Tiramisu With a Side of Ferrero Rocher, Please

On double-scoop servings and crying at my optometrist's 

It had been months since I sat in a rickshaw beside my mother earphones-less, absorbing the sounds of the metropolitan city I still hesitated to call home, without music loud enough to deafen a man being forced into my poor, unsuspecting eardrums. I wouldn't be deafened though, contrary to my mother's belief, the source of which being Unqualified Men on Instagram Posing as Doctors in Scrubs to Bait Indian Mothers. 

For lunch, I dragged my germaphobe mother to a semi-street food place, with alternating red and green plastic chairs and a power outage delaying the college kids' pizza order. She was not one bit the food-poisoning-phobic lady she is now in her prime time, she explained to me. Then, for her and her friends, roadside snacks were a religion to be worshipped day and night. Her preferred argument now is, "Times have changed."

I urged my mother to pick out her ice cream order quickly, power outage apparently getting the best of the entire street. So, in the blinding mid-afternoon sun we licked our tiny wooden spoons clean, her's one half mango and the other butterscotch, and mine tiramisu and Ferrero Rocher.

My optometrist witnessing me cry was perhaps the last thing I had expected for today, but there's a good chance it was a first for her too. Those sixty seconds have definitely occupied a permanent position in The Top 3 Most Embarrassing Moments of My Life. That said, I have come to realise that my vulnerability (to put it in glamorous terms) was weirdly beautiful. Such a mundane thing as finding it impossible to put my first ever contacts inside my left eyeball evoked in me an emotional response, rising from wild frustration. Acceptedly, at that moment, I felt ridiculously childish. Props to my mother for totally not laughing at me in the clinic, though. Totally.