Bikas Sapkota:

My loneliness helps me get the strangest of feelings. I crawl far from my real world and land miles apart from the murky confines of this city to my lonesome realm of retreat. I go deep down, secluded from my real life into the world of imagination and speculation. The mind swerves away and ponders about those unborn tomorrows.

I think of questions without answers about me and my future. As a human, I have fantasies. As a college going student, my head is full of wild ideas. But as a man who is living for tomorrow, I know I have got to work to be someone. To make it to the place I belong to. I know every teenager like me carries such a dream at the back of his or her mind and walks that extra mile to realize the goal. The quest of being someone always haunts me; it helps me to appreciate other’s success stories, as I amply know the trouble of toiling. Each time I turn a book’s page or listen to a genius, I’m used to their exposition on topics like prominence of time, money and education. But that too gets on my nerves and I’m infrequently used to dismissing it all as tattletale, only to regret having engaged in such a blasphemy. As I plunge deep inside my lane of speculation, I emerge more resolute and determined to follow them. My world of imagination often gets the better of me each night, before my train of thoughts comes to a grinding halt by the morning. That is also when the vows are forgotten, resolutions ruined and advice I thought I would take them to the grave appear cryptic and apocryphal. It is not at all amazing the script never changes. As usual, it is the college, friends, fun, frolic and sports that I finally bury my head into. An avalanche of immediate concerns I promised myself to execute.

Each day I visit this newfound realm of imagination, I find myself and only me. But, like everything else, my dreams change with time. They are swept away by the transitory state of things. That pushes me to the realm of rationale. I would love to turn my dreams into reality. But that would mean walking the path others have travelled less. It also means that they are difficult to negotiate. But I intend to navigate such trajectories all by myself. Each time I feel like labouring hard to complete my assignments, I wait until the whole feeling goes away. I pacify myself by saying, work is holy and I shouldn’t be shirking responsibility. Except that I am back to square one at the end of the day!