A matter of perspective
Brian Sankarsingh writes about what it might mean to walk in another person's shoes
Victor sat stoically in his small, dimly lit study. His desk was cluttered with scattered notes, crumpled drafts, and a half-filled coffee cup. He leaned forward, typing furiously on an old typewriter, trying to breathe life into the characters in his mind. He was writing a story about a woman named Evelyn. In his story she was an aspiring writer. She was strong-willed and determined yet burdened by the world around her. Victor imagined her sitting by her window, gazing at the city below, the glow of her lamp casting long shadows across her room. Sitting in front of her computer, her long elegant fingers began tapping away at the keyboard.
Title: Men, and why I dislike them!
Evelyn's fingers danced intentionally across the keys. She wrote with conviction, fueled by years of frustration, misunderstanding, and disappointment. Her story was not just about a single man or a singular experience; it was about the patterns she had seen unfold throughout her life. She wrote about how men had always seemed to take more space, speak more loudly, and expect more from her than they ever gave in return. She wrote about how the world seemed to cater to their desires, leaving her feeling small, unheard, and unseen.
Victor paused for a moment, his fingers hovering above the keys. He could feel Evelyn's anger, her sorrow, but something inside him resisted. He didn't want to paint all men with the same brush, and yet, he knew that to Evelyn, this wasn't about fairness; it was about her truth. He continued writing, allowing Evelyn to pour her heart out on the page.
Evelyn's story began to unravel her own experiences—her father, who never seemed to take her seriously; her first love, who had promised her the world but only took what he wanted; her colleagues, who dismissed her ideas but would later present them as their own. The more she wrote, the clearer it became: Evelyn wasn’t just angry at men, she was angry at a system, a world that seemed to put her at a disadvantage just because of her gender. And in her writing, she found solace, even empowerment, as she let her pain flow onto the page.
As Victor shaped Evelyn's narrative, he found himself feeling oddly unsettled. He thought about his own life, his relationships with women—his mother, his sister, his exes. He’d always considered himself a good man, respectful and kind. But Evelyn’s words made him wonder if, in some subtle way, he had been part of the problem too. As Victor wrote deeper into the night, the boundary between himself and Evelyn began to blur. In Evelyn’s world, men were flawed and often disappointing, but so was the society that shaped them. She wasn’t vilifying them out of malice; she was trying to understand why things were the way they were. Why she had been made to feel small, and why the men in her life seemed blind to the struggles that had shaped her.
As Victor approached the end of his story, he realized something: this wasn’t just a story about a woman writing about her disdain for men. It was a story about a woman finding her voice, and about a man listening for the first time. In creating Evelyn, he had been forced to confront parts of himself that he had never acknowledged. And as Evelyn finished her story within the story, Victor too came to an ending, not with a sense of closure, but with a new awareness, a quiet revelation.
He sat back in his chair, staring at the words on the page. It wasn’t a perfect story, but it felt real, honest. He realized that maybe that was the point—stories, like people, didn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. They just had to be true.
Bio: BRIAN SANKARSINGH is a Trinidadian-born Canadian immigrant who has published several books of poetry on a wide range of social and historical themes including racism, colonialism, and enslavement. Sankarsingh artfully blends prose and poetry into his storytelling creating an eclectic mix with both genres. This unique approach is sure to provide something for everyone.
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