Solitude

Happiness is a myth. After months of broken sleep, that’s the only rational thought I’ve had. Every single day is the same, consisting of a random order of bizarre memories, endless pacing within this room, and suicidal thoughts. And panic attacks.

It certainly is odd how close a panic attack feels to a heart attack. And to think it’s not really a heart attack infuriates me. You lose breath, can’t feel most of your limbs and you experience a sharp pain in your chest - like someone’s using Trauma Shears to tear up your heart into little chunks of meat, while you’re still alive and conscious. It’s probably one of the most disturbing experiences, ever. You live in this constant fear that you’re going to asphyxiate, have your heart internally explode - both at the same time - and end up frothing blood, dying gradually, painfully, in spasms on a cold floor.
To describe this as excruciating is an understatement.

To top it all, the thing isn’t really what we think it is. Imagine that, self-induced fear leads to something that feels exactly like torture without actually, physically being tortured.
Nature’s own masterpiece theatre.

A room does, in a sub-conscious way, define you. Marketing personnel come up with a lot of constructed idiocy with this concept; hogwash like choosing some floral pattern makes you a warm and caring person, or owning some music player makes you vibrant and energetic… Oh sure… It’s like saying reading about impotency, and a general lack of interest in copulation suggests you’re impotent. Perhaps ridiculing terrorist agendas means you’re a terrorist, oddly, that’s how government rhetoric works. I think it’s far more obvious than that. Decorative material does not define anyone, no matter how much we try to embrace that crass idea. Decorative material and most of the stuff in popular culture is a ploy to create an army of conformists. We all dress a certain way, we pretty much own the same lifestyle products - with the implication we’re all the same unimportant petals of one flower, really.
What makes us unique isn’t a DVD player or the next teen novel or a rap video which we dance to in jeans that resemble diapers, for fucks sake… What defines us are individual thoughts and ideas. We systematically kill off uniqueness everyday by succumbing to the same crap millions of people buy, chase and exhibit, with the illusion that what we own is unique, and hence, so are we.

Sometimes I think I was born at the wrong time. I would’ve done anything to be alive in the late 60’s in America. It’s astounding how one drug could have created so many free human spirits. I’m a sketch artist, and I used to attach an immense value to valueless art. I remember taking days to get the right translucent look for this dew drop on a leaf in one of my paintings. It was pretty hard to achieve that effect of being able to see patterns on the leaf, while not appearing completely visible. Partly because a dew drop is translucent. But mostly because that dew drop was the only thing colored in within the painting, the rest of the painting was black and white sketching. I’m pretty sure this era we live in isn’t a time to be an artist. We’ve skipped true creativity, and trudged forward with competition, price tags, branding and every other mindless desire we’ve ever come across in our self-serving sensibilities.

She wasn’t my everything. She was a dysfunctional loony, who seemed so out-of-place all the time. For that reason, I went up to her and tried to find out how her mind worked. Her mind was filled with lunatic views which sort of took form into creative outbursts, she just didn’t realize it. She thought she wasn’t normal. The problem, perhaps, existed and emanated from the single thought that she thought she wasn’t normal. There’s no such thing as normality, all the idea suggests is there’s a certain behavior we agree on and act on. All that’s needed to approach life with ease is an individualistic approach.
Sadly, that simple fact escapes most of us. It was the same case with her too. She wrote random poems. Haphazard Surreal poems. I thought they were amazing, she thought those same poems made her an outcast. Social paranoia was the cause of that; and coupled with her crazy folks, this made her more awkward and repressed in public.

Empathy is an over-glorified, badly-understood concept. Not to mention completely full of shit too. If you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and think like they do, you gradually slip into their mentality as part of the exercise of empathizing with them. The very reason you could comment on their behavior was because it was a look at their behavior from an outside, unbiased perspective - yours. However, this premise does not apply to everyone. If you’re stupid, shallow, self-important and arrogant, empathy might be a character trait you need to hone to reach a mind-set involving decency and genuine morals.
The more she got better, the more I was affected as a result. It’s an oddity when a person depends on you for guidance, apparently. It's odder, when years later; some sort of weird role-reversal thing happens. Exchanged mind-sets. Which makes you proud of the fact that you had something to do with them getting better, then you look at yourself with a newly-morphed mind-set including self-loathing… and it’s hard to deal with. Especially when you’re capable of detailed thought.

She once explained this vague concept she had, which was that every expression a person exhibited or inhibited, was beautiful, because it masked so much of what was going on inside their head. I do agree that there’s a certain degree of beauty in her interpretation of expressions, and by her logic, pleasant and ugly expressions were exceptional in their own way. Pleasant expressions in bad times encased a great deal of restraint, while the ugly ones were raw. Both valid, both immediate, both displaying a large amount of detail if you had draw it, in the sense, if a sketch artist applied a particular type of shading or grimace while drawing a character, that means the artist is showcasing a bit of the character's personality traits through the painting, thus forming a fictional character oozing reality.

Somehow, it missed her attention that she was as complex and intriguing a subject as the idea she pitched to me was. Truly exceptional, perhaps. She had this habit of retreating into long silences, staring into some unseen, unfathomable depths of space. And she wouldn’t know what was happening around her until she snapped out of it. I took the opportunity to observe her. To capture all those different expressions that constituted her complexity. I had to pay a lot of attention to detail, because I wasn’t sketching her, in all these collective moments. Every detail had to be committed to memory. I went back and drew the thing, and played around with the shading to determine what her mood was, based on the expression.

I’ve been living for the last eight months in a dilapidated flat where no one really knows me. No sketches, no lights, no music, no movies, no furniture, no mattress, no cigarettes, no drugs, no drinks, no books. Nothing. Just a bare room with a running exhaust fan. My walls are lined with cracked mirrors, because I think the distorted images of myself on those cracked mirrors, sort of illustrate how disturbed I am.

At the time I subjected myself to this rigorous confinement without all the things that calmed my soul, I expected a week without distractions and my infallible logic would set me right. Solitude is that sort of thing which creeps up on certain people, in terms of coping with it. Most people go nuts with loneliness, boredom kills in some cases. But with exceptions like me, self-induced Solitary Confinement got easier to deal with, until it became a routine, day-in, day-out, staring at nothing, doing nothing, thinking of nothing, with no sleep because of the fake cardiac arrests (panic attacks) , until finally you pass out from exhaustion after ten to fifteen days of staying awake.

Oh yeah, the paintings. I managed to draw and compile about ninety individual paintings with her as the subject. As a gift for her birthday, I posted all of these individual expressions in the party hall as a surprise. When she saw all these, she observed every single one and I watched her first real smile in years.

Her: How did you…

Me: This is an extension of your idea, by the way…

Her: What idea?

Me: You know what I'm talking about...

Her: But…

Me: You know, you might be a whole lot more weirder than you give yourself credit for…

Loathing yourself is a dangerous idea. It gives you the license to treat yourself as screwed up as you see fit.
The only thing I was proud of, was her. She moved on, my task was complete, now I could go back to fucking myself over as much as I wanted. I dropped out of college, worked odd jobs in odd places, and then collected my money and paid an advance for an apartment where I could, in all probability, sulk to death.

Until today.
I was surprised to receive a letter at my doorstep. Unlikely, no one I knew, knew my address. I opened it and found…
WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN????????????? You have no fucking idea of the amount of people I had to talk to, to get this address… Heard you left civilization to deal with some very important nothingness… I’ll be in that obscure town you live in on June 2nd. I’m pretty sure this letter’s gonna reach you before that - I’ll be expecting you at xxxxxxxx Road, at xxxxxx Pizza by Two in the afternoon… Be there, or I swear I’ll come to your place with some Gay Bouncers…

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I’m neither glad nor sad to see her. I'm indifferent, I guess. It’s just been so long since I’ve seen genuine happiness. I want to try to remember what that’s like. At this point, she’s almost like one of those road signs you see on steep, narrow road climbs. It’s past twelve in the afternoon, and I hail a cab. It takes fourty minutes to get there, might as well have a snooze. But of course I can’t. I suppose the long-term effects of insomnia haven’t worn off yet. Still, watching these things I hardly noticed for months zip by me, I notice how much life I’ve missed. Not how much of my life I’ve missed, how much of life I’ve missed. There’s so much that’s interesting, constantly occurring around us, but we miss all of life’s spectacle by being obsessed with ourselves. Maybe it’s her letter that had this instantaneous effect on me, but to be fair, I think it’s just the fresh air & what I used to do a great deal a while ago - observation. Observing everything has an analytical, knowledgeable quality to it.

“xxxxxx Pizza, Sir…”

I pay the cabbie and enter the Pizza place. No sign of her. Maybe she’s on her way. Oh well, I’ll wait. I order an ice tea. That’s when I notice a crowd gathering at a spot on the opposite side of the road. In the midst of the commotion, I notice people beating up some guy from a car. Probably hit a cow and turned it into beef or something. Then, I hear sirens. Cops in India, are skilled in creating Methodical Pandemonium, I think. Like a squadron of circus clowns. As expected, three vehicles of uniformed gasbags arrive and cordon off a limited amount of space on the main road, and are now involved into diverting traffic into a confusion of horns and roadblocks, making it into a worse situation than it was before they arrived. I cross the road and go through the jam-packed crowd to see what’s going on.

Like Still Photography, there is a certain amount of awe when you’ve known a person very well, and see them immobile.
I saw Her... drenched in a pool of her own blood, twisted and still.


END