As Leah

Chapter 1: Suppressed Feelings

I was a student. Someone who had to accept given answers and explanations as they were. There was no room for opinions or a contrary belief. If an answer was deemed wrong then it was as such. I had to just memorise it and not ask for a 'why,' because replies were never satisfactory and my question was never actually understood.
There was nothing I could do except not trying to repeat the 'mistakes' again. I was living in an era where, in the race of completing the syllabus amidst extreme stress, 'happiness' was considered a waste of time.

Although i had never expressed it much, but I had an opinion. I believed that happiness was the ultimate goal of humanity so instead going through the long route of studying, going to college, working, earning to remain satisfied and happy, I often took a shortcut; a detour from reality; I imagined and compared. Like:
"Daring and Caring Milly and Mic Nagged Poor Falcon"
while learning the SI metric prefixes (deci to femto).
I would often burst into laughter in history tests after seeing the words " identify this gentleman," and then almost choke after imagining the disgusted reaction of the teachers if they saw me like that.  Not only this, but I would compare periodicity of elements with characters from my beloved anime, manga and dramas, make bio jokes and comment on physical features like crazy.
This helped me get both marks and many happy memories.
Yet, whenever I read English literature, I felt a sting in my chest. I felt compelled to express my thoughts which were many a times different from what I had read in the book and its explanation.  These emotions always reached the zenith when Shakespearan plays were concerned. I always felt so helpless while reading them.
Even though I would not describe myself as a kind person because I did receive a 27%-above-average dark girl result from a legit personality test, I still wished to do something for the characters, especially the villains. Maybe the reason was that I was reading too many villainess comics at that time or I was just an over sympathizing person, (which I can justify by the guilt felt by me after canceling 2 numbers which were being multiplied and had a common factor), but the desire to help was no joke, specially in reference to the extremely famous play, The Merchant of Venice.

I was acquainted with the play when I was in eighth grade. We had to study several plays of shakespeare for the first time, but they were in modern English and greatly shortened with summarization but when I got promoted to ninth, I was made to study the play in old English and in actual length, which was further continued in tenth.

At that time, things stated to change. The summarized version clearly segregated the protagonists and antagonists and made the readers believe the same but the extended version made me disgusted with the heroes and sympathetic towards the villain. The poor Shylock, who had lost both his wife and daughter, was only left with a chance to take revenge which was also taken away from him in the end.  I wished to help him in any way I could. Even before my exam, I was thinking about the unjust things he went throuh dialogues  even though i was supposed to study. But who knew it would be my last exam in this world ....