Ends of a Rod.

Life can be... mixed... at an international university. So many people from so many places, so many different cultures - all engaged in developing some aspect of themselves and of their surroundings. In the midst of so many, it is as easy to get completely lost as it is to find an interesting experience that will help you find yourself. I sometimes just loved to sit in the common room of my library, watching such a flux of humanity flow past me. Quite a chapter in permutations and combinations, I'd imagine my math professor to say...

Math class started, and I observed from the back bench as two stalwart scholars set out to answer all the outrageously tough questions the professor had put to us the other day. None of the remaining students, including me, had bothered to even raise their hands as the two tried to outdo each other with their increasingly brilliant and efficient solutions. I shook my head as I prepared myself for Physics, where the same thing was about to repeat itself.

Those two were in all my classes - I never found out their names, but I do remember that they looked so alike. The same height, roughly. The same rough coarse hair, the brown skin, seemingly soft features with sudden harsh contours. The same shaved upper lip (completed with a french beard below); I chuckled to myself thinking that they wouldn't appear out of place in any reputed software company.

I also noticed a certain animosity between them. They never spoke to each, never referred to the other by name. A common friend (just an acquaintance to them) mentioned that they were second generation Americans whose home countries had a few tensions between them. They looked so alike. They spoke in similar fashions, I'd heard them to laugh in exactly the same manner in reaction to the same joke. They even liked the same girl. Thank god they didn't know it, or else they would have seriously had something to fight over. They never worked together, and I think they resented each other for being so similar.

Two ends of rod, thats what they were. Two ends of an inflexible, metal rod - staring right out in opposite directions, despite being fundamentally the same. Imagine if they were elastic, they could actually meet. And gain some expertise on being the end of a rod. And still come back to their original positions. And there are so many people like them. I don't know what figure has those many ends, but I do know that all those people, all those ends, could meet to form a ring. Actually see each other. All it would take is a little bend.