Saturday, 4th floor, BA building.

I don’t know what happened between the time we entered the tambayan, totally psyched and committed to studying for Strat and this ultimately peculiar moment where Keebs is pouring blue and yellow glitter over a sceptre drawn using glue and I am conscientiously scanning the tambayan log book entries for Nirvana’s handwriting.

“Dude,” he said. “Strat.” He said this with absolutely no conviction at all, still shaking the tub of glitter carefully over the sceptre drawing.

“Yuh.” I was still not over the cursory dismissal I got from the phone call yesterday. There was no way Nirvana was not seeing the things I’m seeing. But she’d said no, so, no, I was back at square one. Somehow, these tiny goals pacified me, like mental crackers my brain can chew on while whatver it was upstairs or downstairs or in the fumes residing within my mental corridors figured out the bigger problems of what happened, how did it happen and what now.

Nivana once told me I had an amazing talent she could not place. She found it weird that in instances where normal people would rationalize, fret, worry about the circumstances of their next steps, I was one of the few whose instinctive thoughts started with action words. It was like, she said, I left no space for brain chatter.

I disagreed, of course. I think I did have a noisy mind. Only, ever since I met her, she’d been my mind’s sole focus. Everything else fell by the wayside.