked like someone who has had all his life taken out of his body. I looked like I was: a few days away from being homeless.

And I felt anger, and pity. I used to hear Moonlight Sonata a lot in that house, and it felt like it was playing in ears just then, although I wasn’t listening to it.

I looked at myself and thoughts started coming to my head.

Is this it, I said. Is this what life was going to be? Is this who you are? Is this all you are?

I could feel warm tears on my cheeks. No, I said in defiance through the tears.

You know what you need to do, I said to myself. Promise me, I said. Promise yourself that you will start again. Promise that you will start from the absolute beginning and build a better life, a life you are proud of.

That was it. I had made myself a promise and I flew away from that city the next day. I did not return for so many years. When I eventually did go back, I visited the same park again. The park hadn’t changed one bit. It had stood on its place like a mountain stands through time, never changing. But I had changed since the last time I saw it. I had become a completely different person.

When I visited that park last year, I had kept my promise. But lately, I don’t feel so sure of it anymore. Lately, I feel slipping from it. Time keeps saying to me that nothing has changed. That maybe I am still there in that house after all these years.

The things I have achieved keeps slipping from me. The things that never came to be keep taunting me. And my promise stands there. Even after all this time, did I achieve my promise?