I wonder how I’m going to explain this latest incident to my wife. It’s not everyday one gets the opportunity to be robbed at knifepoint by a prostitute, and then made to undress to satiate her inebriated fancies. Very obviously drunk, yes, but she took all my clothes, and the wife’s definitely going to look askance at the fact that I’ve come home without any clothes on, or money. The clothes bit is acceptable I suppose, but what about the day’s wages? Well, I guess it’s for the best, because if she doesn’t lose her head shouting at me, she might not realize the uselessness of her taunts, and if she doesn’t realize the uselessness of her taunts, she might not realize that she’s shouting at me for no reason at all, not that that’s stopped her in the past, but still, there’s no harm in hoping. Anyhow, enough about her. I shall move on to other more interesting details, and hopefully cure you insomniacs of your sleeplessness.
I’m 35 years old, have been married for 8 years now. I sometimes think it is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. You no doubt know what I mean. That statement might sound like the most recently ejected constituent of the cliché gutter, but it takes on a new meaning for me. You see, I met her at a party; she was drunk, and like all drunk women, was really attracted to me, possibly because my face looks attractive when vision is blurry. Indeed I am positively irresistible when there is no vision at all and also because you’re too self-obsessed when under the influence of alcohol; you’re incapable of hearing properly, and the other person has no choice but to listen, and you get the mistaken impression that that person truly gives a damn. Such was the case with me. I pretended to give a damn, and before I knew it, a month later, she proposed. I was of course what you would call a passive bystander in the whole process. She came along, popped the question, and then suddenly against all my wishes, I found myself nodding dumbly. The nodding lamb that is about to get its throat cut. A few minutes later, reason resumed her throne. I sincerely wish she had permanently abdicated, because I was conscious of feeling like I had just been hit and run over by something very large. I don’t know why I make these stupid decisions, I don’t know why I can’t shake my head instead of nodding, just one little tilt to the left, and my fortunes would have been entirely different, just a little tilt, and yet, I chose to nod my half hearted assent.
At that time, I was working; I actually had a job, as a software engineer in a large firm. It was like any other job, the salary was decent, and the actual work, was utterly pointless. We would fill out a thousand forms, most of these forms were about the progress we were making doing work, but it turns out, most of the work was, yes, filling out forms, a progress report to gauge how well we were reporting the progress of the process. The phrase, “the process is all there is” now meant something entirely different to me. But anyways, to veer back from the tangent, I had a job, I had money, but I had no life. My entertainment consisted of walking around aimlessly around the city, and collecting useless information about the habits of my fellow human beings, and for a hobby, I used to write. Bizarre stories, about gobs and gremlins, princes and princesses, eerie love triangles filled with improbable endings, endings that I wished my life would have. Wish fulfillment, in the form of dreary, endless, sloppy prose, and that leads me to the root cause of my so called condition. I am an emotional hypochondriac. The problem, you see, is the fact that my head will not stop buzzing with thoughts. I am terrified of my memories, yet I am unable to forget any of them. “ How lucky you are”, some of you might say, “You get to relive every happy moment again and again!” but no, greedy nostalgia has long since sucked the happiness out of any thoughts I may have, now they are simply like heroin, I need a fix from time to time to fill up the void with brief splashes of colour, laughter, happiness, yet, in many ways, it simply contributes to making the rest of my life a featureless vacuum, a barren desert, populated with ghostly mirages of fertility, for if you dwell in the past, you have no future.
Most of these memories, I am ashamed to say, still deal with love, the only time I’ve ever experienced something like that. Tina, the mention of her name still rankles, and yet, my brain loves to keep chanting it over and over again like some mantra, in the vain hope that repeated prodding of the heart will numb the wound. She was everything I could’ve asked for, attractive, intelligent, and most of all, innocent. I don’t know why I thought this to be an attractive quality; it’s something you need to be very careful of in another person. It is meant to be guarded against, not guarded. But anyhow, to make a painfully boring story more tolerable, she fell for me, and I for her. We’d take long walks in the half light and talk about everything from Dionysus to Hitler, and very soon we were falling headfirst into the abyss of the love that is often born of either complete idiocy, or complete innocence. Intense, and short would sum it up neatly. I wouldn’t have minded marrying her, but the problem was, she was never sure of how she felt about anything, much less a man(I flatter myself) in her life. In her more emotional moments, she was fond of telling me how I was like a cloak, her protector, to keep her warm in an otherwise frosty existence, but unfortunately for me, this protective warmth stifled her in the springtime of her budding adulthood, and she effectively had no problems discarding me into the proverbial closet of her memories. Moth-eaten and shriveled I’ve remained. Such is life, you love, you lose, and then you die.
I was devastated, and naturally, I turned upon myself. The buzzing inside grew even louder, it reached a volume where I could not hear myself speak, or listen to the sounds of life, all I could listen to were the endless voices in my head, each screaming out their frustrations, each of the myriad screams a diatribe against my own existence, the futility of purpose, the meaninglessness of every emotion my undeveloped mind could process.
At this stage of my life, a new and profoundly awful realization revealed itself. Breathing hurt, no, not in any discernible physical form. This pain was entirely mental. The slow process of inhalation and exhalation sent sharp stabs of pain through my chest. Breathing itself became an ordeal. A painful exercise to be endured for the sake of some intangible happiness, which in all likelihood was long dead. Was this born out of Grief? Fear? Frustration? I could not say, it would not let me sleep, or even live a normal life. The dying rasp of a man pushed too far by circumstance.
Out of sheer desperation (I woke up one morning completely unable to breathe, for the voices had now begun to strangle my sanity), I tried meditation. I sense a sneer of skepticism from the audience, and I would agree, your skepticism is well founded. Meditation is nothing but the murder of thought. That which causes you to think about not thinking, is still thinking, albeit of a very confusing, yet base nature. “Focus on your breath”, they said. “Think of the void, the silence”, they said. “Breathe”. The very idea of focusing on breathing in, and breathing out, was nothing but the slow suffocation of my thoughts, my voices, but not only those. It was also the slow strangulation of the very matter that gave rise to everything I associated with an idea of being. My head did not like this, and it exacted its own bizarre type of revenge.
“Attempted suicide: Death by drowning. The accused may please come forward.”
“How do you plead?”
“I plead ignorance”
“You may not. The two available options are guilty or not. Don’t waste my time, Mr. Ahmed or I’ll have you jailed for contempt. You are free to choose between your options.”
Great. I was being tried in a court for suicide. Suicide! Was this a nation of schizophrenics, where terminating your personalities, or lack thereof, would be viewed as gravely as killing someone else? And I was free to choose between a rock and a hard place, but no, the choice could not be extended to something as inevitable as death. Suicide is illegal here, you see. You don’t even have the right to stop living. The pointless hilarity of the situation elicited a strangled guffaw out of me. I struggled to recount the facts as the jury formally sentenced me to a week of psychiatric counseling. The sniveling little bastards, although, I didn’t hate even one of them as much as I hated the perverseness lurking inside me. Death by drowning, to counter the strangling I had been doing all this while.
I struggled to recount the details. I had started frequenting a bar of late. Alcohol always increased my immunity to the yelling inside, and left me with a pleasant warm glow that seemed very much like the heyday of my romantic youth, only this time I was caressing vodka, not Tina’s face, although she would inevitably appear to haunt me, after I had finished drinking. I didn’t even know that it wasn’t real. The hallucinations were more colourful, more meaningful than reality itself. Every detail of her being would be etched in front of me. Her big brown eyes, the beautiful way in which she would arch her shoulders, or shake her head, and that dazzling smile. It would say a thousand things, but the loudest of the silent statements would scream, “There is nothing to be said. I know your every thought.” It got too strong, and at this point I was urging myself to end everything, or rather, one of the voices was, I was simply too tired to argue or to exercise the tattered remnants that were once a very strong part of a complicated framework of inhibitions. I walked to the docks, and threw myself into the water. However, you can’t drown in four feet of gently sloshing brine if you’re six feet tall. What you will get is a concussion, and someone will more likely than not call the cops, after they’ve finished laughing at you.
I was a complete failure. I couldn’t even kill myself effectively; ruminate on that for a second. To be so incompetent as to not being capable of ending that which is responsible for your misery, how much more ironic could life get?
Psychiatric counseling sessions are painful, especially state-sponsored programs. The shrinks, for want of a better word, and they do come in one size, small, mottled, and very pompous, seem to think of themselves as a self styled Jesus to the otherwise self-destructive Philistines. A week of preaching later, I was a changed man. I had decided. I had turned over a new leaf, well, somewhat. If I was going to kill myself, I thought, there must be no screw-up. I could not survive another session intact, but alas, the thought of failure, and eventual return to my freckled Jehovah put away any further thoughts of self destruction from my mind. I now had other things to think about. I suddenly wanted to excel at my pointless job, I wanted a wife, I wanted to be a part of the process that I knew I would eventually reject. I wanted to feel what it was like to be a normal human being. Perhaps the unending torpor of a routine would silence the voices once and for all, bridge the schism between my different selves, and maybe I would find love again. But no, all I found was Suman, waiting for me, buried beneath a mountain of progress reports and vodka shots.
And here I am. It’s been a long and tiring life, and that exhaustion is further compounded by the fact that I’ll have to put up with her tantrums when I get home. Maybe I shouldn’t go. I think I will run away, start again. I don’t know what I will do, but do something I must. I can’t go back to this job, and I can’t go back to her incessant yelling. Ten lifetimes of poverty are infinitely preferable to this intellectually impoverished existence that I misguidedly call a life. A smiling drunk hands me a cup of half eaten yogurt. Shamefaced as I suddenly realize my nakedness, I accept, and he throws me an added bonus, a gown. Now I have the necessary accoutrements to begin my new life. A brilliant blue phrase on the cup catches my eye. “Contest!” it says. “Look under the cup to see what you have won.” Spurred on by a sudden stab of hope, I turn the cup upside down, spilling everything.
“Sorry! You are not a winner. Better luck next time!”
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