One day, in September 2026 | By Parveena Yousuf
 |
| Illustrated by @jvsh.jns |
I woke up at ten in the morning.
Which, for me, is almost an afternoon, and that felt offensive as I was used to seeing the sky at five.
On class days, I’m usually awake somewhere between 4.30 am to 5.30 am, depending on how much I have convinced myself that I still need those extra ten minutes of sleep. There is always something like a bus breaking down, something like a lab coat that I would only remember to bring at the last minute, something like a crowded railway station that would make you wait for five trains for you to get in, something that will happen if I don’t get up soon enough.
But it is semester break.
So, today there was nothing.
So, I stayed in bed for a while.
When “for a while” became twenty-seven minutes, I finally got out of the bed and went to make toast.
It was supposed to be ordinary toast. Margarine, bread, and pan on the stove. Nothing complicated. Except I was still half asleep, so I left it on the pan too long. The edges turned darker than brown, but the middle was black, like an asteroid hit it and made a dark crater. I stood there holding it, wondering if I had made breakfast, or a small piece of charcoal.
I ate it anyway.
Unexpectedly, it was good.
Especially when I dipped the charcoal part into coffee. The bitterness of the coffee softened the bitterness of the toast, and somehow the two wrong things made something right. You know… like negative and negative gives you positive. *Awkward silence*
Anyways, then, I turned on the television.
Nothing.
I changed the channel.
Still nothing.
Eventually, I found a travel documentary about Sapa, Vietnam.
There were mountains disappearing into fog, green terraces folding into one another like someone had carefully pleated the earth, and narrow paths running between houses that looked impossibly small from above. The camera moved slowly, almost as though it had nowhere else to be.
I liked that.
Then they mentioned Cat Cat Village.
Cat Cat.
C-a-t.
I thought about cats. Not cute matcha strawberry cats, though.
Louis Wain’s cats.
The strange ones with their enormous eyes and vibrant colour bodies that make you wonder whether the cats are looking at us or we are the ones being watched.
Do I know why I thought about them? Nope.
Do I remember what happened after that? Absolutely not.
Anyways, I only remember being on Youtube after some time, watching another video about Sapa.
Then another.
Then another.
The screen kept changing. Mountains. Villages. People walking. Roads. Fog. Then, somewhere between one mountain and the next, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the television was still making noise.
I turned it off.
The room became quiet.
I looked at the ceiling.
The fan was turning above me.
Round.
Round.
Round.
The blades cut through the same piece of air over and over again, never actually going anywhere.
I watched it for a while.
For some reason, I thought about those spiral lollipops. The ones that look like a ferris wheel spinning and taste like christmas decorations in malls and plastic and 300% sugar.
Then I thought about the Mad Hatter.
Then Alice.
Then Wonderland.
Don't ask me how.
I don't know either.
So I watched Alice in Wonderland.
And that was my day.
No grand plans or revelations. No productive little boxes waiting to be ticked. No satisfying list of things completed before midnight.
Just a toast with a crater, coffee, Sapa, Cat Cat Village, Louis Wain, a sleeping afternoon, a ceiling fan, a lollipop that existed only in my head, and a girl falling down a rabbit hole on my laptop screen.
It sounds like nothing.
Maybe it was.
But perhaps nothing is not quite as empty as we think.
We are so used to filling every little silence that even a quiet minute can begin to feel suspicious. A gap in the schedule needs something inside it. A journey needs a podcast. A morning needs a purpose. An afternoon needs an accomplishment.
And when there is finally nothing left to fill, we reach for something anyway.
A phone.
A screen.
Anything to stop the silence from becoming too loud.
But today, the silence stayed.
Long enough for a fan to become a lollipop.
A lollipop to become a tea party.
A tea party to become Johnny Depp wearing a ridiculous hat, and then becoming Wonderland.
Somewhere between all those idle little thoughts, I suppose my mind was doing something after all.
It was wandering.
That is what boredom gives us. Not emptiness, exactly.
Space.
A small, quiet room inside the day where thoughts can take off their shoes, sit wherever they like, and become strange for a while.
I don't remember the date.
Only that it was sometime in September.
Funny, isn’t it?
Some days are not meant to be remembered by their dates. They are remembered by the taste of coffee with burnt margarine and bread.
By the shape of a mountain hidden in fog.
By a fan turning lazily above your head.
By a thought that arrived from nowhere and left you somewhere else.
I don't think anything happened today.
And yet, somehow, I am here writing about it.
Maybe that is enough. A day does not have to be extraordinary to belong to you. It only has to be lived. Even if you spend most of it doing nothing.
Especially then.
0 comments