...Starfish

While walking down a clean beach early one morning, I came across an almost dead starfish. It was stuck in the sand, stagnated. There was an urge to pick the fish up and take him home, and match it with the starfish in the book- 1001 words. But as I went down on my knees to pick the blue-grey wonder, it moved its tentacles, begging for another chance. The sea must have heard it; the chilly early morning sea wave splashed its transparent self onto the beach and washed the starfish back with it, freeing it from the sand that held it. The sea must have wanted me to have him too; another wave splashed on my foot a tickling feeling. And there it was; the star fish at my feet, resigned to its fate, stuck in the sand, motionless.

I picked it up, and stared at it. I decided to walk with it on my palm through the waking village. They later told me that it was very rare to find a starfish in Malvan. I saw no meaning in it. Until the angel who was taking care of me then whispered to me, ‘It is here to remind you my girl, that no matter how big your problems seem to you, they will always be small as compared to the universe. Look at this little starfish and think of how big his problem was, being stuck in the sand. Look how small it was to you-his problem.’

The softness of its body had changed into hardness within a day as the experience in the world outside the ocean dried it up. But it sat there, to remind me of my negligible existence in the universe!