It’s a warm summer evening lightly accompanied by a fading rain; I rather like the sound of rain tapping the tin roofs of our home and the dim light in my room. I have turned on my personal computer, it’s been a while since I used it and its gathered pile of dust is relatively a cloud in my face and I’m not quite okay with swallowing it. One of my windows is wide open; there is an auburn streak of sun gracefully stitched into the yellow curtains and I’m writing this in a room that’s open to all sorts of noise or occasional birdcalls. My nephew and my cousin, who are of the same age, are into mutual awakening of a quiet neighborhood. However, recently the neighbor that’s immediate next to us from the left side has been quite a competition to them and the likelihood of their victory has gone down a notch. I calculate the odds to be in their favor very soon. Also, I’ve been in my room all day and I’m disappointed in myself to be honest; my will to do something that is likely to benefit my chances of reaching the culmination of my supposed dreams and desires, is lost somewhere between a virtual combat game and internet. I have been nothing but a waste of time, my exams ended a day before and how I feel is not appropriate to what one should feel in this very moment. It feels anti-climactic and I’m rather worried about how I feel about anything at all. On the other hand, this evening was a moment of clarity for me but obviously nothing that is going to stick too long and might only be enough to get me doing something productive.
An eighteen-century haiku poet called Shisui painted a poem before dying and it looked like a circle that was not closed on one point of an elongated brush stroke. Richard Flanagan in his book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North called it a “contained void, an endless mystery, lenghtless breadth, the great wheel, eternal return: the circle— antithesis of the line.” Now if I were to apply it on my room, the open window signifies and incomplete circle yet something inevitably fulfilling in itself. I’m not quite sure why I like the more maddening emotions, the ones that darker and scarier if we feed them. Descartes in his defense, while questioning the validity of his existence not merely as a vessel with an implanted purpose— declared his free will by saying I think, therefore I am, and perhaps on certain days when we are just idle and have nothing to do or feel the lack of thought eating its way through our soul, we are bound to feel empty; like we’re all an antithesis, an opposite of a line or an open ended chasm.
The past month has been eventful; of course people died this time even and somehow it isn’t surprising but this time an assassination and the government falling apart right after is quite a headline nowadays. An IAS officer from Kashmir described it perfectly well, “We are now nothing but a large crowd of numb mourners going from house to house and graveyard to graveyard, each one of us waiting for our turn to die.” The reality of it is dismal and the irony is that it is strangely popular now to not die of a natural order. The lines of clarity here are thicker and blurry, to be out of focus one just has to step outside and see through the superficial schematic of the life that is lived here.
We’ve only been to the college a handful of times since May began, if it weren’t for the exams I don’t think any of us was willing to go, it has become chaotic and more or less exhausting. Our third semester was all set to start from today but it didn’t, by now I’m just worried if the college has a time table that can occupy us. Doodlebug talked to one of the teachers about our third semester and the response was surprisingly awful. She was told that all the teachers are doing four shifts and the first and second semester fill most of the classes, basically there is no space for us in the curriculum yet we’ve been invited to submit our third semester forms. It’s crazy, isn’t it?
There were not a lot of things that may possibly wind up here, in this log, or I simply may have forgotten them; if I know anything for sure, I’d say I deny myself the social interactions that may keep me functional in the eyes of many others but I recline towards the scattered place that is my room. Even inside my mind, I’m listless and I’ve a crazy infatuation of existing in different dimensions while I’ve company. I met Karla a few days back, after a long month of hunger, we were able to hangout for a while but I was on clock because my cousin was getting engaged the very same day. Hondo and I left the college together and I had to disappoint him about our getaway plans. Sadly, I’m not proud of it and I won’t blame him for assuming that I deliberately come up with excuses to spoil our plans and take off. FYI I do not. My plans disappoint a lot of people, something always comes up and my family likes to rain on my parade.
I was dreading going to the engagement of my cousin, in fact I was glad my exams coincided with the same day but somehow I found myself wanting to go there because that place has always been special. You could tell from my faces that I dragged myself to it, I was glad to see all of them but I did not want to engage in a conversation. Why? I happen to have lost my ability to keep a conversation flowing and I’d sooner die than answer questions that are the forefront of greeting. Yet in the end, when my cousin quietly dropped the prospect of card games and open-ended-circles, the opposite of line where we sit in pairs and wait for the luckiest serve; I wanted to be there and I knew I couldn’t. It was not because of them, or my awkwardness around people or my envy for their liberty; my father expecting me to be home has a universal pity and they just nod their heads like a bobble head statue.