Published: 12:28 AM, 06 November 2026
An Escape Within an Escape: An Unquiet Mind
Faiza Basisa Qureshi
strange it is to feel lost! Even in a room filled with people, how can someone possibly get lost? Perhaps, more often than we realize. Some get lost in their own thoughts yet capable enough of finding their way back but alas! The world has people who venture so deep within their minds that they eventually lose themselves.
The warm light glitches and I see myself back to the present out of all the thoughts, I could hear the rain clattering more and more, but the melody of the piano and the scent of the candle has filled the entire room...the fever has probably crept into my head creating such clouded thoughts. Exhausted by my thoughts I remembered a line from "Days at Morisako Bookshop" where Takako once said "The coping mechanism I ultimately went with was to devote my life to sleep. I was even surprised by how sleepy I was. I know it was my body's way of helping me avoid reality". I could actually relate because not only from thoughts but even when anxiety hits, all the body could do to fight back was make itself sleepy. Is it possible to escape from thoughts through sleep or does it take a bigger shape and haunt the dream as well?
Not an engineer's question to answer but a human's mechanism to understand and explore. How hard is it to control; something that doesn't even exist physically! Which doesn't stop with any force of this world; which grows bigger and bigger, surrounds us, engulfs us and imprisons us. Maybe it is because the way we perceive things greatly depends on the state we are already in. Anything hot feels much hotter when our hands are cold…the mechanism is so simple yet we fail to understand. When our mind is calm, emotionally balanced and is at peace, we can deal with the problems and the thoughts but when the mind is already overwhelmed, even a small problem can become unbearably big. We, as a human being take everything either very normally or very critically, let's not go that way but if we think simply, we get up every morning, go straight to the washroom, pick our toothbrush and start brushing but if we give it a little thought and look at it, we start noticing how it is designed, how it is shaped, it instantly feels different than how it usually does everyday, it creates panic, makes us question ourselves, "Is it actually the one I am using daily?" An ordinary situation turns into a complicated problem triggering our thoughts…
So, what is the solution? Was Takako right when she said sleeping actually helped or was it the flight mode of the brain? Well in reality I would say, it's a way of escaping from one thought to another, one that ends when we wake up and the other that ends when we sleep…the cycle continues until we decide if we want to regain even after getting lost or… just lose ourselves to it….Perhaps, that's how thoughts finally come to an end, not by finding every answer, but by learning to let them rest. As I kept wandering, the candle burned quietly beside me, its aroma made the air feel almost too thick, while its warm light danced softly across the walls. My eyes grew drowsy, my thoughts slowly blurred into silence, and somewhere between what was real and what was only a dream, I finally let go.
Faiza Basisa Qureshi
studies Civil Engineering
at Leading University, Sylhet.
