Quick Reads

Home {Quarantine Edition}

In the past few months I have familiarised myself with every inch of my room. With the minutes that have trickled by without any record of efficiency accompanied by endless sessions of cooking experimentations and quaint longings for the outdoors, I have found a sublime sense of peace that lingers every morning. For so long, I did not remember seeing the posters in my room, or stopping by the kitchen to make my Mom and Dad a cup of afternoon tea. The books on my shelf had become victims to the ever consuming cycle of 'when I get time,' continuously littered with a layer of dust. I had not seen the warm glow that comes through my window every afternoon at 3:50, or the way the winds blew through the clouds mixing along the semi wet clothes on the laundry line. I was immune to the habit of my mom aligning the slippers in a perfect line outside our home or how the pigeons bundled together playfully on the balcony railing passing away irrelevant time. From the knits on the cloth, to the mishmash wiring on my window I even discovered a clutter within the confines of the space beginning from my room to the dining table. I saw the neighbours kitten return with a litter of two, and never before had these changes seem so beautiful and new.

This home has become a journal, which sees and writes my present when everything seems to fall apart. It has become the strokes of loneliness on a white canvas, words on a paper, colours of a picture and a place where I live with my favourite people. It has become the boundaries of love and freedom with its special hours, the scent of fresh cake and setting suns, and the profound darkness of the twilight air as similar to my uncertainties. It has become my only haven, where I work, think, clear and write my thoughts, and transform it into a library of my conscience. Even though these are dire times, where cynicism lays itself down with me to sleep every night, I have come to the conclusion that perfection and the nearing future is a fruitless endeavour, an impossibility, one perhaps even with zero rewards. Rather, I do and undo the present, the one which is sticking to me now which would disappear within the next word - 'poof' - When I disregard these moments, that would be a true sign of apocalypse. This home, this life and even I wouldn't remain the same, but maybe just for today, just for now, I can try to find myself and take comfort in this 'similarity' because where's the rush? This is a standstill and reality would be MIA for an unprecendently long time; and if I don't learn how to exist within these fragments of time, will I ever find happiness in the normalcy of life?