(TAN): Day 35.
Monday without the blues. I started the day with a video call. I made breakfast, started reading Tintin in French. Then started reading the same in English. Maybe I’ll dig up the Bangla versions as well.
Spoke to Maa, Bapi. Calculated the number of eggs they have consumed during lockdown. Declined to make a list for grocery shopping, “I’ll not forget anything Bapi.”
Of course, I will, because the more I forget, I get another chance to go out. Another chance to see someone else other than myself and my landlady. Walk the empty streets once more, listen to the birds, and move to the other side if there’s someone on the same side as me.
On my walk last week, or maybe the week before, I saw a playground that looked like it has snow on the grass. Moving closer, the daisies covering the ground looked up and said hi!
The cemetery beside my home, has blood red roses between the resting places of soldiers and sailors. My landlady tells me that they will be there for long. Long enough for the cemetery to re-open and me to visit? A question she doesn’t have an answer to. Magnolias were in bloom when we retreated to our homes, cherry blossoms have come and gone.
On one of our walks, my friend said, sometimes this feels like a movie. An empty Paris. The cafés all closed up. We saw an Asian man having lunch alone in a café, we wondered if he slept there. Maybe, he couldn’t get back to his family? Maybe, that café is his home and he has no place to go to? We wondered what happened to the homeless man we saw on the way to school every day. School, the first sight of the building had brought me to tears. A lifetime ago. On a cold, rainy January day. There I was, finally, a step closer to the dream.
I haven’t seen my school in 37 days.
People have it worse. I know, that’s what I keep telling myself every time my brain decides to go on an overthinking drive. I am good. I am one of the luckiest. My friend said, maybe we attract negative because we don’t hope enough. Maybe, if I hope enough, time will go faster. Maybe if I hope enough, I’ll ride the waves of loneliness a little better.
Maybe, hope will take me back to that Wednesday morning tram ride, filled with faces, bodies, smiles and tiredness.
The author is a student of patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu, Paris.
You can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
Nice