Squalor Of My Thoughts...

Tonight I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to this pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must not the paper resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.

And while you think that the daily drudgery of life is a battle in itself, a battle to be fought more with yourself than the world outside, life suddenly delivers a blow so staggering that you reel for days, trying to absorb the enormity of it all. Days! In those days you don’t live life—life lives you. You are just doing one thing after another to deal with the blow, hollowed out and crushed.

You just look around, amused, as the rest of the world moves on at its usual crazy pace, unmoved by your tragedy. You want the world to explode. You want the people to express profuse regret for what life has done to you. You want the world to come to a halt and just tell you how immensely unfair, undeserved, and incredible your suffering is. You want all of them to commiserate; and yet you get grated when the platitudes begin to roll: Keep faith in God. Don’t lose hope. Be positive. Stay strong...

What else can they say? They’re not at fault. Perhaps, they’re right too. Yet it all somehow sounds patronizing. You don’t want to answer the calls of the people who call to ask after how you are coping, for that would make you feel helpless all over again; yet you despise all the people who did not call to check up on you, to extend help. The problem is not them, it’s you. It’s what the tragedy has made out of you. 

You look at yourself in the mirror and realise that you’ve aged, suddenly, rapidly. You see it on your face and you feel it in your body. You begin to feel laugh at people who fuss over petty issues. You begin to hanker after the time you’d fussed over those petty issues. How wonderful those days seem now.  You begin to envy everyone around you who leads a normal life, or normally abnormal life, and deals with normal problems. You begin to wonder how elusive this one thing has been all your life: normalcy. All your life if there’s one thing you’ve craved immensely, it is: normalcy.

In the wake of the blow, though, you begin to see things more clearly. You get to know those who really matter. You get overwhelmed by the kindness and support that pours from unexpected quarters. You get disappointed when people you’d depended on the most turn you down. You look at a random person’s face (as you sit across him in a train) searchingly, meekly hoping that they may see, in turn, all that you cannot show the people you know. Because that will make you seem weak and vulnerable. You want to grab a stranger by their collar and collapse, yelling and crying.

The thing takes the biggest toll is your ego. It gets smashed utterly and brutally. The blanket of insularity you’d wrapped around yourself gets ripped off. The shell of solipsism, that you once aggressively guarded and rationalised, is pounded open and you stare, wistfully, at its bits strewn all about you. You’re left with only two choices: roll at the feet of others and ask for their favour, or perish.

Tonight I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to this pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must not the paper resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.