There is this friend of mine, academically junior by some years, who used to be pretty close, once upon a time in school. We drifted apart, inevitably, as school ended. Today, she shared an age old Facebook post of mine. It was written some four years ago, and I, as an individual cannot connect to the teenage me from 2013.
But it was me then, and it is me now. Me, the very me, who is not the one who he pretends to be. The make-believe me in class, on the road, in the metro, at the canteen is perhaps just a facade, hiding a cowering lost face and identity, who loves this city, as an excuse to just feel loved in return. Love, is hard to come by. Or is it me? A single me, who is comfortable to sway from being a flamboyant clown, to a melancholy bench-warmer, to a bookworm who hasn't touched a book in months. Love, is everywhere. But do I desire or long for it? I do. But what kind of a love do I desire? I want to speak, I want to write, I want to listen, I want to walk, I want to see, And I desire the love that will let me do all this.
But it is nothing but futile. There is no practicality in my poetry. Images, that people can afford to overlook, and justifiably so. There is nothing spectacular in the sound of water from the corporation faucet filling an empty bucket, at dawn. It is simple, normal, a mediocre story from a mediocre city, from the pen of a mediocre man. Arguably, am I a man yet? At times I feel like a child as I wave goodbyes at distant flying airplanes and skip down the steps of the MG Road Metro. But why do I wave bye to the plane? Why do I feel morose, seeing it blend into the distant grey sky? And why do I feel frightened to let go? I am afraid to love. I am afraid when lonely. I hate crowds. Yet I am faceless in a crowd. I hate depression. Yet I have bouts of melancholia when the world wears my mind down. I want to laugh with my seniors and classmates at the rooftop. Yet my mind is on the washed up dead child from Syria.
I hate myself. I can never finish something I take up. I quit on drawing classes, when I was a child, I gave up on Rabindrasangeet classes, I gave up on Mathematics, I gave up on Medical, I gave up on you, I gave up on myself, I gave up on dreams, I gave up on love. There is boredom, there is adventure, and then there is boredom in adventure. The very moment when you boast about coherence, your mind and heart beat you into submission. I have to learn a lot more. And the more I learn, the more I hate, the more I yearn to love. Love one, love all.
I am stuck. There is no getaway from this, There is no endgame either, There is only a loop. A sway, between pretentious flamboyance and pretentious melancholia. Where is the real me? I've sold it. Part by part, muscle by muscle, dream by dream, expectation by expectation.
It has been ages, since I have genuinely cried. I have welled up. I have welled up hard. But I never touched that threshold point of a complete breakdown where you howl and cry. There is a ball of something down my throat that just doesn't come out. These are the moments you want liberation. I quit on music and cinema too I guess.
God help me. But, I've quit on God too.
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