Parks and love
By: Editorial Literary Impulse
Tags: Literary Impulse, Love, Letters From Li, Fiction, Hiraeth

I love walking in parks.

Whenever I walk in them, I feel sad.

Don’t ask me how. Even I don’t know how, when I walk on the concretized round and round lane around a public park, or I sit on its green and brown turf, a solemn sadness washes over me. Then I see the world with the help of my inner eye, with a new perspective.

To be honest, though, I am not sure if sadness is the right term to explain the feeling. May be rather than giving a mere signifier to it, I should use more words to describe this emotion, this feeling. Whenever I walk in parks alone, I gain this strange feeling of emptiness, in a trance I enter without my will. Or should I call it ‘melancholy’?

There are many words. But I shall use a common denominator here. I shall use the term ‘sadness’ because somehow, it is this term which explains my state most accurately. For me, it encompasses the entire range of emotions. So, I can say that walking in parks, or just lying idly in parks makes me ‘sad’.

Parks are human made replicas of nature. No, they are not even replicas. They are attuned to the version of what the wild wants to do, and what a human being desires. And this conflict is perhaps most apparent in the art of topiary. Human beings make everything an art. Like, for example, creating beautiful shapes out of the privet or myrtle or holly. An elephant, a conical pattern, a sphere. Parks are the artful renditions of what humans can produce out of nature. They are a living example of what it makes human, human.

Perhaps that is why they make me sad? I do not know.

When walking alone in parks, I see the people there; the children playing little games like running behind each other, or oldsters sitting, or adults… like me… walking or jogging, or taking care of others. A dog chasing a child, and a child chasing a dog… And I think about them, and it suddenly transpires to me that the world is just a park.

Yes… and don’t you agree with me?

The world as we know it is nothing but a park. An ugly park. But one.

People are so relaxed when they are in one. Unlike malls or hospitals or railway stations where they have a motive in mind, an agenda. You can really see them when they are in parks, look into their minds, and I like it. I like it when I get lost in the deepest recesses of mental caves of their thoughts and echoes. Moments like these provide me with the time to think. Time dilates when you are sad. Yes, that makes more sense. I go to the park to give myself some time when I feel sad, so that I can feel sad and think.

One such day I was lying on the ground, on the wires of grass, under a glorious sun of February with hands over my eyes thinking about a myriad of things, which came and went away, like images in a movie. I was alone, as usual, and there were people around me, playing with balls or talking with each other, joking with each other, absorbing the warmth of the mild February sun, living the life.

And there was this group of people, grouped together in a circle. They were chatting with each other. And fun-frolicking, laughing, one of them lying down with his hand over his eyes, and one reading a book, her back on the back of another. And there was a girl who caught my attention. I started looking at her. She was pretty.

I enjoy looking at people’s faces and observe their contours. They can tell me a lot about them. I like to guess things from one’s face, what might go inside their heads… how would they react if they know I am looking at them… what is their profession, how do they live their lives… This, you can say, is my hobby.

She was a beautiful girl… with high cheekbones, fair skin with a rosy hue that glowed under the soft cushion of sun rays. And she was laughing. Perhaps one boy in the group had cracked a nice joke to impress someone. The girl was laughing and clapping her hands with the surrounding people. Perhaps the joke was a real nice one.

I changed my line of sight.

There was a boy who was not laughing as much as others. He was quiet. Perhaps he was like me. He had jet black hair and jet-black eyes. There was sadness in those eyes. And he was looking at the girl. The girl I mentioned before. Once again, I shifted my eyes in her direction. Perhaps she was oblivious of being watched. By the boy. And by me. Or was she?

I drank some water from my bottle. I always carry my water bottle with me. I don’t like to drink water from outside. It gives me a sense of security that I am drinking pure water. I am not free.

But who said I want to be, free? I want to choose. Perhaps this is freedom?

I looked at the girl again. She was silent now. She was looking at something, something… I don’t know… it was perhaps the ground below her. She was not looking at anything in particular. She was thinking about something. I knew something was on her mind.

I tried to look even closer. There were lines of concentration on her forehead. I tried to listen to the group’s conversation. They were talking about someone, laughing. But the girl was relatively silent. Relative to what I could expect from her previous behavior. I changed my attention to the boy. Now he was laughing like a mad person.

And the girl was looking at him. I think they were in love. I think they were too afraid of people around them to relay this to each other. I think they were too afraid of each other to know that they were in love with each other. I was sad. And I was happy. Sad, because it gives me happiness. Happy, because I feel sad when I am happy. When you see an example of quiet love, you do not know what you feel. Quiet love is the purest love.

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This CNF is written on the theme of hiraeth: a welsh word that loosely translates to longing and nostalgia for things that may have or may not ever have happened. This is part of a themed thread initiated by Literary Impulse. I was happy to be the theme editor of this successful event (Kindle Ebook and PDF mag coming soon), and I intend this piece to be the editorial, going along with seven fantastic pieces by RH, Kim McKinney, Gayle Kurtzer-Meyers, Aimée Gramblin, Radha Kapadia, Sanka Rathnabarana and Paroma Sen.

I had fun working with you guys and learned a great from you. Thank you for the opportunity. And thank you, Somsubhra Banerjee and Priyanka Srivastava for making it all possible.

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Do check Som’s post on the same.