cannot sleep. thinking about a life unlived.
I do not have a table lamp, and my roommate is asleep. All my frantic energy is stuck inside of me, I cannot read, I cannot study. Cannot agonize over future plans because they are best done when I am doing something else in the constantly diminishing present. The present is a train, never stops at your station.
All I can do is lie down on my bed, and look at the outlines of things. Clothes hanging over my bed, pictures on my wall which I can clearly see because my memory is my eye in the dark. I have nothing to do, nowhere to go. So I turn to the wall and then turn inside and run into an alternate version of myself. Someone who is living in a city which is New York and New Delhi. A small apartment, with a window open. The sound of traffic reaching my room by climbing the breezy vine. The summer air full of promise, of longing. Bright lights in my room, some golden, some white, turned on at every odd hour. Music over and over. For my convenience in this daydream, there's a restaurant about a hundred metres from where I live. I get down the stairs, and I walk to it whenever. You are allowed to smoke inside, and there's music, over and over. Few regulars, few people on a date, punctuating their eventful day with a snack at any place that's cheap and lets you sit. When you step inside this restaurant, you understand what the insides of the colour red are like, when it's birthed from love and loneliness. It's usually green for me, but here it's red. The world outside is blue, metallic.
I started writing this because the frantic energy in me was poking at the gap in my brain where I store words. I agonized over the format - should I scribble in the dark, or text this to my friend, or let my brain suffer a haemorrhage. Now I am tired, it's very easy these days.
Even in this alternate version of myself, I am lonely and full of longing. I walk back to my bed, the sheets are green. I turn towards the wall. The lights are still on.
origamiaround
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