IL PENSEROSO

Typewriter Olivetti Studio 42 designed by the Bauhaus-alumnus Alexander Schawinsky in 1936.

The day begins long before you decide to welcome it, grace it with your selfish toast, and face it from your dire straits. You wake up subconscious, dreaming of a miracle that could always come true but never did because some of the guiding stars wouldn't coincide and work it your way. You move out early, head to work, promising you'd bear it just one more day, and then you'd be home forever. On your way, you smile at the minions and at the minnows; you smile at agreeable faces and read the expressions as a sign of hope. You think you look fashionable, you look your best with your debonair gesture, you remind yourself of many a thousand innocent remarks that you ignored as a kid simply because you're polite. 

The newly paved roads look more pallid than the candid half-dead trees that line along a fluttering horizon you always decide to glance at on your way home. The traffic lights blur your visions; hurt your motives but you can stare right through their significance, still unhurt by their heartless guidance. You pause! You walk instead of waiting! You walk along the never-ending building blocks again, feeling dizzy that you can't hide. Your spirits almost give up when a friendly-looking sexagenarian steps forward and shows you the way, your way.  

You forget your previous night's silent prayer, open your eyes and enter into the world of others. You think you could change the world but they won't trust you. So, you toil on a joint venture and imagine your share tiptoe. You win, you ignore! Others win, you clap! Others celebrate, you follow! The jingle gets louder and louder as the camera zooms in on you. You can't hide your tears! You cry and feed on your mortal shames before sanity makes you a humble priest of necessity. Necessity! There's no escape! So, you hang on. Time flies. You stay quiet. 

Your midday is a miracle! Dazed and confused you look through the glass wall, at many a thousand coarse structures rising above primal instincts, forgotten lakes and dying emotions. You stare at the skyline long enough to make it disappear, which it doesn't; rather it becomes blurry and sink beneath a purple white hazy surface. You pretend to enjoy the effect no matter how long it lasts. Your friends say you imagine too much but you think they are funny, exposed on the other side of the surface. 

As you head out homeward, the rolling mists join forces with the drifting clouds. Without thunder and fury rain starts pouring. Suddenly your fatigue gives in to fear, an unexplainable anxiety, which haunts you day and night. Your conviction shakes, yet you do not flinch. You walk out and get drenched but hardly feel the rain. You notice somebody's staring at you but you don't stop. You start humming songs in indistinguishable tunes but that doesn't help, doesn't make you forget your dreams. By the time you cross the third block, the pouring recedes into drizzling, with a refreshing sun peeping through a few wanton patches of clouds. You feel happy!

Soon your gratitude increases in magnitude as you notice a playful rainbow forming over the crimson and turquoise mosaic on the northern sky. It's beautiful and you wish if you could gaze at its reflection on somebody's eyes. It freezes more, flashes less, as you find the concept of beauty puzzling and the essence, exhausting. It shimmers and shines as you stand for a while bathed in whitewashed flashbacks and ocean blue reminiscences of some distant moments, buried in the past forever. 

Silence is a drifter and you have tamed it well. Owner of a lonely heart, you know how to look at lights, the dim reflections they decorate darkness with. You shine against the signs and symbols people create to signify glory, signify fame. But you need no fame, no glory, because they mean nothing to you; you mystify limelight the way you choose. You know signs are like fancy perfumes that people wear alongside those white blindfolds to overlook honest hallucinations and subconscious tears.  

Soon you're home! Home is where you hide your impulses and frozen flames. Home is where you perform all your sacred ceremonies.  Home is where your hungry soul relishes on swallowing whatever comes your way. You're supposed to be on a diet but you never quite remember that. You're open to sizzling delicacies and to left over delights, from high class social faces to unknown pretty faces, dead or alive. 

The parasites on your narrow balcony or those freaky cats on the hot tin roofs cannot tolerate your sights, your homemade lemonade turns tart because somebody just does not like you taste it. No, just a plain 'No' is all that somebody needs to break your heart, burn you beyond an old pyre's alter. You laugh! But your half-audible laughter is a bitter cry because you know it doesn't help, It doesn't help you to know that down deep you are a miserable liar, you are prone to be a brute than a blessed being, you are dead to be living in this hell they call heaven.

Your conversations with 'friends' end unexpectedly. The special person you draw all your inspiration from doesn't care to answer your call. You feel angry! You feel sad. You grew up around an asylum, being derided by maniacs who thought the time itself would change to the good. But you know it never has changed nor will be! Today is just a prolonged shadow of yesterday, while tomorrow barely keeps any promise. You want to forget that 'freedom is a choice; happiness, a decision', but cannot keep these ideas out of your mind. Every day is exactly the same.

You're a living contradiction! You're dreamer of no big dreams yet count your days with misery, unable to accept your less than ordinary existence. Your brain conceives love as a piece of art but your heart feels it's a necessity. Lunar calendar has no meaning to you, still you cocoon around your window to bathe in your share of moonlight in the wee hours of the night. Your silent epiphanies wander around the darkest neighborhoods while you stare at a mute Beethoven leaning against his piano.

After several failed attempts to translate Autumn Sonata, you give up; you decide to retire to bed, thinking there's nothing you can do to change your tedious fate or misnomer. You wish some nameless angels would come and sing you a lullaby. As you close your eyes, the whole day shatters into pieces and disappears; you enter into a new world. A kaleidoscope of peaceful images floats around and you feel assured that you're free at last. 

The writer teaches at BRAC Institute of Languages at BRAC University.