Don't think about tomorrow - tape 2

I walked all the way from the GT Toyota Center at UP to Technohub just to kill time. Call it a deviation from the unpleasant to make sense of things. It's Friday after all, and I don't believe that there should be anything to be done on a Friday night, let alone anything that wants to get done.

I've been trying to loosen up, this week most frequently. Just trying to feel how things are like when they are not so cramped up within the tiny lobes of my brain, or when I could not feel the slightest tinge of fear run down my nerves anymore. Maybe then, things will not be so bad.

So UP.

I have this volume of Childcraft encyclopedias, which delighted me as a child. I never read them. At that time, I couldn't yet. I was drawn first to the pictures. I'm talking about 80's to early 90's Childcraft: definitely not new photos now, but not completely old either. I loved those photos. I still do. I especially loved pictures of houses in forests, countrysides, hills, and what people do in them. They're all so simple, yet whenever I look at them, I wanted so badly to be in those pictures - in that exact situation, at that exact time frame. It was magical to me.

This afternoon, UP and its expanse of land - the shadows of branches on red bricks, the rustle of leaves in tune with the cold whistle of the monsoon, the range of woods beyond every lamppost - all laid out those photos in front of me, displayed them within my reach as though they were real, alive. I was living in them.

The sun is setting.

I had wondered before how things would be had I been allowed to take the test in UP, and had I passed. I realize now that that doesn't matter. Fact is: I don't know, and I will never know because it never really was a dream. I could never really transform it into one, try as I might. I feel at ease knowing that this is the only perspective in which I shall see UP. Best that I not ruin the illusion that I have of it as I had destroyed my previous dreams.

I was there this afternoon, just walking, taking in the reality of being there, and yet never actually making it. I felt magnified by time, scooped up by its hand, cupped into a feeling of security. It's okay, it seemed to say. Everything will be all right.

I'm okay.

It got dark eventually. The lampposts could only give ample light for writing, but I wanted to stay. I just wanted to be there. It was exactly childhood, that simple and that real. That beautiful and breathtaking memory of childhood to which I could never serve justice. I want to return to it, to be coupled by the greenness of being a child. I'd live there forever, I swear to god, if I could. I'd give anything to have it back.

It would take me an hour to find my way out.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.

- Robert Frost