What it means

Submitted another paper and again I got the same comments.

“You have serious problems with your grammar and idiom usage… your ideas are good but I hope you had developed it more…”

Before you handed it back to us you commented that the class had some expression problems, and you flipped open the first stapled stacked of papers on the pile in front of you and I stopped breathing.

It was mine.

You proceeded to pull out one language mistake after another from my paper like it’s a pit-less well, fishing out bits and pieces, gnawing off bones and tearing them apart.

Flip.

“Different beliefs cannot be put together, you can reconcile them, you can compromise them, but no, you cannot put them together...”

Flip.

“You can’t make the women go through a progression, they can only progress…”

Flip.

Flip.

Flip.

******

Some things happened after that but all I remembered was that I left the class and went back home. I then sat around absently-mindedly before taking a nap, perhaps in an attempt that after opening my eyes I would realize that it has been a bad dream and none of it ever happened, that I had been on my bed the past morning and hadn’t stepped onto campus grounds.

But of course we knew it happened. I had a dream during the short nap, it seemed longer than the nap itself and I saw you and me standing in the middle of nowhere and I was holding my marked paper.

“You have good ideas but you just can’t express them well, why are you in my class?”

I stammered, I choked and I nearly cried. “I’m trying, I am doing an ‘O’ Level revision book now to try and hammer it down.”

“What? ‘O’ Level? How old are you?”

“26.”

“And what age is the book meant for?”

“16.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I thought most of you read proper books? Didn’t it rub off you?”

“I don’t know, perhaps I was like Haroun and flew over the seas but I didn’t reach in,” I scratched my head. “Guess I also don’t know.”

“What a waste.”

And I woke up.

I wondered what the dream meant.