Inside a Daydream Worth Two Pennies
The idea of Sucharita writing a story fluctuates more like a defective pendulum clock. You might look at the oscillations and think, oh well, she has something important to say, but when you lean in to get a closer look at what she says, it might turn out to be bogus or misleading to many an untrained eye. Yes, she is slightly narcissistic, albeit a healthy dose of that trait. A notch higher than that would make her egotistical, a notch lower would be perceived as a woman with low self-regard.
One evening, she sat down at her desk to work on her scientific article. The more she thought hard about science, the more she got carried away into the sea of imagination of what-nots; things that seem most irrelevant when there is a submission deadline right around the corner. But she is so helpless during these times, that the only way out of the misery is to write her heart and soul out on the paper, or her laptop screen. So, that is what our lady did. To hell with the spouse, she chose to spend the evening with her love affair instead. She wrote like the world was going into war. She wrote like she was breathing her last. She wrote like she was about to skydive and didn’t care if there was a tomorrow. And the more she wrote, the more the affair seemed like the only right thing in her life. She liked science. But it was the written word that made her feel alive. She could be a deep-sea diver, peep into the blue world of corals and goldfishes. She could be a spacewalker without having to go through the pain of studying hardcore mathematics. She could be a painter in spite of her antagonistic relationship with brushes and oil color. She was everything when she was writing. The line separating reality and fantasy would blur for her in such times and nobody else would know how euphoric it felt to live like that.
And Time. Oh! The all-powerful Time would lie at her feet when the cascade of words took shape through the nib and out of her pen. In those moments, the Theory of Relativity would make perfect sense to her even though she had hardly ever looked at the actual mathematical proof of the concept. She ceased to be an entity in this physical world. She was part of a universe in which everything was racing towards the ultimate truth. Day and night would lose meaning when her mind was actively engaged in articulating her deepest and innermost truths, which she often found extremely arduous to mouth. Thoughts, she believed, were images. How does one convert images into words without losing the essence in translation? Is it how everyone else forms thoughts, too? What if everyone else knew exactly how to express and she, who was such a solemn thinker, was bereft of that cognitive ability that a writer must possess? What if she was alone on this journey? That question used to petrify her. The more she thought about it, her fear fueled her fire to keep trying harder and harder. And then, amidst all of this, she would get sucked into a realm where space, time, and matter- all became one. She was floating. She was writing exactly what she was thinking. In those moments, she was almost certain that a higher being was making her do things beyond her known capabilities. It was when such magic happened, she would feel the presence of God. And no matter how absurd it seemed, he felt God resided in her.
What is this urge that keeps chasing her, and she keeps writing about experiences, although these experiences may be mundane and repetitive in her life? I think, the reason she feels this urge to articulate her experiences is because, maybe in the process of writing, certain truths will emerge- truths around lessons and learnings that will help her survive through the next phase of her existence. She is looking to explain her actions and reactions to situations- some responses that befuddle her own conscience. She doesn’t believe that happiness and truth can coexist at all times. In fact, the happiness that doesn’t serve the purpose of taking her closer to the truth doesn’t interest her much. Her ideas are bizarre at times. But with whatever she has gone through, she has understood that identifying the truths surrounding her life is far more exciting than reveling in ephemeral joys. Perhaps her search for meaning is based not on who she wants to be, but rather on who she is meant to be. What she is meant to be is often a function of certain needs, conscious or otherwise, which led her in the past, to explore places, human beings, and relationships. Want, she realized, was often disguised in many forms, that led her to make mistakes. But, need, she is discovering day by day, is much more nuanced, much more cerebral, much more layered. Her choices, good or bad, were ultimately satisfying some innate needs that she was mostly unaware of. Her need to unlock mysteries of the universe. Her need to delve into the planes of human consciousness, her need to witness the physical geographies that don’t necessarily catch the human eye.
She mostly resides inside her own head, much to her detriment, some may opine. She would have done better in life had she done away with her daydreaming and philosophizing tendencies. To make matters more complicated, she probably doesn’t enjoy her 10–5 job anymore. But then, who will pay her to write about seemingly unimportant articles that deal with understanding her own self better? Therefore, she slogs through the day to stay committed to her channel of writing endeavors that may or may not bear real fruits. Despite all the current chaos in her life, she does know what her future is going to look like- a digital nomad, traipsing through foreign lands with a clumsy backpack, a laptop, and her fantasies. Whether her dream future will ever see the light of day or not is not the point. Her melancholic mind sustains the hope that she might actually make her dreams come true someday. The world is busy unraveling 5G, quantum computing, and AI. Everybody is entitled to their own versions of truths. So, can we let Sucharita have her two pennies worth of imagined bliss?
