Walking, Japanese Music, and Suiyoubi no Campanella

KOM_I performing Shakushain at J-WAVE LIVE SUMMER JAM 2017. We have various reasons for having our own choices of music. At a certain age, we make or break friends depending on whether their taste in music coincides with our own. At a different point in our lives, we abolish such criteria instead keeping our music...

I Want To Talk To You

“I want to talk to you.” The air whispered to the man who was standing nearby taking a picture of the sunlight filtering in through the window and lighting up the wooden floor. Two chairs and a small round table were laid by the windowpane. It was an invitation for a conversation for two people...

Vibes of the Nether

"When you sleep do you see an angel in dying lights?Or can you see someone standing outside trying to set you alight?"- In Bad Dreams, Crippled Black Phoenix Life that we know of this world seems to exist as a continuum for most of us. Stars line the skies and the waves crash on the...

Snapshots From A Future – 1

Dusk brought with itself a slight drizzle. Shimmering under the amber streetlights, the road was bustling with the sounds and harrying of people and cars. It couldn't have been a more characteristic summer evening on a Sunday. This town never sleeps, as most travelogues mention. It rages on in varying measures all through the day....

Writing Exercise 2 – Description: Cherry Blossoms in Korea

We wait for Spring to come and remind us of the beauty of life after months of winter strip away all that exists leaving only barren branches. Spring reminds us of why we weather all storms: to experience something beautiful is one of the real pleasure of life. In Korea, the first two weeks of...

Writing Exercise 1 – Fixed Camera: A Silent Room

Emptiness is unacceptable to us. Presented with an empty space, we will do whatever we can conceive to inject consciousness into it. If not a living being then personification of an inanimate object. Stillness terrifies us, that is a basic facet of being a human being. Stillness, to us, means death and peace. An uncanny...

Days Of Lull(-aby)

Photo by Dương Nhân from Pexels The days pass by like breaths on a window glass, creating a wall of mist, only to disappear and get replaced by another wall of mist. Freedom was all I wanted, I wonder. Freedom from going to work. But am I really free? Moderately, a voice says. In Keira Knightley's words from...

Blurred Mental Spaces During COVID-19

One of the most inconvenient outcomes of an extended work from home situation for most of us during this phase of lockdowns due to the novel coronavirus has been the interspersed fragments of time that we used to know as boundaries. In the normal way of life, these boundaries used to be distinctly defined for...

Briefly Awake, Mostly Alive

The rep crossed the fiftieth mark and I let out a grunt. My aim is to reach sixty today. I am listening to Maynard Keenan repeat "Pushing me" all over again and again. I can feel the strain in my arms; the muscles contracting, wailing to not be put in that position, but I tell...

Restaurant

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels "Roasted duck and red wine" would've been mymost preferred order if I had gone out tonight;possibly with a best friend, or with a strange date,perhaps catching up on lost love, or trying to findsomething new, something fresh—a zing in the bland,a ting amidst the silence, this permeating, growingsilence that envelops us as it...