Lucifugous

"Come back later?"

I like staying in the dark these days. The shadows are cool and comforting, and the darkness can blanket the mind with blissful ignorance, which is always welcoming.

You still need the sun, though. Warmth, light and Vitamin D is needed to keep going. And it’s always better to travel in light; you don’t have to worry about stumbling into potholes and chasms.

These days, I travel under the stars, convincing myself that moonlight would suffice. So far, I had walked into poles and construction digs, and maybe a monsoon drain or two. Once, I stepped into a minefield and sparked off a chain reaction that lit up in spectacular fountains of dirt and limbs.

You’d think that I’d learnt soon enough.

But I’m just stubborn that way.

*******

Three weeks can give a lot of things that just happened to be ponderous subjects, and by ponderous it meant I get less sleep as they mull and debated and insulted each other’s mothers in my head. Most of them are the important things, and they’re there because they just happened. Some of them are those things you just had to stupidly think about, even if they had nothing to do with you at all. It’s like volunteering for more work and without pay. It kinda makes you a sucker.

(I mean, I think it does. Doesn’t it?)

But well, like someone said to me once; “It’s better to think than not to.”

No, no, that doesn’t make sense. But I’m not in the mood to make it otherwise.

Anyway, three weeks of lesser sleep and brain atrophy has contributed to writing skills that has marvellously regressed. And in a job that prints ‘Writer’ on my name card, that’s not good. Not good at all.

Let’s… let’s start working out.

**************

I used to do this, a long time ago, as a means to etch words into my abysmal vocabulary. It doesn’t work, mostly because my goldfish memory couldn’t ensure that it’s stays etched; it fades out in three days at most, but it does work itself as some sort of writing exercise.

It goes like this; you take a word, which in my case is Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day, and you write something about it. Today’s word was Lucifugous, but since I've already used that as an irrelevant title, let’s use another day’s.

That’ll be Nympholepsy. Which means:

1.

A frenzy of emotion, as for something unattainable.

2.

An ecstasy supposed by the ancients to be inspired by nymphs.

Which also means: a tumultuous mass of feelings caused by very attractive women. So yeah; think Epilepsy, but the psychological type, and caused by hot chicks. And yes; it’s a pandemic.

The next step is to simply write something with the word in it. Like:

The roasted ribs gleamed at him, dripping oil catching the light, steam wafting gently and coiling into imageries of taste, rising up into some kind of mounting nympholepsy. His mind snapped, and the glass panel did little to hold him back. The ribs were already between his teeth, and he gnashed and tasted… plastic? No. No. No no no no...

Yeah… well, I guess I needed more workouts.

Let’s see if I can keep this up tomorrow.