After Midnight

Finals kicked off last Thursday and it wasn’t a warm opening. It sucked. Like hell. Hope I’ll pass that fucking paper. Scale the difficulty 1 to 10; I’d give a fucking infinity. Undefined. Pardon the curse. Sorry you’re a saint. Just so you know it was Financial Math paper. Almost every semester I get lecturers who; do not lecture, cancel classes as they please, and set up questions just to fail the students. It’s sickening. Even donkeys appear smarter than the state I was when I answered those horrific questions. Blah. Stash finals, let’s talk poetry.

I was blog hopping and I stumbled upon Yasmin Ahmad’s the storyteller. Her post, ‘What on God’s earth was he talking about?’ attracted me most. It was about haiku. I first had my hands on haiku when I was in school. Let’s just say I failed. I love haiku; it’s clearly written but ambiguous in meaning. Written words that allow you to explore another universe I believe is exceptional.

Truthfully I thought of two dearest friends when I read Yasmin’s post.

to Niksu,

A cuckoo sings
to me, to the mountain,
to me, to the mountain.

and to Arif,

A firefly
creeping up my sleeve.
OK, I'm a blade of grass.

by Kobayashi Issa

I’m very sure they understand well why *winkwink*

But anyway, two days before hell paper, I was at the library studying with my friends. And I got bored. So I walked down the fiction aisle, and I grabbed Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. A copy of it rests vertically in my bookshelves. Only time halts it from resting in between two palms.

My friends were busy punching the calculator; I on the other hand was dancing swiftly above the sky. The preface alone drifted me away. It took me an hour to sink in a page of Stephen G. Kellison's The Theory of Interest, but it was less than an hour my imagination shoes tapped reading Wilde’s preface and first chapter. Reading doesn’t seem an option before I bid the world goodnight these days. The mind’s just locked up from imagination. It’s pitiful. I can’t wait for finals to be over.

…those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
…all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life that art really mirrors.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde