Malinda Words: Awaiting arrivals unlike any other

Families have routines. Family members have routines. Children: they outgrow these things. Parents: might notice but will move on as they must. Memories are made though and they remain.

I know a young girl who dreams and daydreams. If asked or if she feels she must share, she would describe her dreams in detail. In fact that’s how she recounts conversations, incidents and encounters. In detail. No filters. If asked about a play or film she has seen, she would probably repeat most of the script. She probably acquired such skills when very small, having had to watch the few movies there were at home so many times that she would go with the dialogues, word for word with perfect mimicking of enunciation, dramatic pause and such.

She won’t share her daydreams though. They are long. She daydreams as she walks the over four kilometres from the Kottawa junction to her home (even though she can afford a three-wheeler off and on and can certainly afford to take the bus).

‘Why?’

'I don't mind walking.'

'It's quite a distance. Don't you get tired?'

‘I like to daydream!’

She’s making memories. As she always has, for herself, her family and friends. Like everyone does, I suppose. I don’t know what she daydreams about, but daydreams are about spaces, among other things. They are all about shifting around parameters, erasing inconveniences and enacting happy scenarios. It makes possible the impossible, hastens the arrival of that which seems to be moving too slow, banishes squalor, creates geographies, designs pleasing architecture, bends or amends laws, norms and convention, and more than compensates for less-splendid realities.

Limitless. The police cannot stop the mind, the most draconian of laws cannot forbid imagination. And so we visualise a different world, a different society, different system of governance, different economies and development paradigms, and love which was thought to be unrequited will indeed be requited, victories seemingly out of reach will be within grasp, tyrants and tyrannies will be kept at bay, injustice, having concluded that it cannot hide in a just-garb will flee the city where citizens experience meaningful citizenship, solidarities will triumph over orchestrated division, mistrust, jealousy and malice.

All is possible in these moments of exquisite flight. Once visualised, all that is left to do is to develop strategies and unleash innovative energy. Easier said than done of course, but this matter of reconfiguring space and time can certainly help things along preferred directions that could lead to preferred destinations.

But it’s not always grand. Indeed, it’s probably mostly simple things. A moment shielded against interruption, a few square feet that suffices for encounter, things like that. Arrivals, of one kind or another. That which the heart desires most at daydream-moment. At the moment, that must be noted; for time passes, people walk in and out of lives, lives move with other lives, dance together and move to other arms, other comforts and bliss redefined.

A young heart’s desires are different from those that older hearts yearn for. A child’s ideal universe is made of species, spaces and furniture of shapes, colours and attributes that can be startlingly different from that which inhabits the world of a teenager, the young, the middle-aged, the old and infirm.

The young girl’s thoughts, at least those that can be surmised, are of love, friendship and reflections on relationships of all kinds, notions of self, affirmation of identity and theories of the universe. The meaning of it all.

Years ago, when certainties were more easily defined and understood, she would diligently reserve space next to her, at the edge of the bed so no one else could share her father’s presence. Today, she might write something like the following:

A leaf in free-float finds destination —
preferred or otherwise, who can tell…
it will rain this afternoon, so say the skies,
there are things and signs of things to come:
I notice and push them all aside;
there must be space, after all
for an arrival like no other.

And she will make new memories, draw a different reality and make it happen, fill the incredibly blissful spaces imagined with the most appropriate decorations, put out welcome signs that only one person has the eyes to see and language competency to read and wait. For the imminent. For an arrival unlike any other.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

15 March 2023

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other

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