30 - On Never Being Icarus

I am too scared to look within.
Don't know what I might see,
I am too scared to be
Alone with myself, tonight.
There's no confetti
Or rose petals and chocolate
Just a crumpled bed-sheet
And half read books strewn
I am imploding, as we speak

Haven't we had too much?
Haven't we had too little?
I am thirty
When will my love of irony,  die?
My drama. My scarcity
My appalling dearth of guts
My fear of myself
And my pointless distractions,
Lined up one after another

So I ne'er haveta think
Where I'm headed
If I am getting ahead, or stuck
Or simply regressing, guess I am
My whole entire idea was to,
Just stay afloat
Merely nostrils above water
Exactly this way,
I'll float out into the sea
With least possible effort.

And life treats me right back,
The same way.
Quid pro quo
With minimal reward.
And hence my implosion
There's this logic
That I don't want to see.
But now see.
I know why I fall
Probably, I'd be no other way

My love for oblivion
Goes a long way
Transcends all ambition
My diminished self worth
Digs up nadir after nadir
Tied in my own tongue
I am succumbing to
Self inflicted asphyxia,
You know

As I child, I stumbled on Icarus
Icarus who, flew too close to the sun
Melted his wax wings
Fell into the ocean and died
I can't recognize who I've become
But certainly far apart from the child
Who was fascinated with Icarus
I've probably made my choice
I've set my heart on
Never Being Icarus.

Homecoming

Stories that we keep telling ourselves. Every day. Day after day. We have become these incessant story tellers, hon, ain't nobody stopping us no more. That going through the motions is doing us good. It isn't. Every day is a disguised failure. Trembling with masked anger. Unspoken, unspoken wrath. Sugarcoated love, that only isn't. In all this rush, when am I myself? Never. I am scared that I am underacting my way through life, not pretending enough. So I overact. I laugh really loudly when I am sad. I joke around when I am angry. I make small talk when I am lost. I overwork to get rid of the omnipresent feeling of disappointment that life has become. Somewhere, a while ago, everything has shed its meaning. I keep masking one thing with another and then that with another. There are so many masks, hon, I forget where I hid the real thing. Life has become folklore's quintessential demoness's soul, stored in a chamber inside seven other chambers. 

Sometimes I recall the hallways in which I became a person. An adult from a child. Tunnel like long endless hallways with rooms on both sides. My memories are trapped in dungeons of the past. And it takes so much effort to uncover them because they have been positively hidden for my benefit. Yet I scratch that wound sometimes, hoping that probably, I would find something I left behind. And that something would help me hold on to the real and slowly unmask myself. But there too, I seem to find only pain. Only sorrow. I have nothing concrete to hold on to in the past. Because I mostly lived in imagination, partly in denial. May be I am still living in denial. Wobbling in knee high denial, you never know. Some truths are so tough to accept and internalize, I would rather choose denial. I am living in denial despite being fully aware of the scores and scores of flaws in my mind and body. Goodness, what else, is even there.

And more often than I would like, I think about the years to come. Will I continue to be this dull. This selfish, even. I ain't crafted for too many challenges, hon. In the face of adversity, I lack the fortitude. I collapse and become a shamble of bones. I wonder if I will even begin to deal with my issues, or will I have the glorious courage to accept oneself as one is. Probably, I will float in the mundane middle, forever and ever. And whatever the potential I deem to have, I shall never achieve. Will I always measure myself and never fucking free myself from the fucking scale. 

Living entangled this way, I have made chaos my home and look forward to going home. Deeper and sooner. 

Now Playing: Nina Simone's You don't know what love is. 

Yeah, hon. I don't. And I never would. Hon. 

House with no mirrors

I took an auto to the market. I had some money. I didn't even bark at the auto wallah over the fare. I paid whatever he demanded. I was there to buy clothes for me. Dusk was dissolving into the air. And I was at the beginning of long and seemingly endless veins and vein lets of streets. Filled with hawkers selling split open raw mango sprinkled with salt and chilly powder, guava the same way, and bangles and wallets and trinkets for your home and you. Of course there were so many well lit stores, filled with stacks and stacks of clothes. Thousands and lakhs of clothes, I couldn't imagine how many there were. For the first time in months, I began to feel overwhelmed.

I randomly walked those streets to regain my breath. Paid for things in cash and hoarded clothes and bangles and bindis and earrings into my bag. It got heavy, but it didn't matter. It began to drizzle and I didn't stop even then. Despite knowing that the rain would wreck havoc over the city traffic and I wouldn't get an Uber to go home. I ran out of cash and started coaxing hawkers to take Paytm. I swiped my cards at so many shops, I don't even remember. And then suddenly, my gusto collapsed. It had enough reason to, alright. But that happens, you don't know why you feel the way you feel. You take yourself by utter surprise. It makes you think if you've been hiding something from yourself. Intimidating thought that.

My mind traveled back to my first apartment. It had a lot of windows but I had the maroon curtains so stretched out end to end that no voyeur would even dare. I lived there for about a year. And entirely by happenstance, that apartment didn't have a mirror. I lived an entire year without looking at myself. Not that there was anything to look at. Life batters the self esteem of a no looker by the time you are thirty. But nevertheless, not even the tiny flagellant remnant of the narcissist in me wanted to see myself for a year. So weird was that. I now come to realize. 

Self esteem apart, what does a mediocre laggard even get in life. Except crying in gulps sitting on the office toilet. Reading what great writers have written. And how every sentence of them once read pulls a chord real strong and pours out of those fucking tear glands. Because I know I will never write like that and never be cried over like that, at least, not anymore. I would rather go shopping in endless streets and feel overwhelmed. Once in a blue moon. 

Epilogue

Whatever happens to those writers who narrate an entire life story in a sentence or two. It's quick and done with. Like, they met in college, married soon after. She bore him his first child, a brilliant little fair girl. A decade into, differences emerged and they separated. Moving on, he met his second wife at forty two. They have a son, who is neither as brilliant or fair like his half sister. But he is, nevertheless. Or, let's say: He was the unwanted third child, conceived by mistake, half heartedly. His father wanted him, mother didn't. So, he grew up with half the love, half the heart, tagged along with his older sister and brother, until, they would no longer have it. So he branched out, broke bad and became an alcoholic. Or, let's say: Ever since, she was seventeen, she wanted a child, a cute plaything of her own. But she could find no man that was a keeper. She studied and worked. Meandered through life, far from effortlessly. Swinging between depression and self doctored therapy until she met a keeper. But then it was too late to have a child, her fluids had stopped flowing. A hostile uterus, or something. Like that. So easy. So easy. So swift. Thanks to those writers, you can live the lives of their characters with such ease. 

But your own life! It is so excruciatingly slow, painful. Excruciatingly slow and painful. And fucked up. There's no way you could just cut short some of the agony. Some of this misery. Some of it. You've to roll on it, lick it, swallow it. There's no way out. Only if the writer of my fate would learn something from these on the fast track. And get done with it. 

8

A few weeks ago, I completed eight years of blogging. And I hadn't paused to notice it. I had forgotten. Neat excuse. But I had. Very few occasions in life call for a celebration. We are all sinking into veritable depths of monotony. And discarding the right to be special. Every day.

Once I had thought, my writing would take me places. Now I think what places, and laugh. Is it even possible to take anyone anyplace, ever. Aren't we all static, merely enjoying the illusion of motion. So much oxygen is getting us high. My writing may not move me a millimeter. My mind is fixed, frozen, glued to its labyrinthine biases, against the act of motion itself.

So yeah, amongst the shiny success of others, I may finish up a reluctant loser, a hopeless mediocre, a screaming for sympathy, self published author. Hah, yes. My glorious future, ladies, the one I had been told and coaxed to believe existed has now perished into oblivion. I am clutching thin air, in my fist.

I am not talking apocalypse. Or glass half empty. All I am saying is that life doesn't always pay off. Mostly never. And we continue to survive, as beings of angst.

Switching between phones, booking tickets, losing breath, consoling, cooking, being consoled, murmuring, driving, buying, stealing, loving, unloving, sleeping, waiting, waking up, catching breath, sighing. Writing, counting years, writing, counting years. 

Ladies Tailor

Many rains come and go, the anguish of existence drags on. Unlike the unforeseen shower of today though. It's such a relief when you forget for a while, everything. The infinite pleasures of amnesia.

Years ago, when I was younger, there was this woman at the bent of the street. She ran a Ladies Tailor. By the name such places go. It was hell of a similar rain. The one that was never to be. The smell of dry earth rose and I waited on one of those benches they put out for girls. To sit and wait on, go through repulsive design booklets. For neck designs, for sleeve sutures on dresses you wanted manicured to fit you. Because you were only seventeen and there was an entire life ahead of you. Your skin dimpled and glowed in the summery sun. Those days, I sat on one of those benches waiting for my turn, for the queue ahead of me to dwindle and finish. It thundered and splashed outside and there was no electricity, and yet I waited for her to measure me up.

Some bitches even elbowed you to get in front of you in the line, such species that. Their menagerie continues to exist. And for their long lives, it felt like decades before the Ladies Tailor even looked at you. She was such a poker face. God knows, she had that Robert de Niro face of pitiful disgust. She would ask you to step out of your shoes and then treat you like a lifeless doll as she turned you around and strung her tape all over you. Like some wild animal she would grunt if you didn't keep your hand straight or bent your neck even a little bit. 

Inside, it felt like she ran her own slave army of tailors. Young girls and middle aged unemployed men sewing and sewing till blindness, both physical and metaphysical. Like bonded labor under her iron hand. She wore her sari like a man would, the pleats would run right in the middle across her chest. Exposing whatever was to the sides. Yet you never dared to point that out to a friend. Her deliveries were always way beyond the promised date on the receipt. And the work only about average. Nevertheless I never stopped going to her, those days. 

The delay never messed up with my life as I pondered it would. Nothing ever does, until of course it does. 

Dragonberry

Nobody knew, where she was. At work, they assumed she was home. At home they thought she was at work. Some friend thought she was with the other. The other thought, that she was with another. Some didn't even think anything. Their heads empty, thoughtless in her regard. While she spent a thankless afternoon in deep sleep on a mat on the floor. Under the influence of dragonberry. Sleeping off the insomnia of a lifetime. All bridges snapped. Phones thrown away. All constraint abandoned, with her elbow like a pillow, beneath the chin. The dragonberry was a hallucinogen. Bringing about an acceptance of loss to when it doesn't feel like a loss no more. Alcohol traded for sorrow. Tears dripped from the corner of her one eye and dried up. The coagulated salt in that and the pinch in her heart. Both stayed though, but gradually got inconsequential. The stitched straw of the mat printed an impression on her cheeks. When she woke up suddenly, fear clutched her heart. Had she overestimated her freedom. Nothing could steal her away from the truth afterall. 

He, crouching in the opposite corner of the room, looked at the print on her cheeks and laughed. Aloud. It wasn't funny. And she didn't even fathom why. She was with him. And nobody knew that. Just about nobody. Nobody knowing where you are is as good as death. Or as bad as. They were as good as a couple of dead lovers in a thankless afternoon. It was then, precisely then, that she realized that everything was imaginary. The salt in her tears, the phones she had thrown away, the constraint that held her, the people she put off by knitting one complicated mesh of lies. All of it was afterall, imaginary. Only s/he was the real one. And probably, the dragonberry. 

Poise & Untruth

Just asking. Is there anything, material or immaterial, in some corner of the brain, that moderates. Some secret gland, that releases a notorious secretion and makes us more-man-and-less-animal. Is there? Isn't there?

Because if I slammed every door I felt like slamming, there would be lots of fractured doors in my world today. If I told every fucktard, that he was indeed, one of those, I would have lots of enemies. If I had opposed every idea I thought was foolish, I would have become a rebel, Che type. If I had told every pretty lass, that she was one pathetic attention seeker, I would have no pretty friends. And If I would have blamed the ugly ones for being ugly, I wouldn't have the ugly ones either.

If I had revealed the gargantuan truth, that almost all of us are bloody hypocrites, then where would I find that single place to hide my shameless little ass. If I had told those dangerously self obsessed narcissists that that's what they really were, they would set my tail on fire. If I had a tail, i.e.

There are dozens of other things I would have said and done. But I didn't. Couldn't. Because of that secret secretion inside of my head, that fucking moderates me. Calms me down. Relaxes. Sometimes it makes me see that my saying anything at all, wouldn't make any difference to the course of things in the long run. Sometimes it makes me want to save my energy; lie down on the couch and watch all the drama. Sometimes it makes me believe that, it all merely seems to be, but it's not. It does just about anything to keep me from reacting in my natural flair and showing my true color.

And thanks to that secret secretion, I have become the one that I have come to be. Lazying around, writing when she feels like, opinion-less, neutral about even the most vehement of phenomenons, struggling with a rigid inability to believe, to believe in anything, anything at all.

And what did I get? Did the pluses and minuses cancel out to give me something positive that adds to make me look a teeny-weeny better in my own tired eyes? No. Nothing. This poise earned me zilch. Zilch. 

Adam

Being influenced comes easy. Even now. Books, even books drive me nuts. Movies addict me. To almost a point of no return. That point of no return, where onward I begin to worship, believe in, and love, without reason. Such love, attraction and intoxication is an insult to my intelligence, shouldn't deny. And books and the like apart, you are a man.

You could a bimbo. And I could love you only for the assumptions I have of you. Without considering who you are for real. You look alright to me. Good rather. And I love your smile. God, I adore your smile. I adore it so much that it makes my inner being beam. In the few seconds your face flexes into a smile, it's like each and every bit of you is happy. Oozing with joy. In those few seconds, I wonder, how could anyone, ever impersonate such honest an emotion. Your smile is so pure, it makes me want to tell you how I feel about it. Like I said, it drives me crazy. But in a good way though.

And I should be shameless to feel anything like this about anyone. Now. After everything. It's almost embarrassing. And I wish I could get help. You could be a bimbo after all. And not the person of my dreams. Not the man I see behind the face, the gentle humility. And all that. But seriously, you're like a delicious slice of chocolate pastry. I find you too sweet to swallow because I am already floored the moment you touch the tip of my tongue. Quite non-literally.

It couldn't be the naughty teenage infatuation. It shouldn't. Because that would mean I have regressed. Or I haven't evolved. At all. But I wonder if we ever do. I still feel like that butterfly-in-my-heart seventeen year old. In the few seconds I just stand there to see you smile.

Adam. Adam Adam

Continuance

Decades ago, there was a bride. A sari crudely wrapped around her frail figure, whatever skin showed, was filled in with gold. There was a groom, and that old grunting ambassador adorned in threads of jasmine. A dozen drunken men, dancing in mad moves; a perfumed night. Dimming yellow bulbs, shamianas hung out, colors of which aren’t readable in the black and white pictures now stuck on forgotten albums.

There was a bride, not too young, not too old. The groom may or may not have had a moustache. Nobody had seen nobody. Love hadn’t been discovered in those ages. Decades ago. Hymns were read out, women with saris drawn to their noses, sat beside the summer night fire, and dozed. Funnily enough, there is no proof to that demi-heavenly drama. Almost everyone must have been half asleep. But there is the continuance.

Continuance. Scores of fights behind bedroom doors, disagreements, many scars. Children born and fed because they had to be born and fed. Who grew by inches in months, and fell apart. Strings of the womb couldn’t hold anyone together. Each had a mind of his own, too many minds inside one rather.

They fought over who should have the TV remote, they sat on terraces, hidden, stealing a smoke every now and then. Each tenaciously clutched her own secrets, under one roof. Nothing shared, not even glances. Slept turning sides, secretly hating each other. And still posed for photographs together, some of them framed and kept in the living room. Space became a problem, the big problem.

And so the menagerie was complete. Too much for continuance!

Love and other Disasters.

Once I was made to attend a workshop. It was loosely focused about excelling in the workplace. But drifted to personal problems sooner than expected. And the guy was telling us about artificial happyness. I don't know what but I felt something inside me snap. I almost heard it. I nearly screamed at the poor fellow. But it wasn't fair, he deserved the scream. Even stitching together an idea of something like artificial happyness was preposterous. It's oxymoronic.

He argued that it was possible to love someone with all your devotion. But that someone leaving you shouldn't be exactly apocalyptic. It sounded like a contradiction because if you love someone that way, he leaving you should mean the end of the world for you. Shouldn't it.

It's hypocritical of me to feel so because the process of trying to be happy is as continuous as breathing. But when someone else tells you things you yourself have been trying to swallow for so long, it feels like a slap. One feels offended, wondering how did he get there first, before me. I conceived the freaking idea way before he did!

But I did scream, and in front of a lot of people. And the spasms on my face were so immediate, so honest. It totally sucked, opening up in public that way.

Sometime later, I read things here and there, and started practicing indifference like a religion. Drew strict lines around the contours of my body, limiting me, constricting my radius, trying to contain myself. And I wondered if living for oneself was applicable enough a thought.

Someone told his friend, I would die for you. But I wouldn't live for you. It's the same as loving with all your devotion, but learning to live beyond being dumped. Do you understand.

Isn't that a manifestation of unconditional love.

I wonder if that could be workoutable. Bah!

The Cost of a Smile

Talking about attitude, everyone should have her own share. I am not talking about the mere cognition of being you. The context is something way more aggressive. It's about the lack of any motivation to alter oneself. To believe in and worship inertia of the self.

I walk around with a poker face. You actually have to sit across a table with me, crack a ridiculous joke or two to see me smile. If you march further on polishing your sense of humor you would see me laugh. Or sometimes roar and fall of the chair. But then you wouldn't do any of that. You have no vested interests, do you. So I am never seen laughing and perceived as depressed. Or someone who walks around with a lot of attitude. I walk around with a poker face.

The slight idea of me having an attitude of any sort will make my friends laugh their bellies out. The perception of me so diamatrically opposite in my inner cirlce of friends and amongst the distant others. I am taken as some sort of a silly lost and easy going female amongst the former. I am anything but these amongst the latter I am afraid.

This realisation has been haunting me to the extent of troubling me sometimes. It's not just about me being denied a friend circle with a larger radius. It's also about the tens of people who never got the idea of what I really am. It's like denying each other a certain privilege you know. It sounds like unhealthy boasting, but grant me the liberty here. The poker face hides a lot within. When I finally talked to someone who I could have talked to long ago, I was told it's a shame we didn't converse before. But then what can we do. What can we do. With the poker face.

I do not know how to smile without a reason. Just keep that pasted on your face all the time and keep shining it at every Tom-Dick that passes by. As simple as it sounds, I just cannot do it. I mean it's a problem to an extent of being clinical. Sometimes I don't understand why I price a mere smile so much. May be I am afraid of smiling. I am afraid that it might stretch to something beyond a smile, may be a conversation between the eyes. And things would be told and taken. I do not want that to happen. I do not want to add uneccesary acquaintances. Sometimes not even the necessary ones. If that has to happen at the cost of a smile, I wouldn't even move a leg.

People ask me to change. I am told, regularly, sometimes even warned to alter my demeanour. I get to hear stories of how peoples' lives changed after they learned the art of smiling. How they get more loved, how they become more popular. More successful. Happyer. And more than anything, how they get smiled back at.

Sometimes the proposition sounds too tempting to deny oneself of. But mostly I gruntle, what the heck! It's not worth it if it comes at the cost of a smile I say.

Cold's here, again

All the light is turned off. What appears is a faint shadow of the tree on my window pane, and I can't bear to look at it. Months ago, in a similar time I had written something called Misanthrope looks for Misanthrope. But that's not true. A Misanthrope doesn't look for a Misanthrope. She doesn't look for anyone. A misanthrope is always lost in narcissistic despair. And what scares her/me now is the faint traces of daylight that have entered the sky. Yes, day light scares me. It tells me that though the day is still away, the night has almost come to an end. And if I don't get sleep in the next few minutes, I probably never would. I start counting minutes and this chase inside my mind, puts sleep further away.

The best part about winter is the long nights it brings along. They give better alibis to people who want to hide behind their ownselves. To dream longer, to stay away longer, distant, pretending ignorance and convincing themselves of it. The one other thing about winter is the easy anonymity it brings along. I could just hide under layers of jackets and sweatshirts, pull a scarf over my face and walk down into unknown streets, without the fear of being recognized. But the one fucking thing bad about winter is that it's so fucking cold. It doesn't let me do anything but hibernate, and sink deeper and deeper into my apparently non-existent sorrow.

About what, I don't know. I might just figure it out if I wanted to, I have enough of degrees for that. In my domain, everything almost is supposed to have one logical reasoning. And if it doesn't then well, chuck it. But the issue is that I don't want to. It's quite an oxymoronish thing to say, but may be, just may be, I do not want to be happy. Yeah, that could be it. Because you know, nothing, practically nothing makes me happy for a considerable period of time. And I would rather not fake being happy, it's like faking an orgasm. So let's be sad and let's be me. My foolish pursuit of happyness has been so volatile, and I have been so capricious that sometimes settling for a status quo seems like the more reasonable option.

I never write about beauty. It's been my controversial thing and it freaks me out why haven't I ever written about it here, in the ten million posts I have published since the beginning of time. I always thought, I would be too biased to write about it. Beauty or rather the dearth of it has screwed my entire life up. And that's why I have a lot of bias against it. And I never wrote a word about it fearing that my bias will drip from almost each one of it. But now, I guess things are different. At least, they should be. I am much older, have been through a lot. I have lost some of my bias, some of it yeah. In the process of losing the rest of it. And this cold, this biting fucking cold, makes me want to write my perception of it, beauty hah! So write about it, I will.

Misanthrope looks for Misanthrope.

The dead of the night is the best part of the day.

I am watching a movie. I watch movies on weekend nights because I like nothing else to do. I watch movies on weekend nights because they keep me from feeling terribly lonely. It's called In Search of a Midnight Kiss. The name says quite much. It's a very different movie, you know. It's worth a watch because it's worth a watch. It's about lonely people looking for love, and about life. And the print I am watching is slightly weird, it's black and white. And outside the night is black, but they have the damn lights on. I mean c'mon! Let it be dark, when it should be dark.

I just drew my curtains and closed my eyes. My breath settled on the window pane, and it got hazy. Many tired souls must be sleeping as peacefully as could be.  Tomorrow I am not going to be up till noon. I generally avoid mornings thesedays. And afternoons, when people don't just shut up, and I have to listen. Sometimes I feel like my ears are going to detach themselves from my head and fall off like dead jelly. People! I wish I could tell them, just how much I hate them sometimes. On their face. But I can't.

And I am writing like crazy because, I don't know. I really don't know. It gets so hard sometimes, you wish it wasn't there in the first place. I am sure you don't get my previous sentence. And if you did, you could interpret it in ways more than one. But don't.

It's like 3:03 in the morning, and I think I should rather get back to that movie. In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Darn! I am notgetting sleep. But there is something in this time, I am alone with myself. Together with me.

And if you have read so far..

The dead of the night is the best part of the day.

Invisible/

my escape feels good. for these times, i have been hiding myself from the world, i have felt safe. blame it on my lack of courage, or the fact that i give up very soon on somethings. but living alone, in a dark cold forgotten corner makes me peaceful. i was probably tired of answering questions. and looking for the answers i found this place. my refuge. where i rest shrouded in absolute silence. needs that were so earlier, have vanished now. i don't even want to speak a word, lest it destroy my silence, the one i so love. i have understood, yeah. and i wish to breathe with this understanding. sitting here, clutching my knees close to my heart, crying hot tears sometimes, consoling myself at others, i have learnt to accept destiny. my destiny. and i have not the slightest inclination to share this with any second soul.

So invisible  is the way i shall be..for now & forever!