Monobina Nath writes a short story for Outlook.
I thought I would not write again. But again, I altered my gown to a mini skirt to wear it today. Just like I was clumsy before, my aqualens cleaner splashed on Lenskart’s lenses, the Vincent golden rim turning into rust around the corners. I barely used it.
The day was ordinary; the word ‘ordinary’ exists in perplexed pleats that I recognised after reading Won-Pyung Sohn’s ‘Almond’, a story of two innocent monsters, Yunjae and Gon, completed two weeks ago while posing on the sofa, one leg over the other on the bed. Once Sohn’s cinematography is accomplished, I am again luring, scrolling on Flipkart, adding one more to my cart.
Korean, Japanese, and Chinese translated into English are my topmost preferences. Though my peers thought of K-pop ideals behind the set, nobody knows what makes others upset. Days are like social media; nobody knows when it rains. Humans remember and reflect culture by their names, dates, and usually posts and comments nowadays. The simple reason behind this is to build dopamine.
Outside is hard rain, which begins with a storm and then a lofty smile. Sublimity around. Sticky pads like rainbow butterflies were flitting at my study table, one reminding me of workloads, the other of my “Hush...not today”.
Nevertheless, I peeped into the phone, ringing hard, notifications popping on screen when I turned on the net, and it took a while to check, like a daily routine, you would say. When the sun switched its petticoat, guilt came back. I turned it back.
The kick I was hoping for to relieve the workload was stagnant; dopamine is absent today again. Waiting for the on-the-spot reward, my stimulus metamorphosed into inferiority and despair.
I thought I wouldn’t write again; my trust, my words, and my friends all evaporated, but I wonder what you think of… In my early adolescence, I was inspired by Helen Keller’s ‘The Story of My Life’. Today, while pressing two boat airdrops into my ears, I noted that the “science of patience” is still there on the front page of my English Supreme. And I say, “I can break multiple times, but I will never segregate.” I recall often when I feel terribly desperate.
Passing time, after breakfast, posing on the same wheat-brown-bean vibrant sofa with Murakami’s ‘Kafka on the Shore’. Twisting off and on. what I mean is the room’s tubelight’s liquid gas is gone. With no delay, I began the journey with the toughest 15-year-old, Kafka Tamura, uttering monosyllabic words, reading, nodding, and blushing. I blush too.
My phone rings. Someone is standing downstairs. Pay on delivery; the person says I settled the payment quickly. The parcel is a book with multiple facets, with no eyebrows, no eyes, and no lips. Anything. But the cover squeezes out an incognizable conscious feeling within me. Besides, the tea was hospitable on the jute coasters at the left corner of the study table; it was warm and light, and my heart too, using my fine motor skills, moved five lines of my palm on Cho Nam-Joo’s ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982’ (translated by Jamie Chang).
(Monobina Nath received is a poet and a travel vlogger. Numerous foreign journals, periodicals, and newspapers, such as the International Times, Meghalaya Times, Outlook, Caesura, Piker Press, etc. have published her poems. Her dissertation, which she recently finished, examined the ecofeminist and ecopsychological undercurrents in Han Kang's 'The Vegetarian'.)