You’ve been an ascetic for as long as you can remember, but you have never admitted the word to anyone as long as you can remember, either. It’s not because asceticism is supposed to exist only in minds and every single ascetist on Earth shares this single and firm doctrine that it’s illegal or even non-ascetic to pronounce the word out loud. It’s because you don’t like the way the word sounds on your tongue, the way it starts as a small gurgle of one heck of an innocent vowel, and how it contracts into a sharp and tight ‘ss’, then finally leaves the small uninteresting cavern of your mouth in a frustratingly unresolved style. You prefer other words to describe yourself, as other ascetics all over the globe have done--thoughtful, keeping to oneself(too long, too selfish), hermit((although you’re supposed to be wiser than that) which reminds you of the certain type of crab), strangely and (as other ‘unascetic’ people should deem you,) superficially philosophical(once more, too lengthy). You don’t like any one of these examples or love one of them so much as to not even reveal it in here. But they’re much better than the solid, ignorant, efficient ‘ascetic’.
Even though you’re self-obscurant in the field of spoken word, you’re sufficiently a self-proved, self-claimed, and clear ascetic in the field of behaviour. You go to school alone, eyes trained on the floor as a habit, but these days, oftentimes wandering upwards towards the eyes of those around you. You have already mastered the skill of reading and guessing correctly someone’s personality by observing their shoes, and after 14 years of honing that skill, shoes sometimes make you sick. Meanwhile, eyes are thrilling to watch, especially after those 14 years of staring at the nylon, the rubber, the leather, and whatever’s-on-that-shoe. Not only are their rims and lids and colors hard to guess correctly, but they even often swing towards you on their own! They chase your own eyes, following where your eyes are pointed at. Sometimes, their eyes meet yours. At first, you used to jump your eyes away, and lurch into a few seconds of making them scamper around all over the place. Now, you’re slowly mastering the eyes already, moving a 0.5 second earlier than your opponent’s, making your eyes hop onto another face and stroll around so casually and naturally that he or she starts to feel guilty and as if he or she was the one to stare at you in the first place.
-Shoes were a boring museum, offering to you anything they had in store in their folds of nylon, rubber, leather, and dirt. But eyes are a terrific game of speed, chance, and rude ecstasy.
At lunch, you sit alone. Always, you never intentionally try to sit alone nor join a flood of people you know you don’t belong to. Sometimes, you end up alone. Other times, someone else-fellow ascetic or not-tags along, trying to look smug and casual about it. With or without a fellow human buddy, you always sit with your legs folded straight and neat. You put both your elbows on the table and take a bite or sip of any kind. If your food is mainly for one hand, fold one arm into a right angle and place it between your chest and tray. Take a long chewing silence or a sipping swallow-and make sure you’re eyes seem clear and sharp but also faraway, perhaps a bit too far away for anyone to bother nor question you. And inside your mind? Depends on the day; meditate, if you want to, with your posture and eyes still faraway and solid. Or think of how useless it is to spend 10 minutes of your life talking about how silly your biology teacher exaggerates her drawing skills or how hillarious her voice gets when she tries to sing. Or simply ponder about how well you’re being an asceitc today, so far. Only seem occupied and casual when you’re dipping your head down for another bite or sip. If someone has any sense to ask you what you’re so seriously thinking about, answer curtly, politely, and cleverly-but don’t worry, no one ever asks.
When school’s over, head right home. On the way back, say hello to the grass and the dirt and the unconscious beings floating dormant but clearly inside the screaming and hopping children who dance and unintentionally block your path home. Clasp your hands together for a moment and squeeze your eyes shut tight until mi-God receives your call. With nothing little more than surprise, you check that mi-God’s a male today. Tell him of how useless the other girls’ talk at lunch was. Tell him of how sick you get when you see shoes, about how you automatically attempt to interpret someone from his or her shoes these days. Listen to him reply that some humans never realize how useless and meaningless their purposes of using a portion of their time are. Listen to him telling you curtly and godishly that you now need to master the task of erasing the lower part of your vision and stopping yourself from seeing shoes anymore.
You often make it back home directly-no detours, no unnecessary greetings by existences around you that you were initially interested in, but have learnt to not care too much about(for instance, the hound next door, or a girl you shared a homeroom with last year). But sometimes, others decide for some very unascetic reason to invite you along to a party or some sort of occasion for the strangest reasons. You never agree to go along with the purpose of not letting them down; you only go because of the pure human urge to see their disappointment or other reaction to your failure to blend in, just as a tiny voice inside each of them would have wanted to give you one last chance to change your depressing first-impression. While everyone else is dancing or singing, lean on a tree trunk. Force a drop of beer down your throat, and stare at shoes and people spending time in their meaningless ways for a whole hour until you feel like throwing up. When it’s time their fun is over, look relieved and happy. On the way home, with some of your unascetic inviters still with you, sing a song or two-pretend to be drunk, pretend to be out of your mind, pretend to not be an ascetic when you are one. Pretend to be too clever and wise when they guess that you're an ascetic; change topics if they jokingly challenge you: ‘Hey, besides, are you an ascetic??”.
And when you finally get home, fill out your diary with all the thoughts that passed through your head that day, curse the world and say hello to the stars before going off to bed. Sometimes, they will murmur goodnight to you in return, 30 minutes after you gave up on receiving a reply and are already snoring. Other times and more oftentimes, they won’t be there to say it back, not once during the whole night. Forget about them and just fall asleep, dreaming of yourself acting like an ascetic.
If you fell asleep an ascetic, chances are that you’ll wake back up an ascetic.
YOU ARE READING
A Negative World(A collection of short stories)
Short StoryYou always have a good plot hanging around inside your head. But when you try to write it into a long novel as you always intend it to be, it doesn't necessarily work out. Here are a few short stories that I hoped would go on for a while but turned...
