A Collaboration

I have been studying all my life, but I never had a proper study-spot. I was fine with studying in bed or on the floor until recently when I realised the importance of having a good studying atmosphere to keep things from getting boring. It began with me having a fireplace as my laptop’s desktop wallpaper, and white/pink noise blasting in my ears as I studied, and now I am obsessing over Ambience ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos.

I do not understand video animation and graphic designing, but a dear friend of mine, who is self-learning such software, has been experimenting with Ambience ASMR videos. She asked to feature my poetry in one of her latest projects, and I was more than happy to help. She walked me through the process, and I was taken aback by the complexity of it all. She works on a pretty basic laptop and it takes her a lot of time to make a sixty minutes video, but she finds it worth the trouble because she loves what she does. If you are a fan of such videos, please check out her channel, Cees Cosy Niche.

It feels good to support all forms of art and their creators. 🙂

Noncommunicating

I often find myself stuck in the middle of the most boring conversations ever, and I am no longer able to mask my obvious discomfort, despite having an actual mask on my face! I fail to engage, so I stay quiet, patiently listening at times and zoning out at other times, mostly because I usually cannot relate to anything the other person is talking about. It is only when you get older that you begin to realise that you cannot keep spending your days listening to people and thinking, “No, I do not relate to that.” That is when you should decide not to listen to everything anymore and let your bubble get the stronger walls it deserves.

Here are my borderline inappropriate, conversation-killing responses to a few questions that people had asked me just at the end of their stretched-out halves of the conversations:

1. I buy two pair of shoes per season and wear them out
2. I have never been to that place you were talking about
3. I am not friends with that many people, and we see each other about twice a year
4. Sorry, I did not quite understand what you were talking about earlier
5. Sorry, I have to leave, I am already late for a meeting
6. No, I shop online
7. I have a similar headache at the moment.

I am beginning to get tired, and I am pretty sure that people are getting tired of conversing with a silent person who keeps staring off into space and refuses to offer no insight whatsoever. Something must be wrong with me.

Since I am still obsessing over Fernando Pessoa’s poetry, a slightly relevant snippet from one of his poems from the book, I Have More Souls Than One translated by Jonathan Griffin, is in order:

“Yes, I am tired,

And ever so slightly smiling

At the tiredness being only this –

In the body a wish for sleep,

In the soul a desire for not thinking

And, to crown all, a luminous transparency

Of the retrospective understanding.

And the one luxury of not now having hopes?

I am intelligent: that’s all.

I have seen much and understood much of what I have seen,

And there is a certain pleasure even in the tiredness this brings us,

That in the end the head does still serve for something.”

Photo by Amir Esrafili from Pexels

A Burst of Happiness

Happiness bursts out of her

At not the right times,

And she tsk-tsks

Over the chemicals in her head

For being so weird,

But she forgets

That the wrong times in her life

Could be the right times

In someone else’s life,

And that happiness after all

Is ofttimes contagious!

©Aaysid

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
Gabriel García Márquez

Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

Not Lost in Translation

Sometimes you read something, and you cannot stop thinking about it afterwards. At least for a few days. I have finished reading a collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa called, I Have More Souls Than One, translated in English by Jonathan Griffin. There were a couple of poems in it that made me wish I knew Portuguese so that I could read the original versions of those poems. When a verse reads this beautifully tragic even in a language it was not penned in, how magical it must be in a language of its birth!

With this thought making rounds in my head, I wrote this poem today:

I have heard you talk,

And I have seen

What you have seen,

But I still don’t know

You at all;

We are worlds apart,

Words-that-we-speak apart,

But may not be apart

In your art.

Maybe if I could

Walk your walk

By becoming a part of what

You do with your pen,

I may still limp,

But I might not fall anymore.

©Aaysid

Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Selfless-Love

Today on an online store application, I was greeted by an insanely-pink banner that had read, “You come first! Buy yourself something special this month.” I don’t know why, but it had made me sad. Maybe because it had seemed like an exploitative marketing strategy!

I find the concept of self-love/self-care a little unsettling. It is one thing to prioritise our mental and physical well-being, and accept ourselves for who we are, but the entire concept becomes this completely messy thing when in the name of self-love, we start spoiling ourselves and begin succumbing to narcissism. The world is already full of such people, there’s absolutely no need for more.

I think when it comes to self-love, it is wise to set boundaries, because of the way things are at the moment, more and more people are becoming intolerant, cannot stomach even the constructive criticism, and are becoming materialistic. By inhabiting our personal full-of-love bubbles, we do not feel like giving anyone a chance anymore. This does not seem right.

So if I see a banner somewhere that reads something like this,

“Hey there! Please use this month as an excuse to buy something special for someone you have not made contact with and surprise them by letting them know that you still think about them,”

I would be happy to oblige. 🙂

Photo by Matthias Zomer from Pexels

Unlit

We have fallen many times.

We have so much to show for it;

There are minor cuts and bad gashes

But the light does not go through.

Horrified at the sight

Of such woefully broken doorways,

It keeps waiting for a proper gateway

While the darkness

Keeps winning the unwaged wars.

©Aaysid

“I’m your phantom dance partner. I’m your shadow. I’m not anything more.”
Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Too Distant

Someone who is only

a text message away

can still be too far away,

because the distance

that can be measured

in short units of words

might still be just as great.

©Aaysid

Photo by mahe haroutinian from Pexels