How to Daydream

In the class­room, the teacher drones on and on in his ma­roon col­ored t-shirt that does­n’t suit him. His empty vi­bra­tions rip­ple through out the room, bounc­ing off the glass win­dows shut tight against the sum­mer breeze, mix­ing with the click­ety-clack of the ceil­ing fan to cre­ate a sub­tle dis­so­nance, and stretch­ing in­def­i­nitely and in­ter­minably in time and in space.

The only con­so­la­tion, the only med­i­cine is a cer­tain girl who is fac­ing a cer­tain de­grees away from that ma­roon-T-shirt-wear­ing teacher; look­ing into the win­dow-pane with a cer­tain tem­pera­ment; cer­tainly think­ing of beau­ti­ful thoughts about who knows what. Yes, that girl be­tween two other girls in the sec­ond bench. We will call her Sabina be­cause she is also the un­in­ten­tional witch who en­snared my lonely heart with no in­ten­tion of ever do­ing so, not know­ing that that in­tent­less­ness was the strongest in­can­ta­tion.

That girl, with her pretty red cap and her long neck, has set up an ir­rev­o­ca­ble res­i­dence in the lit­tle part of my heart where I plant roses and other flow­ers. It is of lit­tle con­se­quence that she prob­a­bly keeps me in a hum­drum study table of her heart in a small unim­por­tant box where she keeps her use­less pen­cils-that is if she keeps me at all. When I dream of her, I find my­self in an in­com­pre­hen­si­ble uni­verse where I am with­out ground or sky, the an­gry stars mur­mur and roar; where she is the ab­solute and un­equiv­o­cal queen of the cos­mos such that when she walks the space rip­ples in her feet and in­side her in­com­pre­hen­si­ble home is the ab­solute pool of swirling rain­bows and sweet wa­ter where she lounges with her grand­mother. Where she fills me up with the eter­nal promise of fra­grant flow­ers of all col­ors and emo­tions. It is of lit­tle con­se­quence that most likely she does­n’t even dream of me.

Yes her. We will day­dream about her to­day. We will first pre­tend that we are se­cret artists and that we pos­sess all the curves that ex­ist in the uni­verse. We will then pre­tend to draw her pro­file with the ex­pert ap­pli­ca­tion of those curves which flow grace­fully out of the pen­cil oddly sharp­ened with a knife and tucked in our ears when not in use, while in re­al­ity we are just ab­sent­mind­edly writ­ing her name and cir­cling it re­peat­edly with a dazed, up­ward gaze. We will, in our reverie, first draw her nose. The small in­ward curve be­neath the brow-ridge, fol­lowed by a beau­ti­ful nose - made with two curves: the first sub­tly bumps up­ward and falls, then the next smoothly turns from the tip to the philtrum. Then we draw the lips gen­tly, as though we are care­fully trac­ing it’s out­lines with­out dar­ing touch the flesh. We then con­tinue on to draw her chin, then with one fluid line we con­jure her jaw, then her small, pretty ear. We continue on in this fash­ion, draw­ing her hair, and her shirt’s col­lar and what not. The re­sult is a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of a beau­ti­ful girl, which is, nat­u­rally, to be ex­pected see­ing how we are se­cret artists who pos­sess all the curves in the uni­verse.

After the pic­ture is drawn, we will imag­ine tear­ing it off our note­book and keep it in­side our shirt right next to our beat­ing heart that pumps red hot blood through our body and skips a beat when it hears her name.

Now, be­cause this is a day­dream, and we are the sole mas­ters of the events that un­fold in this con­trived sphere, we will en­gi­neer the cir­cum­stances so that in the re­cess, as we en­ter the class­room en­grossed in our se­cret artis­tic thoughts, she hap­pens to be walk­ing out per­haps ag­i­tated by a sim­i­larly beau­ti­ful pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, such that the scene re­solves it­self in a mild col­li­sion, a whiff of the in­ter­twin­ing fra­grances of her sham­poo, of her hair, and of her skin; a lit­tle bit of that sum­mer breeze; and my own un­wit­tingly com­mit­ted blun­der that al­lows that lit­tle piece of pa­per to find a way away from my heart and out of the shirt, where it traces a flour­ish in that thin sum­mer breeze to land right next to her feet.

By pure chance she looks down and no­tices the pret­ti­est curves of the uni­verse which we had em­ployed to trace the pro­file of the pret­ti­est girl in the uni­verse. She re­al­izes the lines, plucked from a rose for her ears, bor­rowed from a but­ter­fly for her nose, and taken from the ce­les­tial dark­ness with an as­tral sprin­kling for her eyes - could only have been drawn by some­one in love. But be­cause we are our­selves se­cret artists and be­cause we like for it to stay that way, we have no choice but to grab her by the wrist, and guide her through be­tween the var­i­ous bod­ies and ob­sta­cles to a pri­vate spot in the stair­case which leads to the ter­race but which is cur­rently blocked, thus form­ing a sort of stair­casey cul-de-sac. There we look into her ra­di­ant eyes and say that we like her very much and so on and so forth un­til she looks right into our eyes too and smiles that be­mused smile that says she has un­der­stood every­thing that has­n’t yet been said and says some­thing back but we can’t hear it be­cause now the ma­roon-T-shirt-wear­ing teacher has stopped pro­duc­ing those tur­bu­lent vi­bra­tions to fo­cus his ugly en­ergy into spot­ting the inat­ten­tive stu­dents and re­mark­ing on their inat­ten­tive­ness. With our head back in the class­room, we re­al­ize that the note­book page is cov­ered with var­i­ous in­stances of her name in var­i­ous sizes and with var­i­ous flour­ishes, so we must first take care of that.

Then we bor­row a book from the guy be­hind us and try to make sense of what­ever the hell is be­ing taught. For to­day, that is all the day­dream­ing we will do, be­cause, in the words of Albus Dumbledore, It does not do to dwell on dreams, and for­get to live.”