/a man can only but dream

Gloomy days, bland evenings, dark nights — what is an observer to do than wait for the ambient grey glow to fade and for once, the man-made luminous objects to light up the landscape in front of his eyes and the landscape of his soul.

Even then the beauty is lost on him, after-effects of prolonged exposure to a binary weather that hasn’t changed its state for days. It takes a moment of looking through the viewfinder and tinkering with the settings to find a new perspective. He has dreamed of halation, of streaks, of palettes of teal and orange with a hint of green, and it all comes back to him in that moment.

So he mounts his eyes (read: camera) on a tripod, calculates the distance to panning, sets the focus, presses the shutter, and swivels. He looks at the viewfinder and what does he see? A result that one usually gets on their first attempt to turn their vision into reality – garbage. His mind pulls a quote from its catalog —

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.”

He goes again. And again. And again. And 81 times more, till he finally gets something that he is contended with. He sits on his hotel-room balcony and starts scribbling something in his notebook. On a closer look, it reveals “a man can only but dream”…