I am writing this so that I can remember this state of my being.
It is not very difficult for me to express something. However, the struggle is in controlling what people understand. But then, it would also be wrong to blame the people. I am seen too critical in my way of life with this cynical awareness. Everything seems to me utterly meaningless in its capacity. And when I say everything, I am really inclusive of it all. I feel to be in an existential catastrophe. I am misinterpreted, misunderstood and miserable.
So do you become what people think of you or are we often an outcome of a misinterpreted identity? The problem is that I want to define everything. I feel the urge to participate in every notion that I believe to be invalid, or rather, feel compelled to establish an unintelligible validity of everything. There is an urge to engage in every idea that does not even impact or influence me. This perpetual vulnerability has made me weak and because of this I am more unnecessarily reactive and in this depression.
I am constantly grieving in a pain that may not even be mine. But I feel to be a part of it. I see a suffering and I suffer with it. I see an environment deprived of hope and I become hopeless with it. I see what I don’t need to see, but the desire to see is so intimidating that I start living it regardless of how it makes me feel. You cannot un-see something. And it takes no time for me to start living the person I am not.
The perspective I present is not my own. I feel a consolidation of societal misery put into one. Like an ailing bus that carries the burden of several humans without its discretion and only to fall into the valley. The anger in me is not a reaction for my hurt skin, but a retaliation of weaklings inhabiting in my mind. There are a lot of people inside my head right now who are communicating their hopelessness, their grief with me. I am not given a choice to listen to them, but somehow it has become imperative for me to know.
I knew what I was writing was no mainstream-readable-piece. May be I never wrote one. May be I never thought like one. However, it took me a lot of courage to come here and speak from this state of mind. And all of this only to remember someday, this true awareness of human emotion. It took a lot for me to sit and boil myself; thinking about something that I was trying hard to escape, only to find an expression like this, like love, where you illuminate your misery, illustrate your suffering and interpret every grief as a consequence of it.
There are memories that walk in with familiar fragrances. Objects that nudge me towards people I used to know. Evenings that told different stories than today. Sometimes some moments put a spell, bewitching me for nights together and the only way to escape is to sleep. Human beings convey so many sensations and I, somehow, seem to experience just one like the pile of unworn clothes I see but wear just the same every day.
I feel an intense incompatibility with what is around me, whether it is breathing or not. I wouldn’t blame the monotony of life. Everyone is doing the same thing every day. The fear of monotony is what is consistent throughout. The news are not new anymore, losing their integrity to our shorter memories. If the news show something densely stupid and then I tell people about the news’ stupidity, then it becomes news again because it has been talked about stupidly everywhere. Perhaps a cheap exemplification how Twitter works?
So often I am engulfed within this space of time. At office, hunger doesn’t knock in; I have to be reminded of my lunch by my colleagues. The wrist watch on me only illustrates movement in my stillness. Time is so slow that I am a perfect human time-lapse on occasions. Looking outside the window, I miss the hills sometimes. Not because I know them. I am a city dweller. I only imagine the buildings to be mountains. I miss them because I don’t know them.
I feel myself living a lie, a long blatant lie, where I feel I know the truth and yet, I have to ask my intelligence to unlearn it. I see a grand matrix being built every passing second in the real world which is a grand deception only to keep the population engaged in a loop. An idea could be dangerous when it can breed intentions.
I don’t know if democracy is under threat today but the fabric of democracy was always stained and has remained unwashed forever since. I am afraid of the governance I am living under. Why should I not be? I am threatened by its influence on the masses that is furthermore threatening a rationale and well-reasoned world who is now being advised against the very values it was conditioned with.
The greatest climate change is happening within us. If I am a part of the universe and the universe is also within me, then I feel the shift towards insufficiency to preserve this being. I feel cold. Not on the hair of my skin but the layer underneath it. We don’t really care for the bigger impacts in life until the smaller joys keep us busy. I suddenly have no real friends. There is nobody I know in this world. Or maybe I am still to meet people. The only person I am acquainted and conversant with is the security guard at the mall who frisks me on arrival.
Sometimes I feel like a fish in the water but gasping for air on the outside.
Tell me. Do we really care for the world’s drought? You stood under the shower in your gym for half hour. Remember the plastic ban that you announced on social media? You didn’t even recognize the straw in your LIT last weekend. Journalism must not have an opinion they say and that is only when their opinion is against yours. We have reached the times where it is now commendable when those who are ought to do their job, do their job.
Do we realize that we are killing ourselves in others? What we construct is what destroys us. Our being is immensely struggling against this inscrutable external influence. We are incapacitated to give meaning to our own lives as much as we glamorise it with pictures, words and hash tags before others.
I have a pet fish who I believe recognizes me when it sees me around and eighteen plants that stay around me making me feel responsible. I still grieve the plant that died in my house a few months back. It lived amongst other plants but couldn’t live longer. I don’t know if it was its loneliness while it saw its leaves being slowly eaten by the spider mites. It must have screamed for help, but I must have mistaken it to be my own inner voice.
I feel strange about this existence. Like a loss of appetite when you are sick, a sudden lack of purpose in this world. There are people who know me, there is a place I work at and there are faces I recognize. But there is another world where I exist too but am not known.
I am separated in two worlds. Isolated in both.
Do you see darkness?
Where?
Here. Around me.
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