The single window seat in the shuttle is just that – a single seat, looking out at the grassy (and admittedly, trash-filled) landscape of Sonipat. But the jitters of the van as it begins to pull away from Ashoka, the sting of cold air against my nose through the rusted window are transcendent. “My little boat, for many quiet hours, Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimmed and white”. When I close my eyes, the movement of the shuttle is akin to the rocking of a little boat; as I curl up with my laptop to write this, I can hear the scratch of pen on paper replacing the clicking of my keys; the white plastic bag that flits in the wind becomes as beautiful as flowers swaying in the wind. The serenity of my laptop, my earphones and I become my own personal boat; my own personal bubble with its own yellow glow as the words pour out of me and onto the paper.
As a PPE major, I often get extremely intrigued in discussions in class that are philosophical. An entire hour passes by, and I find myself entirely immersed in the topic. It is at moments like these, pen in hand, hair up in a bun, that I feel the enamor of academia; the waves of depth slowly drawing me into them. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the limitless nature of academia; the way I could read for every minute from now until I die, and there would yet be more knowledge, more ideas that I wouldn’t have been exposed to. ‘I have fears that I may cease to be, before high-piled books in character’ The idea of endless knowledge waiting to be consumed, so many opinions across scholars just out there get me excited and restless; it makes me long to know everything possible, and yet feel like I know nothing. It’s an exhilarating feeling – to know a subject in and out, the nooks and crannies of the argument, the smallest of issues. And yet, you can always run into more.
Exam season always has me living in the library cafe, jittery and anxious because of my 8 cups of coffee. The anxiety extends beyond my academics, as somehow exam season are the 2 weeks a semester when everything in my life seems to be going wrong: academics, friends, love life – you name it. I find myself barefoot on the football field, leaning back down against the grass with my legs propped up. To anyone else, or even myself if I try hard enough, I am a random girl sitting on the grass for hours, with no apparent reason; I am a sad, lonely girl, who’s probably really going through it (what a shame, she’s f*cked in the head, they’ll say). I sit there with tears rolling down my face, melancholy shrouding every thought that pops into my head. The pillars in my life begin to crumble away as the melancholy rips apart their permanence, tearing away any sense of stability I believed in. And so ‘Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day, Nothing gold can stay’. The thoughts pour in until my Thursday night turns into an early Friday morning, until my solitude on the field is seemingly replicated in every other aspect of my life. The melancholy feels like my best friend as I let it wrap around me and take me in, holding me closer than anyone else ever has.
I lie in bed, my legs entwined with his, laughing about the stupid small things. He sticks his tongue out at me and I stick it back out; he pouts at me, and I lean over to bite his shoulder. We play-wrestle, and play-shout, we laugh and laugh. Somewhere in between the laughing, I lose myself in the sound of his laugh synonymous with my happiness. I replay the small moments in my head and realise how absurd it is. How absurd the things we say to each other are, the weird expressions we make at each other – and yet, that is our love. ‘Love is like understanding, that grows bright’ – love is our own personal language, our own method of communication. It’s my own world within a world, my own language within universal languages – my little spot of pure bliss within other moments of happiness.
The romantic poet inside me comes out in the mundane moments of my life; it comes out to remind me that ‘bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven’.