It Ends In Absurdity

Chapter 7

I just had this dream. A long narrow hotel hall. I am at what seems the end of it for I am leaning against the wall and I can see only what's in front of me. What is in front of me is a long straight corridor with rooms on both sides. I take a step, I want to move forward, see what's at the end of it. It's so long that I can not see the end of the hall. I walk and when I look behind me, the wall I just leaned against is right by my back. But I swear I have made a few steps. I move again now looking at the wall and I don't notice anything with my eyes except the fact that it maintains the same distance, and I don't seem to get any closer to the other end. This is life - this very feeling of entrapment. I can stay in place and wait. I can keep on moving each step taking me away from the person I once was. Each day, hour, second moves us towards inevitability. Our protest, discontent, inactivity, won't change this axiom. You either move ahead in hopes of finding an exit or you stay and it finds you.

It's almost 4 A.M and I wake up. I don't turn the light on, I can move with my eyes closed around this apartment. With my eyes shut I make three steps straight ahead, one step to the right, I step into the bathroom. I turn the light above the mirror and closely look at myself. My face looks swell. I did have a few drinks, I've been drinking too much as of late. Alcohol helps make you forget, not care, it sedates, and I like it.

I don't usually look at myself in the mirror, and when I do on rare occasions look at myself I don't recognize the person gazing back. Who is that person? The face is uncanny, strange, mysterious and unknown to me. I don't identify with it, it is not me. It can't be me, and there it is staring back. I grimace and I contemplate it scrupulously as an artist would contemplate a piece of art. My face is a piece of art, it is art. Leaning closer to the mirror I notice the wrinkles around my eyes, my lips are cracked and dry, my forehead wrinkled, my eyes are blue or green or both. I think the one thing I liked about my face, is the color of my eyes. I like to think I have beautiful eyes. I might be right or not. I don't know. I think my face feels so foreign because I don't take pictures of myself, I don't look at myself in the mirror that often. There is just this face, sometimes I wonder what others see. Surely what they see might be different from what I see. What do my eyes speak when they look at them? Do they manifest sadness, desolation, a murky gaze, desperate loneliness, exhaustion? Do my eyes convey lifelessness or on the contrary? Nothingness? Something? Anything?

Sometimes I come upon pictures or video footage of when I was in my early teens and mid teens and I am clueless to the fact that that person was me. That person dwelled in this very body, it was me. It isn't anymore, and yet it's crazy, unfathomable. Around my family I was the eccentric extrovert, obnoxious as hell type. And around society I would retreat into myself, afraid to open, to be vulnerable, to speak up, to be judged, to be liked for speaking up, to be admired. I preferred to be unknown. I preferred to be a shadow passing along, I did not feel the need to open up to others, I was perfectly content in my misfortune by myself. No need to drag others into my mess. Besides, it didn't matter either way.

I was trained to become a person, I became an outsider. Living a life foreign to myself. There was an I an I of the many that were hidden within me. An I for each scenario. So who was the real I after all?

I wonder when was the last time I was happy and experienced joy. I try to remember a few happy moments, and most of them come from when I was still very young when existence and life didn't hit me in the face. And now those happy moments seem so vague and false like, those moments might have happened or not, I am not sure. Then you acknowledge that you can't remember a happy moment and not get nostalgic and bitter. Now I feel bad, I went in my past and that past is gone. The present is worse.

I remember telling my parents without any pretence one night how pointless it all is and insignificant. They still think that maybe a girlfriend, getting married and having my own family would or could remedy my thinking. I am sure they think I think too much, I look way too much at the dark side of things. But it is right there under our noses, I just point my finger at the stuff. I don't invent it, I just acknowledge it's presence. That's it. My parents tell me that this is how life works, this is the reality we all face, the struggle we all go through. I knew that, I knew that way too well. I knew people had their struggles. Hell, the things I struggled with might look as trite bullshit to another. But at the end of the day, those people weren't me, and I wasn't them. The struggle is fine as long as it has a purpose, you struggle for something. I on the other hand struggled for nothing, I had no plans, no desires, I did not want to struggle to keep on living. It seemed stupid. An inane idea. I am no sadist. It made no sense, I know it's not supposed to. But I needed some of it to make some sense and it didn't, it was as absurd as it can get.

Things were not easier just by acknowledging the realities of life. The meaninglessness, our mortality, our growing up and moving on. Our perseverance towards oblivion, our protest and discontent with death. People drew peace and purpose from religion, an afterlife, Gods, angels. All of that were good to nothing for me.

I had so many chances and yet it seems like I never gave myself the chance. A chance.

I don't think we are ever ready to grow up, be adults. We are just thrown into it and expected to make it to the other shore. Or at least to float and not sink. There is only so much water one can swallow and not sink.

Talking about it didn't make things easier. Having another person, loving another person seemed an impossibility. I can't give myself to another human being. I don't know how. I forgot how. I am left by myself, with my struggles, my unhappiness, my despair. This is not someone else's cross to bear, it's my own.

Gandhi said that what we are is the result of what we thought. Wrong. It's the result of what we have witnessed.