Skip to main content

Closed Window, Opened Door

I like my desk.

It matches the drawers in the room and the armrests on the sofas. It goes with the walls and doors and ceiling which are either beige or a sullied shade of white. It reflects light in a similar way - similar, that is, to my own table, back at my own house.

I like my desk because it became mine last week.

It matches the drawers and the sofas and all the other aspects of the room, so it tells me that it is in the correct position. It is placed exactly where it was meant to be placed. With all the other things that are also in the correct order. It is at ease with itself, and with the friends around it. It is at home.



Tonight I stood from across the street and tried to pick out the window that betrayed me every morning as it let the sun in. It looked just like any other window and I could not pick it out. I tried to find the specific blinds that rattled as I tried to find rest against the fiendish bed that had an automatic verbal response to every turn of my troubled sleep. But there were so many other closed blinds, hiding so many other naughty beds. This was not home, at least not from the outside, at least not yet.


But my desk is mine. Only I know where my earpiece is. Where the folder with my documents are. Where the spare plastic bags are. Where the second earpiece is. I've made every deliberate decision with regards to this desk, and it is mine, for now. At least for now. And it seems like the only thing that's gonna stay the same, that's gonna be whatever I want it to be.

The people are new, their voices sound alien. Everything is fresh and different. My bed hates me and hates my roommate more. But my desk is my friend, and that's enough for tonight.


--

Also, suite is throwing a party later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thematic Summary of The Star by H.G. Wells

H.G. Well’s wrote The Star in 1897, but apocalyptic/disaster fiction had already existed for thousands of years. Well, the authors didn’t think they were writing fiction, but nevertheless, they were still writing speculative ‘non-fiction’. A quick Wikipedia look-up on Google will tell you that hundreds of seers have prophesized the end of mankind. Unfortunately, fortunately, they have all been wrong! Yet, these countless predictions prove a point about our very own human nature: many of us have fetishized the ‘end of the world’. Christians call it the rapture. Vikings called it Ragnarok. Others called it the Apocalypse. All these stories about our eventual end on this earth have a common thread: there is some greater reason for our end to occur – most of the time, it involves the triumph of good over evil. This is where The Star differs in its narrative. Instead of focusing on some grand narrative of good gods achieving a final victory over the forces of evil, it sticks to d
3 comments
Read more

Thematic summary of When It Changed by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ’ When It Changed centers on a human society made entirely up of women on a planet called ‘Whileaway’. The human colony is void of men because of a plague that occurred thirty generations ago. The females that remained after the plagued managed to survive without the males by a process that sees the merging of ova. This allowed women to reproduced with women, taking away the need for penetrative reproduction and thereby making redundant the role of men in the human reproductive cycle. The story begins when four Russian astronauts arrive on Whileaway. All four of them are male, which makes them the first 4 men that have set foot on the planet in hundreds of years. Their arrival has a profound effect on the women they meet, and we see this effect from the perspective of Janet, a thirty-four-year-old woman that is married to Katy, with whom she has three children. Upon meeting the four men, Janet is immediately taken aback by their physical size – “They are bigger than we ar
Post a Comment
Read more

Inheritance [Balli Kaur Jaswal]

I really shouldn't attempt to write this... as if this were an assignment due on Monday. It isn't, so I shall not.  Two days - it took me this to finish my first SingLit novel, as far as I can recall.  It was about a family who goes through tough times. This family was Sikh. This family was Singaporean. This family felt, for a few heart-wrenching seconds, like my own.  Dalveer and Harbeer have three children: Gurdev, Narain, and Amrit. Karam is Harbeer's nephew, but he doesn't get to be a narrator in the story, so, screw him. Also, he's an asshole.  We see their story unfold over a period of twenty years - this is paralleled by Singapore's own growth as a nation. We see the effects of rapid industrialisation on the nascent city state, and we begin to identify some of the more... unspoken problems faced by its people. In its endeavour to grow, advance, burgeon -- people, genuinely good people, are left behind. In our  struggle for success, the few am
Post a Comment
Read more