All at once, I miss college terribly. Apart from the early morning visitors - ranging from the hoarding and the weaving to the ultrasonic variety - this room also comes with hyperbolic acoustics. So this song comes on, not one I have ever much wondered about or remarked upon, but it comes on and all at once, I miss it. I thought it would never come.
This oppressive revisiting. Longing for inexplicable things like bus rides at sunset, alone. Like walks in between canteens, stopping for coffee only as an excuse to keep walking, running into old faces from school, from unexpected places. The strange way how everyone seemed to own the campus and be owned by it in turn. Every junkie, every geek, every scowling politico - as if organic growths, rational fallouts of that maze of asphalt and recycled flora. That strange sense of floating through knowing that this was how I would remember it. Aware of the memories hardening, often skewed, perhaps inaccurate, but settling nonetheless for good. Those born under Revati were meant to make an art out of leaving.
The smell of rain, thin coffee, books, ammonia, mulch, cement dust and sometimes skin. Earphones seem to be the refrain in these flashbacks. Sitting on the stairs, not needing conversation but happy in the soft glow of others talking. The easy distance that had replaced the first passionate ardour. Not that I disown the love, the attachment. Never had there been such closeness, such belonging. Not that I don't remember with a shudder the equally disembowelling periods. Times of total discomfiture when people, books, this self skin seemed grossly alien and designed to kill. But keener are these times of neither love nor hate, these times of blessed contentedness spent in solitude, sometimes shared solitude, which only like minds can understand. The absence of guilt, doubt, fear, intolerance. The ballooning joy of everything from a three-and-a-half-legged dog that followed one around the lake to a sudden flower offered. How the littlest of life's touches seemed to brim over.
I had a migraine when I started this. But now the song's over and Ma's just returned with a bucket load of haleem so all maudlin writing must be ended herewith. =)
This oppressive revisiting. Longing for inexplicable things like bus rides at sunset, alone. Like walks in between canteens, stopping for coffee only as an excuse to keep walking, running into old faces from school, from unexpected places. The strange way how everyone seemed to own the campus and be owned by it in turn. Every junkie, every geek, every scowling politico - as if organic growths, rational fallouts of that maze of asphalt and recycled flora. That strange sense of floating through knowing that this was how I would remember it. Aware of the memories hardening, often skewed, perhaps inaccurate, but settling nonetheless for good. Those born under Revati were meant to make an art out of leaving.
The smell of rain, thin coffee, books, ammonia, mulch, cement dust and sometimes skin. Earphones seem to be the refrain in these flashbacks. Sitting on the stairs, not needing conversation but happy in the soft glow of others talking. The easy distance that had replaced the first passionate ardour. Not that I disown the love, the attachment. Never had there been such closeness, such belonging. Not that I don't remember with a shudder the equally disembowelling periods. Times of total discomfiture when people, books, this self skin seemed grossly alien and designed to kill. But keener are these times of neither love nor hate, these times of blessed contentedness spent in solitude, sometimes shared solitude, which only like minds can understand. The absence of guilt, doubt, fear, intolerance. The ballooning joy of everything from a three-and-a-half-legged dog that followed one around the lake to a sudden flower offered. How the littlest of life's touches seemed to brim over.
I had a migraine when I started this. But now the song's over and Ma's just returned with a bucket load of haleem so all maudlin writing must be ended herewith. =)
