Monday, February 18, 2013

The Winter Demographer

As B looked out the window, he could see the gentle, gradual descent of mid-sized snowflake-fractals. A mild breeze imparted a tiny drift to their motion and he looked long and leisurely at their languid floatation, their placid trajectories tracing out countless, random paths in the sky.

Time was in ample supply for the lone occupier of that cavernous building and idle objects of insignificant importance seem to trigger in him broodings of an indefinite character, the trajectories of which, much like the ones of their counterparts outside the window, had a free-floating, unencumbered, purposeless quality.

As his eyes lay transfixed at the scene unhurriedly unfolding outside the window, his mind wafted across from one point to another - an internal hidden semi Markov chain mimicking and exemplifying the abstract, similarly named processes he lectured on externally. He thought of impending calamities, brushed away distant memories of domestic strife, mused about lost opportunities, paths not taken, the soundlessness of solitude, the mild fragrance of loneliness and recursively thought about what he had been thinking about.

He let out a deep, almost involuntary sigh and got back to grading.

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