Welcome to Readers’ Week 2024, where we celebrate the thoughts and voices of our blooming community. This year, we invited our readers to share their thoughts on the theme “Clean Slate” as the academic year restarts - unfolding a tale of fresh starts, new beginnings and untold stories. From an array of incredible submissions, we’ve chosen the top seven, and as difficult as that was, these pieces best embody this powerful theme.
As we take you through these seven submissions, they bring to you their own interpretations. With that, we present to you the runner-up, which truly captures the essence of starting anew!
The Fool's Errand
BY - @inkedpad
I had been staring at the fan for a long time when the alarm went off. I did not remember for what time or purpose I had set up the alarm. I swung my legs off the bed and saw my clipboard tightly holding on to a blank paper, like a mother who holds her lifeless child. Shaking my head, my eyes fell upon the push-pinned quote: “You never knew the difference between what’s missing and what’s misplaced.” The heart’s missing, I murmured absently. I looked in the mirror to decide who I am and got distracted by the jazz on the radio. I closed my eyes in the shower, and as the water trickled down my lower back and hit the ground, I thought of the lonely rains of September.
Mark and I would take lovely walks in the rain, we would embrace it by going out without an umbrella. In return, the rain would isolate us from the world, and we could only hear each other. I would stop and say, “We have come too far.” He would say, “I cannot stop here,” and he just kept walking in the rain. As my tears mixed with the shower droplets, I decided to end this ritual of cleansing my sins. I took my LSD pill with warm water. I put on my broken watch. The clock struck some number, and I set out for inspiration.
Amidst the blizzard, the woolen caps would disappear after a few meters. The winter had brought on an unusual state of hypnotism. Through the blinding white, the people came, and the people went, and I stopped to live here forever.
“Lucas?” A hand on my shoulder. I turned around to find Edith’s smile. Edith was a very charismatic girl; I once entered a swimming pool with her, and not many moons later, she disappeared with the boys and the waves. “What are you doing here standing all alone?” she asked, frisking the snowflakes off my coat. Everywhere I had ever stood, I was all alone, and this was no different.
“I’m off to the pub, would you like to join me?” I said, while making my destiny up. Edith would take a long time to think, and I left her in this catatonic state, confusing the goodbyes.
As I walked towards the nearby pub, I took my notepad out and scribbled, “Who’s leaving whom.” Hiding the notepad in my pocket, as if it was some kind of a secret, I entered the universe of drunks. My eyes quickly fixated on the bartender. As her pretty eyes served themselves around the table, I took the seat to the far left.
“Some sparkling water should be good enough,” I said.
“It’s never good enough,” she said while sliding up the water.
Everyone ordered different kinds of sorrow to complete themselves, and I could never know what I wanted. I watched her tease the guys till a time came where these guys would disappear. The bar became a projection of my empty mind, where a piano is always being played. As I kept scribbling something in my notepad, I felt as if the lights were closing in, leaving only a spotlight on me, her, and this glass of water.
She turned to me and said, “What are you writing in there? Pubs are no place for writing.”
I showed her all the strikethroughs and kissed her mouth.
Pubs are no place to find yourself.
When I came out of the pub, the sky was dark. The snow had gone calm, and the streets were filled with jovial people, as if everyone was high on morphine and the world was going to end. People gathered around a mime putting on her street show. Who does a mime imitate when the world is ending, I thought. Wasting not much time on her, I pitied her and left the small world of mirrors. While I tried to come up with poems, I watched the couples walk hand in hand, as though they had never left each other.
Edith was smoking cigarettes by the post box. “Hey! Where'd you go that day? I was speaking to you, and you left in between, pretty rude, eh?” She offered me a cigarette. I lit the cigarette up, and we both waited by the post box, she for her boyfriend and I for the postman to call me back to some ocean. As I put out my cigarette, I realized that Edith had left. The deadline for my suicide note was near, and I still hadn’t got enough inspiration to return home, so I kept walking in the other direction.
Many men have returned to their homes while they took the other way; my aspirations of getting lost did not align with such karmic belief. I blinked my eyes, and of course, I came across a gurudwara. With his head covered with a golden cloth, I saw a man praying. I was jealous of the devotion he had towards a feeling beyond us. I felt like a loveless person in a world full of love. I removed my shoes and went inside; I sat beside him to meditate on my past. In this warm atmosphere, I forgot about the cold outside. Searching for meaning at the end of sorrow is deceitful. My shoulders were tired of being tapped; I did not want this return to reality, but someone had other plans.
“It’s late,” he caressed my arm.
“Been that way for years now,” I took his hand.
Mark was too pretty for anyone who would acknowledge my existence. His eyes were subject to my disorientation. I was assigned the fool’s errand, entrusted upon me by nature, to fall in love with beauty, to keep it near, and let it leave you. We got to know each other better through our common interests: books, movies, music, and poems. By the next year, we started living together. Mark introduced me to Miles Davis and Chopin, while I got him into knitting. He wasn’t as good at singing as he was at the piano. A pianist is more often than not the protagonist of misery; the pianist is survived by the piano.
I prepared some onion and garlic to go with roasted potato. It is lovely to take the meals to the balcony and watch the rains of September wash away the crowd.
“Whenever I see the rain, I feel like being called by an ocean,” Mark said while grabbing a bite.
“The ocean’s too vast though,” I said squeakily.
“You can always send letters in bottles,” he took another bite.
After appetizing ourselves, we could not resist the rain. Just as I stepped in the rain, I found myself in the depths of a swimming pool.
“What are you doing!?” Edith smacked my face. I gasped for breath just to say, “Nothing!” She found the coin I had let go to the bottom of the pool before me. “I think you cheated, Edith; this is not the coin I let go,” I said while squinching my eyes. “Wait, if this isn’t that coin, then I just earned a few bucks!” I wish we still fetched our broken pieces now that we are older. The moon danced through the ripples of the pool. I am 17.
I woke up in a hospital and watched Mark’s body give up. Lymphoma takes you away layer by layer. They put him on so many colorful drugs. “Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows,” quoted Mark.
“But the poison’s missing,” I took no joy in trying to correct him.
“It’s misplaced,” Mark completed me.
I stayed by his side, playing his favorite music on the radio, bringing him our favorite food. Mark held my hand and said, “I wish I could love you more, there simply isn’t enough time now, is there?” He coughed. “It hurts to know that I will become nothing now—all those photographs in the albums where I was an infant, in my mother’s arms. The cosplay I did with a mustache on when I was 13. How I cried and how I laughed. How I struggled through life to kiss you for one more day. How you knitted those woolen caps for me. It hurts to know this ends.” He spoke until he couldn’t because of the tears. There is no glory in death. It’s pure helplessness. I could not say much because I was choked up too. The doctors asked if we would like to extend his pain for two more months. We shook our heads.
I left the room. I looked back through the glass and tried to capture his whole life in my eyes. “I am sorry,” that’s all I thought. I started walking towards the exit.
Transcending through time, I reached my apartment again. I see the blank paper with its plastic savior, my clean slate. A suicide note that is empty is a new start every day. In this fool’s errand, I get to live with what I have loved, all over again.
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