Ananyaa Jain, Class X A
It was an amazing day, full of fun and frolic. We all stood aghast to see a strange flying object over our heads. We started guessing all that it could possibly be.
Rebecca said it could be a UFO. Karen said that now the Earth would be ruled by aliens.
After some time, when we were done guessing and discussing, I drowned myself into my own thoughts. I imagined the object to be every possible thing on Earth, from an extra-large orange falling from a tree and having super healing powers to a sofa set, thrown from the top of Burj Khalifa because a couple had a fight over who would sit on it first!
For once, I also imagined it to be Mickey Mouse’s house or Alladin’s Genie on his flying carpet. I was enjoying this own fantasy world of mine.
The next day, I heard in the news that it was an asteroid. I jumped up with excitement. I always had this love for asteroids. When I was five years old, an asteroid had fallen in my town, luckily in the outskirts. At that time, I thought it was something very dangerous and was literally trembling out of fear. My mom wanted to comfort me, so she said, “Oh dearie, don’t be scared. This was Santa’s bag of gifts which he has got for the kids of our town for Christmas this year.” This did comfort me a bit because I was really fond of gifts. It was Christmas the next day and as always my parents kept a gift for me secretly with just a little more decoration than usual and a note that said, “HO HO HO! This gift is for you my dear, and don’t be scared, whenever something like this falls from the sky, and someone says ‘it’s an asteroid’, understand that it’s me with a whole new collection of gifts for my children. – Santa.” I was really glad. Like every year, I believed it was really Santa who had given it to me.
But this time, it was mid July and Christmas season wasn’t near. So, I could not understand why Santa had got gifts for us at this time of the year. I felt suspicious and tried doing some research of my own about asteroids. When I found out what they actually were, I endlessly laughed at myself and my innocence. I never stopped imagining things and getting lost in my world of imagination because it had so much more than the actual world. I liked myself more in my fantasy world than in the real world!
