What Is Boredom?
What Is Boredom?
Boredom is reading every book on your bookshelves and not enjoying them, and not wanting to read any more, but going to the library to read more to fill your time. Boredom is time times inactivity. Reading is passive, unless you takes notes, outline, read aloud. Boredom is the time I spend in the inactivity of reading.
Hours…hours mesh into days, days wane into weeks, weeks move into month. Synapses are slowed. The search for the word synapses is a quest — falling asleep mid-sentence is another. Full-stop. A period. The place where we pause and take a breath before moving on.
That’s quarantine. This place. This full-stop. This period. Where we slow down, look at our lives, and shake them upside down and watch all the parts pour out, then re-organize and downsize, to indulge in minimalism — a paradox of action.
Indulging in less and less — savoring each detail. Yawing in parentheses. Bored by our own thoughts. This is boredom.
What is boredom? A question. A statement. A clarification of a state of being and not-being. Of having been. Of having lived. Before. Pre-pandemic. When there were lives to live. Now. Silence. Rainfall in the San Fernando Valley. Weather anomalies. Shrouded sunlight.
Stillness on a hike. Hills razed. Dirt mounds collecting more dust. Dogs peeing. Sniffing each other’s butts. Images of the outdoors fading.
Trying. Desperately trying to fill 20 minutes of time with a writing prompt: given to myself by what is on my mind. What is boredom? Time filled with fingers pecking at keys not developing any coherence or semblance of story or even answer to the vagueness of the question itself. This is boredom. This lackluster amalgamation of words emptied onto keys for no reason except to empty oneself, when one is empty herself.
Loneliness — is that boredom or something separate. Combined into idle. Into going nowhere. Permissive — allowing — sinking — disappearing — fading –from all importance.
Is it poetry? Or is it pomegranate seeds? Just the vivid, bloody juice of inedible, unenjoyable fruit comes to mind. Choking on the seeds as I try to grind them up in my teeth. Staining my T-shirt with the escaping juice. Remembering my mother chopping open a pomegranate to feed us the iron we most likely lacked. Bleeding teens. Girls with periods. With full-stops. Life gone into lax for a few days. Cramped up on the cold, bathroom tile. Shoved into the garbage can — soggy, blood-soaked lady diapers — pads — feminine napkins — how exactly are they napkins again?
Bored. Bored. Bored. Shocking visuals. I think not. Just memories of entry into womanhood tainted by this longing to escape to adolescence. Sitting. Rocking in my chair. A chair not meant for rocking but rickety at that. A life demanding stillness — paralysis. Nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide. Underneath an apostrophe. Ownership of this state. Sapna’s boredom. Sapna’s time. Time spent bored. Time times inactivity = quarantine.
