Today was special but I didn’t get a day off for it and in all secrecy, only one other person knows about why today every month is faultlessly special; liberty of going public is something we earn when we have the legs to stand up for it and until that day comes, nothing is going to make me believe otherwise. The lines, the further away you go from them, the closer you find yourself to their charade of being parallel in a certain obligated dimension of our implicit conscience.
I was traveling alone today; to avoid conversations I had an earphone and some music that wouldn’t really suit your taste buds. Truth is, I don’t feel like being in a class and hear a teacher drone on forty minutes straight about a dead guy’s poetry and about how he manifested God in his tight lipped jargons. I used to have a routine; everything happened on time but now I’m in a system that gives me plenty of time and while I sit here, my future is close as unthinkable; it was my call but I think maybe I regret it when I’m not thinking about anything else. It is selfish and arrogant, something I’m stuck with for a few years to come. If I don’t have a routine, if things don’t happen as they have to be, I become unstable and reckless, just like I’m going to be today. There were reasons why I chose to stay and I hope have got that part right.
Doodlebug is sitting on the park bench that is at the corner of the college’s heritage building, reading perhaps, if I may recall right. I may be amnesic in a certain kind of way; I forget more than an average person does, I hear it has to do something with your creativity quotient. College smells like freshly cut timber; we walk a hemisphere of our college and sit under Chinar and talk about things that are hard to remember. I skipped college yesterday, so I had a motive to talk about something and I did for a moment at least. But then I seemingly ran out of things to say to her, or to talk about anything else for that matter.
“You look younger with your hair all set.” she remarked.
I was already shrinking from the self consciousness of my short hair; sadly my family just likes to poke into matters of hair too. Ironically my father had longer hair when he had it; I’m not that independent to bring that up in an argument yet. I’d be branded as disrespectful. My nana gives me a run for it too; she literally held me by my hair and ordered me to cut it short. I’m too shy to take what is rightfully mine. Period.
My active role in a conversation is to agree, just nod and say something similar for a change; asking more from me is like wishing you were dead and then there was sawdust in the air that came from the window frames that were being polished; it mixed with the air and it was as though anger would smell like this.
Moody and Hondo were in the class when we entered, Moody was in good spirits and the latter was cross with me because I keep disappointing him every time we plan something, it’s been like that since forever. My plans have a natural tendency to not pan out and I don’t remember the last time I could meet someone on a particular day that I would have suggested. Blackbeard is absent nowadays, for the most of the days we are in college, we don’t get to see him much; I guess his father has started to appreciate his dedication toward their family business. Good for him I guess.
It’s our literature class, John Donne’s Sonnet XIV is on our desks and none of us could care less what it meant but the professor is hell bent upon engaging our interests in it; I don’t hold it against her though, anyway she did succeed in interesting us in Donne’s poetry. The only thing that went south was when she used rape as a synonym for ravish but before she could realize it the context just went either way. “Ravish me.” she said. All of us were in for it after the class finished; the joke wielded its charm on us the whole day.
“Would anyone like to be ravished by me?” Hondo chided in after ma’am left, breaking us into echoing guffaws, meanwhile Moody made gestures of his own Ravish me the while earshot. We bunked the next several classes, Hondo and I, we left the college to roam but my spontaneity got us to his brother’s café. Hondo doesn’t like going there often because he doesn’t want his brother to have a wrong impression of him, we do study but we aren’t serious about it in any way a normal person would.
I have a very sad history with ordering food, I order things that come in a large quantity or just basically can’t be consumed without getting your hands dirty or just something plain stupid. I don’t order at eating places, it’s a very hard thing to do for me, it is awkwardly confusing to me and therefore I just don’t want anything to do with it. Menus give me a headache, it is a lot of thinking and I’m not used to processing high end information about food. This time I ordered noodles and the bowl was enough for three people to eat, I have an appetite of a half person myself. I hardly eat and every passing day it feels like I’m getting to a point where there is a certain chance of me turning anorexic or just so habitual of food that I am beyond the point of feeling flavors.
Hondo refers to Doodlebug’s apparel, which is a veil from head to foot as a dementor costume. He narrated an incident where a girl with the same apparel was riding a scooter and she looked like a flying dementor. He and his friend casted an Expecto Patronus spell over her she toppled over with her scooter. It was funny; we just sat there laughing for a while.
Fast forward to college, four of us just sat there in a classroom determined to stay until someone bothered about us, but none of us actually wanted to go home, we’d missed the feeling of being, in that moment we were not four different lives; we were collectively a part of something bigger, something much liberating in its own. I knew that and I wanted to be in a loop but the world wouldn’t let me be.