While staring blankly at the wall, I was lost in emptiness. It was dark and all I could think about was blowing my head off. I paused from a moment of that gruesome imagination and asked myself, “ how did I get here again?”
I used to have it all, or at least I thought. It was already more than seven years but everything felt like yesterday.
“ Who am I really?”
After that life changing experience, I created everything from scratch, the only thing that was factual was my name. There was tangible information on that and it was something I could trust. Everything else was blurry. People say, childhood experiences and how you grew up affected us. I didn’t even know those, they were just pieces of a puzzle that I wanted to find. Seven years, I am working on fixing that puzzle but instead completing them, I was led into a Pandora box.
“ Where have you been all these years?” Asked a friend, Rory.
“ Long story short, I had to start over. I was slowly learning to speak, to speak the common tongue, everything was like a puzzle but I am now content, with the life I am having and the identity that I created” I replied then sipping my coffee.
I kept everything to myself for the last couple of years and learned how to numb my feelings. I still candidly still speak that sometimes I am suicidal and having suicidal thoughts more than I’d like to control. And more importantly I hold on to beliefs, it’s not good to show emotions because it’s a sign of weakness as nobody cares.
So, I resorted to talking to countless pages of journal, to myself, to the clouds. Yet nothing beats the feeling of talking to Anne.
“ I miss talking to you. I hope you’re happy up there” I wrote to her page wishing that I one day could get a reply. But her name was inked on the tomb with a beautiful flower wrapping around it.
“It is different. But you love different things. It is constraining. You do hate constraints.” Anne texted me while I was busy thinking about my next upcoming project for community service. It was a few years ago that she told me about it.
At one point, our communication was getting shorter and somehow, everything was blurred. The point was, I was hyper focusing on something I didn’t even remember. Talking to Anne always felt like someone out there genuinely cared about me, my world and my messed up life and its problems. Once she was gone, my life, much like her family, was crushed down and wilting.
Our conversation was always lighthearted, eye-opening and sometimes I found answers and solace in them. I was always prone to boredom, more like thinking there’s nothing to do, to appreciate while there were billions of things to try.
“ Boredom is always a symptom of being disconnected from where you are. Usually because some part of you is convinced the situation or place is much more awful than some other place. there's nothing like the sky to make a person feel in awe. ... well and the ocean and the land and animals and birds and even insects.” Anne said.
“There are plenty of places to explore, houses to visit, cows to feed, chickens to catch, and flowers to capture.I shouldn't be this bored.” I replied and proceeded to go out and do things.
It was still hard to believe that she was gone. Yet the world moves on just like that.
I recently read that what makes life so meaningful is the history, the memory, the connection and how it impacts others lives. And ironically, when my mind is at its darkest and didn’t realize how life could be that meaningful.
Pressured to change, to stop being stuck on a loop, self-improvement was something I’d focus on. I was eventually overdosing on stoicism. And as people said,nothing good comes out from being excessive. The more I was silencing myself, the more I was sitting on the sidelines, the more I kept everything to myself, I was like a volcano; waiting for the right time to explode. Figuratively and literally.
But there was a point where despite life being hard, I had that fighter spirit. I could do it all for a dream and I used to have dreams. All these years, I learned that if one bridge is burned and your dream vanishes, the simplest way to cope is to create a new one and pursue it. I don’t know what/how/when things get so wrong that I stopped dreaming and lifting myself up. Perhaps I was conscious and somehow, I was diving deeper into the darkest cave. The only good thing was, I was good at masking and pretending.
There was a point when I don’t give a flying fuck. I wrote my hearts out, full of life, full of emotions. As much as I cared about money, when it comes to writing, I shrugged it off. I wanted to write in my own voice, my story, and it didn’t matter if it was dark, gloomy and as if it’s written by an adult with teenage angst. So, what if I have that much resentment to society, to life, to my surroundings?
At least, I was still functional. A lot more functional than today.
It dawned on me that this page, this persona I built for six years, has become my life. That paradise lost was intended to be a recollection of my darkest time but somehow, just like I said in the foreword, I am notorious for being poor at consistency. But now, a little order, I fixed that. I became better at being consistent.
At one point too, I was wondering if I wrote as if I am celebrating a pity party and trying to invite people in. It wasn’t my intention.
I was simply telling a story. A story about one human being navigating life. A raw truth that I exposed candidly out there. I simply was not in control of the perception of others and I always leave it up to them. However, I enjoy this, I am enabling people’s voyeurism to read into the rawness of a human being's life. From behind the screen and border less. I wonder why I stopped, why I was shying away from myself and my own voice.
That led me to this feeling, that once again, I was lost in emptiness.
Footnote :
- This story is part of memoir called paradise lost.Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.