Skinning ourselves

I have this tendency of starting every piece I write with ‘Lately’ or ‘Sometimes’ or ‘Nowadays’. This makes me extremely lazy and from being someone who would write entire pages, I have fallen into the Instagram writer halo who posts short melodramatic snippets straight out of a high-school breakup.

So here’s to brutally assaulting the new world’s 23 year old urban soul who overuses the word soul. Of late, here it goes again, but yes of late, I have been sinking into the freedom of living independently and ultimately losing the drive to create. No no I don’t want this to be another damn social media usage rant, no. But its affecting me, its affecting all of us who record and document the most mundane things we do. Oh isn’t it amazing that I managed to cozy up in my dinosaur printed bed-sheets and read a cool book with yellow lights that bokehs in the background. It’s all mundane, none of it is raw enough to be documented so vehemently. Yet here we are.

Even the introvert in me has been buried deep down somewhere and is screaming to be left alone. The concept of quiet is drowning in all the white noise that my screens are generating. It’s all too loud. It’s all too bright.

Almost as if to make up for all these shenanigans that the modern hipsters in us do, I have begun to retreat into the darkness, into the quiet places. To not be a imitation of literally every other 23 year old in the city, to not be everyone else.

Even if that means to be not cool at first glance. To be our own awkward selves. To not sell all my secrets to strangers. Apologies for this rant, but it is the result of not writing for a year, of making up excuses, of adding too many commas and using it to trash write.

 

Uncharted territory

I am so frightened to write. Fear of what might come pouring outside. The problem is that I do not know what is going on inside. What if something ghastly comes out and throws me down. I am dreaming of oceans and rivers. I am dreaming of nightmarish things and i rise up in the air, as if floating and the ocean comes into view. it instantly heals me and yet the thing I feel isn’t happiness. It is anticipation of the next nightmare.

I am doing really well at work. Minor setbacks. But it has been great. I am beginning to love what I am doing and learnt a lot in less than a year. It’s been amazing. But. I have more to do. I have to learn to be brave. To travel more. To do things alone.

To love. I guess. To let myself be happier. That it’s okay now to be fearless. It’s okay now. I have made it here. I have managed to leave the dark place of abuse and pain and I brought myself here.

It was all a blur though. I only remember the one who stood with me through it all.

It’s horrible living here. I am not sure how I managed it for so long. I sound like a pretentious person. But it does something to you. Living with certain people. I should know. I escaped a terrible life and walked into another empty atmosphere. They talk behind my back, they laugh at me. Just because I am not like them. I am different. I am weird to them. And to get over my existence, they have to team up and push me out.

People condescend me when I tell them I want to live only with my type of people. They can’t understand, they wouldn’t get it unless they have the same kind of fragile shell. A shell that trembles with the pounding of shallow relationships and white noise of unnecessary conversations.

Among these things, My heart is on an eternal hunt looking for people who suffer from the same ghosts I do. I care for them. I am their friend before I know who they are. Pain brings a bond like none other. It makes you reach out to people who may not even exist.

It’s a form of healing. Finding others, finding their pain and healing them. Healing yourself along the way. If I can hear the sounds your soul makes when you open it up to listen, then I ll find you.

To Pause

Of late I have been changing into this person who hurries. Someone who doesn’t take the time to stop and stare and listen. Instead I have been running headfirst into things without bothering to even look at them.

Now that I have taken a break. I have been forced to stop and throw some mighty harsh judgement at myself. Before I read an article, I am urged to press that like button and share the post and project myself as this literary person. I am that person. I love to devour all sorts of literature and knowledge. But I was never before in a hurry to publicize it. Now all that i do is undertake things only for the sake of putting them up on my trophy wall.

Even today, I kept counting the days to the end of the break and panicking. Why am I not relaxing and enjoying the slow dull week ? I am constantly running around and it’s like I have forgotten to dawdle.

I am pushing my mind to stop spinning. To stop, just stop for a while. I am trying to enjoy the everyday humdrum  of grocery shopping, walking down that dark lane, or even trying to savour that mango without putting it up for the world to see.

I am returning back. I am going home. I am fixing myself with all those layers that were laid bare. Now for you to know me, you will actually have to know me. Let me guard all my secrets. Let me have secrets in the first place that I might as well take to the grave. If that means I will have some mystery left in me and not for the world to see.

Phases

I can notice these changes happening to me. Anyone would. I peel away all the layers of my soul and lay them bare begging for the momentary attention of passersby. All my pride has disappeared much too quietly, I doubt if it has taken another form and is preparing for a violent return.

My memory has taken the blow as well. I forget about the things that matter to me, instead I find myself focusing on feeding my anxiety. The darkness that resides in a corner has crept up all around and in a way I don’t really want to do anything to it.

Times like these make me want to open my friend’s heart and cry into it. But instead I lie down and stare at the sea on the wall.

Raven dust

A new kind of suffocation surrounds us. It almost feels like the plague is back, we are all moving about in black plague masks. Like the Ravens are about to peck our souls and leave us behind to slowly rot into the dark soil.

I am not willingly pushing myself to be dark, I bet you sense it too. It has hushed our voices and blinded us. We are no longer the children of this planet. We have fallen in some sort of incest filled toxicity that consumes us. We live only to consume what we produce.

Everyone I know complains about the kind of pattern we have all fallen into. Nobody wants what they have. We don’t fight, we are too ill to resist this. The men wearing bird masks are looking at us and we look at them.

The fog is too thick. They don’t see us and pass right by.

Invisible growth.

Its always here. It surrounds me and attaches itself to me like some sort of a parasite. Maybe it is. It lives off my thoughts and my emotions. It eats them until I am hollow and broken inside. If you could see it, it would look like an engorged black mass of slimy liquid climbing out of my head. But be thankful that you can’t see it.

It will get to you too.

On some days, I feel light and almost forget my parasite friend. I skip around and believe that life is beautiful. I go about with no care and almost slip away from it. Then one tiny tender thread whips me back and wraps me tight. I suffocate and fight it. I cry alone in the short bathroom breaks that I get.

Then I shrug it off and carry it along, reminding myself that we have been always together. Some days I even thrive on the blackness. I find myself wishing for pain to hit me, the worst of tragedies to happen. So that I can let it eat me up almost entirely. In that numbness, I know I ll climb up and walk again. But its terrible. It is the worst thing in the world. The blackness is me. Its not a ghost. It is truly and unarguably me.

I find myself staring at the mirror, at all the tiny broken details on my face. I remember the faces of the perfect people I have met. How wonderful is that not a single crease seems to ever cross them. Maybe not all that wonderful, but they do seem to have it easier.

I often feel that nothing makes truly happy. Nothing at all. It excites me for a while, but happiness ? I am not so sure. Maybe its because the parasite doesn’t absorb it. Maybe its a dysfunctional emotion.

It feels like the black blob is getting bigger. It has spread into every nook and cranny it could find in my imperfections. So dense and so black.

Its always there.

Only a very faint memory tells me otherwise.

Curled up under layers of warm clothing  and listening to the rain outside. Before all the heartbreaks. Before reality. Before struggle and pain. Before Life maybe.

Or was that the real deal ?

An extremely short one at that then. Only so much that a seven year old can remember.

 

 

Irrelevance of the past.

This maybe ridiculously insignificant. But then again its of tremendous significance to me.

To anyone who is constantly aware of every single thing that happens around them, every single thought that passes through their heads or those of the passersby. Infinitely conscious of everything. Always.

Its exhausting.

I am moving to a new city. Not for the first time. No. But honestly I don’t remember the first time I moved to Chennai alone. That ended up in me being chronically sick and then having my entire family move there to support me.

Now this is going to be the  first real job. And a city where I am going to be alone. No I am not scared of being alone. I am shit scared about trying to make this place feel like home, to be able to feel at ease.

Moving to a new city seems romantic. But when it actually happens its going to shatter all your beliefs and say this is the real deal. Like when I first landed the interview, I was super excited. Now as the days crawl closer, I am close to bursting from anxiety and overthinking.

Searching for similarly scared people on Quora doesn’t begin to describe it. What the hell was I thinking when I described myself as Independent, Loves to Travel and Brave on various social media sites. Now I am staring at myself, raw and naked without my shell of comfort. But its something I have to do. Or else this stagnancy and familiarity will swallow me and render me faceless.

I ll pick all the pieces and build it all from scratch again. It’s a brave new world.

Here’s to the living! Come what may.

15 days and all hell will break loose.

 

Monsters are better than us.

I have an interview tomorrow. But that’s not the reason I am feeling queasy. I already know how it will go, a great talker would offer an average pay all the while acknowledging that I am exactly what they are looking for or more.

Well I feel queasy because I feel one day I am going to wake up and then stop caring about this life. I think its about time though. There are so many things wrong with this planet and we have been responsible. But instead of creating solutions, we are all working for some big shot and helping him earn more.

It’s not like I yearn to do anything either. I just seem to lose interest in life. But yeah I chose this path, I chose to undertake this career and absolutely love it. But no, I can’t go on. I occasionally feel proud of myself, I want to give myself a pat on the back. I want to be happy that I am out here venturing on my own. But my insatiable soul has never had that.

Even if you had the best things in life, you aren’t going to be alive unless you have love in you.

We are all falling less in love. We are going insane trying to keep up with the inhuman world.

Our bodies are dead. Our souls have dissolved.

The white noise of television is making me cringe. But still I am lighting up my soul with a screen.

Life Lessons

I learnt a big lesson today.

I learnt to not believe in compliments. Let it make you happy and derive pleasure for a moment in it. But don’t drive your life around fishing for compliments.

It’s such a fragile wavering thing. Learn to let it go. Take strength from heart to heart talks, heartbreaks and intimacy.

Take that which comes to you from a naked heart at an odd hour. Breathe it in. Let your love be filled with the ghosts of personal conversations. Repeat them when you need strength.

They will remain.

Because they were truthful. Not just for the passing moment.

But for always.

Aftermath

For over two years now, I have been doing something I never wanted to. Of course I always have the choice to quit or escape overnight into another life. But lets face it, in a middle class society, it’s not always easy to just walk off and cut all your ties.

But it is tempting.

At first, it didn’t seem all that bad. But slowly it consumed me. I began to change. More than change, I think it was a sort of reversal process. It began to drain me of everything that I was made up of.

This is the sort of thing you have to watch out for, it first seems like a phase, but then it begins to eat you up ever so slowly. At one point, you even enjoy it. Then before you know it, it has taken away every tiny bit of you and you don’t have a chance to fight it. This is something most people go through, they do nothing about the lopsided battle, they merely watch like they are mute spectators of their own lives.

Not like I bothered fighting back against it. It took me too. It consumed me and ate away every fragment of my soul. Soon enough, I became an empty shell. But something still connected me to the other side and I hadn’t completely made the transition to this dead side.

This dilemma of sorts frustrated me and threw my emotions way out of balance. My mind threw tantrums like it was forever on a period.

It was then that I arrived at the transition point. I could see my empty shell hovering about with no element of desire or life in it. I also saw my soul wandering about with no sense of direction.

I made a different kind of peace today. I let my empty shell go. It will continue to live or die in the dull lifeless two year period of my life for a couple more weeks.

Meanwhile I prepare my soul to attach itself to a new shell.

We have crossed the transition over to the void. Now I am drifting towards the opening.

Its all empty for now. But I hear faint voices in the dark.

They are getting closer. So am I.