While walking past this street in the wee hours of the morning, my polarised sunglasses make this world look unusually uplifted. The long, straight road appears bumpy like a gum eraser; the rumble strips resemble a long ruler; these birds in the sky look the same as I draw on fresh white sheets of my drawing book with a stippling shading pencil. To all appearances, life seems to be like a ‘pencil box’. The traffic light at the intersection looks like the rounded pencil ferrule —functioning with the sole purpose of keeping us safe.

Then, I make a 60-degree turn towards my school. The gore road in front reminds me of the set square. It runs parallel to my footsteps yet I never see them meeting at any point. Maybe, it helps amplify the baseline in our lives. This is what I often deliberate over while counting my steps to the school. As I reached the asphalt concrete base course, my eyes started measuring the distance between my expectations and reality. But the hinge of my compass still feels loose. This short burst of commotion often surrounds me when the thoughts of love for the mezzo-soprano crumble under the need for learning all the subjects. Just then, I’d think of that boggy ground right behind our school premises that have lovegrass; its panicles would often creep upward, making way to the top side of my pants. And I’d handpick them one by one, smelling the wet and fresh fragrance of my dreams, no lesser than petrichor, still waiting for me to unleash them. I’d keep enjoying the timelessness of this thought machinery, the renewed vigour that it begets reflects the vestiges of an innocuous me — a nonchalant being. As I settle down on my desk and open the pencil box, my revolt against the absurdity of this life opens its wings and takes flight in the wide blue sky. I’ve kept one of its feathers as a memory in my pencil box until we meet the next fall.