I used to pronounce library as "liblary."
No one corrected me. No one needed to.
I was too busy being a kid to care about getting words right.
Then I grew up.
Learned the correct pronunciation.
And everything else that comes with "correct."
Correct answer when someone asks "how's life?"
"Good. Busy. You know how it is."
And I do know how it is.
The Weight You Never Signed Up For
Responsibilities don't arrive all at once. They don't knock.
They accumulate. Quietly.
One day you're mispronouncing words and eating cereal at 2 PM.
Next day you're managing money, people, expectations — and yourself.
And somewhere in between, you lost the lightness.
Not because something broke.
Because something loaded.
I catch myself thinking — life was simpler back then.
Before responsibilities showed up uninvited and never left.
That thought felt true.
Until last week.
The Kid on the Footpath
I was walking past a row of books laid out on a footpath.
Nothing unusual. Pune has a hundred of those setups.
But the kid sitting behind them made me stop.
Couldn't have been older than 9.
He wasn't selling. Not at that moment.
He was reading. Slowly. Finger on the page. Lips moving.
Not for school. Not for fun.
He was trying to understand the thing he needed to sell to eat.
No "liblary" phase.
No mispronouncing words at the dinner table while your parents laugh.
No childhood to look back on and romanticize.
He skipped the entire chapter I keep mourning.
Two Versions of "Life Is Hard"
I grew into responsibilities. Gradually. With a safety net underneath.
He was handed them before his bones were ready for the weight.
I call adulthood heavy.
He doesn't even have a word for what he carries because nobody taught him enough words yet.
I had a childhood and I miss it.
He never had one and doesn't know there's something to miss.
Two versions of "life is hard."
Same sentence. Completely different weight class.
The Part That Stays
He wasn't complaining.
Wasn't sad. Wasn't performing struggle for sympathy.
He was just reading.
Trying to learn from the same books people walk past every day without looking down.
I have the luxury of nostalgia.
The privilege of looking back and saying "things were easier."
He doesn't get to look back. He's too busy surviving forward.
I used to say "liblary."
He's still learning to say it at all.
And somehow I'm the one calling life hard.
I'm not mourning. Not really. It's just a thought that sits with you a little longer than it should — the kind you can't unsee once you've seen it.