I’m going to pay for it. Oh yes, I’m going to pay for it sooo much. I take one last look at the hour on my laptop and I’m out.
The day you realize that you got only 24 hours a day is the day you leave your teen years behind to enter adulthood. For some it doesn’t make much of a difference; for others, like me, it means a pang of extra guilt whenever you leave home with some unfinished work to do.
On tourist guides of Belgium, under the label of “natural attraction”, you’re bound to find mention to the Hallerbos forest where, between April and May, tourists can enjoy the vision of the bluebell’s blossoming. Those little flowers cover the undergrowth with wide blankets of soft blue and iridescent violet, making the forest look like a picture from some old fairytale. You almost expect to see unicorns and princesses stroll around the forest, leaving no trace of their passage. Normal people does, however, leave traces, therefore the forest is protected, and common human beings are not allowed to leave the signed paths.
Listening to a podcast from the BBC, regarding afghan cameleers emigrated in Australia, I finally find myself in the green. And the yellow, and the blue, and the orange. The Sonian forest was, long ago, one with the Hallerbos forest. Nowadays It is, somehow, less touristic in nature, being so close to Brussel that a short stroll from the ULB campus takes you right at its beginning. Yet its 4.421 hectares give you all the space you need to find yourself alone, looking through the bushes and walking near ponds shaded by tall brown-gray trees.
As I walk and listen to an old song whose words have lost meaning in the transition from a continent to another, I look for some extra meaning in my little walk. I find it quite easily, not restricted, as I’ve been weeks before, to walk on the signed paths. Hyacinthoides non-scripta, commonly known as “bluebell”, looks back at me in the grass between the branches of an old fallen tree. Here it doesn’t make those beautiful mats I saw in Hallerbos, still such finding gives me the same glorious impression.
Much later I find myself checking, with sleepy eyes, the article for the hundredth time. I check the word counter, quickly check William Strunk’s “Elements of style”, and decide to finally submit my entry.
I copy-paste the work on the submission form, read the last paragraph and end the submission procedure.
It will take me a good night sleep, and a review of my entry, to find out that I lost half of the formatting in the copy-paste process. Had I been less tired, I would have noticed it in time.
I paid, oh yes, I paid. Few hours of freedom may have such a high price!
