I arrived at my room and sat at my desk for a late dinner. Cup noodles. I put on a movie, watching it mindlessly while hoping the luggage would unpack itself. Background noises. The clinking of keys unlocks the front door. First conversation with my flatmates was brief. The rustling of their masks was more audible than their voices. But their eyes spoke, welcoming me as the last resident of the place. An ensuite bedroom facing the East. Lights out. I tried to sleep the fatigue away. Tried to think of a year ahead. Writing only. But ten thousand kilometres from home. The movie of my life. I watched it unfold upon the ceiling of my room.
and the night
falls onto the roof
silkily
Everyone was talking. The professor’s voice was booming. I wondered if we were still on page four. Turning on, turning off the mic. It was unwise for a latecomer to speak. So I stayed silent, smiling, still tapping my feet on the rug as no one could see it. Two weeks couldn’t have made such a gap. Or maybe I was simply incompetent. Maybe not my illness, my lateness, or the world’s hatred for current circumstances, but rather just an ill judgment on my part.
darkening
the present I chose
hereafter of the day
I lay silently on the floor, sinking slowly into the darkness. Let it cover me from the light of forthcoming days. I made no exception, failed the thing I sacrificed to achieve. A humble pill so hard to swallow. It was a weight, even. And it dropped my heart to my knees. I hit rock bottom. But the force of my fall was too strong. And I bounced off, rocketing from the chain of expectation. I was floating again. Not just my head but my whole body above water. Because the worst had happened. Nothing else could bring me down.
glimmer of light
crescent cuts like diamond
against the dead of night
The sun was making its presence felt. The cold air became warmer. Mask off. People filled the streets of the West End. They lounged on the steps of Kelvingrove Museum, dozed off on the benches of the Botanic Garden. Coffee shops. Bookstores. Under the bell tower sprouting like an oasis above the green lawns. They took strolls along the River Clyde, walking slowly with their dogs beside. Rows of colorful houses, boutiques, and lively pubs of the Southside. But the toughest crowds always bustled along Buchanan Street. The sound of traffic mixed with the chatter of pedestrians, hurrying from shop to shop, the singing of street performers, the hollering of the local vendors sell as if the city never sleeps. Always moving, changing, growing.
golden gleam
silver lining
the edge of the world
I made myself at home with the Glaswegians, consuming the produce that they grow yet grew foreign to them still. ‘You’re long way from home,’ they would tell me. But I didn’t mind. I enjoyed staying strange and distant in a place distant and strange to me. While the boys I’ve met, Glasgow flows in them.
the sky embraces
breaking battle of opposite ends
beacon and abyss
When they took my hands and led me through the wilderness, I was at one with them. The Glasgow they knew shifted in their eyes as I told them how I looked at it. We were young again, sprinting across the Forth and Clyde Canal. Above the Great Melody. Down under Kelvinbridge. But our trip was short-lived. They went back to the habitat they know. As I continued on, staying hungry for the unknown, the endless possibilities I would only get to know, on the blank pages of my note. I wrote and wrote, to the last words of my dissertation. It was lavished with praises on my “foreignity”. But it wasn't anything so foreign. Just a merging quality of my own nature with the surroundings familiar to them.