Bullying and bathrooms – rant post

So then, when I experience distress, I ask myself, is it me? Why do I encounter bullying so often while others don’t seem to so much?

Fortunately, I am now allowed not to let such doubt turn around and attack me. I see bullying often because it is legitimized just as often. Colored normal, it camouflages itself in the norms of workplaces, families, relationships, friendships.

So I woke up a day after a bullying incident and rolled up a bunch of hair that fell out overnight in a ball. I think it is beautiful how the body moves with the heart. Over a year ago, they whitened in weeks and stay with me in the memory of my long walk away from harm. Today, my hair fell out in protest expressing solidarity to my distress at encountering yet another set of bullies.

My colleague said something interesting. It is these bullies that are often found in positions of authority because they aim for such power. I aim for a lesser power, not the power to fight back, no, I already have it. It was a gift from the violence itself; as all my being rose and raged at an injustice that is never only a matter of theory but of a crawling skin and a fast beating heart, of salty eyes and the white noise in my head. My power is my body that tells me when something is wrong. A body that listens and responds to the slightest changes in the environment like a keen caregiver. I thought it was illness to be this sensitive, but I believe it is what warns me and sustains me through a world everyone knows is off.

The power I desire is the power to wake up refreshed and new after having done so. The power that tells every last shred of me to stay together, each hair, every short breath lost to panic, the power to tell all my sweet parts to grow serene, for what I encountered when I encounter violence in any form is lesser than, is slippery to my being.

The power of the word to walk me from a ball of hair to a shower and a desk back to itself; back to language, to being able to speak, to soothe myself back into my own lively solitude. To know in my body that everything is alright and I am safe now for my body itself walked me away to this safety. But like a window clatters to a loud noise, I clatter a little bit too.

And in bed this morning, the morning after, I try to find the power to write away the clattering back into calm. Into things I love and things that love me. Things that nourished my hair back, brightened my skin, gave nourishment to my being. I go back to reading; I know where to head after the loud noise, and I know the path to it goes through a bathroom.

I learnt in the last year of recovery, that all walks to health go through small steps, cleaning the room, bathing, light, many bites of food, drinks of water, timeless silences of sleep, a little list of tasks that matter and for me, words and words and words, one at a time.

For now, it is time I start walking away and towards.

Something out of the blue

I have done some terrible things, made many bad decisions and when most needed, did not make any at all. I have been in love and been heartbroken. I have been on both ends of what unrequited love is.

I have made passionate vows to never agains and then walked myself right back where I was not needed. I have wrestled with myself and for those reasons with time. I have sent out howling desires to the heavens and secretly cradled the one last seed of hope while I set whole crops to fire.

I have visited long silences where you go to bury the remains and that one last seed, so you can reap the rewards of giving in and letting go and I have been asked to go back and return when I do not want anymore, a yield for the labors of my soul.

I have fantasized living with such vigor that I returned only to a desire to die from those mighty festivals of life. I have confessed and confessed and poured myself on sheets so much and so often and with such little shame that the ink now refuses to carry the weight of meaning. I have desired and despised meaning.

I have lived in spite and bitterness and I have been proud in my own self loathing. Echoes bounce off my insides as I walk, like water in a tumbling flask, I have carried it all, the many times all molten into my life’s blood. I have not let any of my wounds congeal and heal so they could seal the infinite ruptures in my skin. No, I have let the ruptures remain and have forgotten the memory of when I didn’t know any mirrors, only the world, the world of dust and wind.

I have been and am always lonely. I know now, that I am always lonely and there is no reason I should deserve to not be so. There isn’t any reason because there isn’t any reason. The world does not differentiate, the world melts and moves and melts and moves and you melt and move and melt and move, and I may not always hold my own essential indifference in the on-goings of my flesh, but indifferent I am, indifferent the world.

I have sought despair so someone would come and comfort me and then I have slept on the winds of spite and dreamt vengeance. I have failed. I have failed at this and that and many many other things and I have failed to see that it does not matter for my failure is not so much in the doings or not doings of things, but merely of an attachment to an absurd word in an absurd world.

I have found so many ways to consolidate and solidify myself into this giant of a being; a being that swallows the whole world whole and doesn’t even notice. I have lusted for words, words that utter to the other my endless cries for help. I have taken them and decorated them well, for years sometimes, so adoringly held them only to throw them away on whim. After all, I give them the treatment I believed I deserved.

I am hungry now and in a strange state from not having slept all night. I crave sometimes the known intensities of the past, but now, I take care to not crave them long enough to bring them to life.

Now I am bored….Later.

The breakdown case collection

Putting some things here, to organize later or never

21 Days

Was there a scarcity of food?

I can’t tell. Concerns of hunger weren’t shared with me. I was a guest.

But they decided to catch fish from the pond behind the house that day.

When evening comes, little insects light up in the gardens. They’re not fireflies. They crawl on the earth, little lights along their body.

The cigarette smoked secretly clatters in your fingers, like your dreams in the night. It is cold there, colder inside the house than it is outside. They gather in groups around fire and food. They haven’t forgotten how to be a community, so they survive, often without complaint or a vulgar use of the internet. They know no one is listening anyway.

I imagine now, all of them sitting in their homes, watching the country, or the country that makes the most noise and listens to nothing, watching them make noise about the horror of a 21 day lock-down. I would be bitter if I were them. But I am generally bitter.

21 days, I was there, clattering ungracefully in the valley of poise. I return in my memory often to that other ‘curfew’ now, in which I stayed also, 21 days.

21 days, 70 years, men outside the house guns ready to poke holes in you. Unambiguous, these guns have kept their word. The evidence comes tinkling on phones, broken body of Burhan Wani, until the phones grow silent too in mourning. But that’s not my story to tell. Sooner or later, one must learn to shut up where it isn’t their place to speak. It has been done to them for years. I cannot describe it, I know too little. But I learnt how it’s done.

So then, they decided to catch some fish in the pond behind the house.

If you are a newbie meat-eater like me, don’t worry, with the fishes, they say, god put them there so we could eat. Only with the fishes though and other edible things.

So they decided to catch fish that day.

I’ll tell you how it is done.

You take a long fish net and untangle it.

Then, you fold your pants and enter the muddy pond on one end.

You hold the net straight along the width of the pond, so its base settles on the bed below.

Are you with me?

Then, you walk the length of the pond. Holding it straight.

You see, the fishes start to swim away from the net to protect themselves. But they don’t know that the pond is becoming smaller and smaller.

So as you walk the length of the pond holding the fishnet along its width, the fishes begin to gather in a space that grows smaller and smaller.

And then you keep walking until there is only one corner where all the fishes can go.

You go on until, there is one small corner for too many fishes, the fishnet on one side, the edge of the pond on another.

Now the fishes begin to panic.

They are all frantically swimming to get away, but there is the net on one side, and the edge of the pool on another.

Then, they either try to escape to the remaining part of the pond, but they get caught in the net. Or, they jump up in the air away from the fishnet and towards the edge of the pond, and they get caught.

There’s only these two possibilities left to the fish, and whichever they choose, they die.

So then, the fishes in terror, begin to panic and jump. The lucky ones stay in the shallow depths of their now very small pond. But sooner or later, they are bound to panic. And as soon as they do, someone catches them and throws them on to the edge. Someone has to be standing there with a bucket. So you quickly catch hold of the struggling fish, and bang it against the edge of the bucket. You have to do it well, because if you don’t, the fish may thrash and jump out of the bucket and try to get back into the water.

You can’t let them.

So you have to be very quick and not give the fish any time at all.

You pick it up, and bang it hard against the edge of the bucket until it goes limp. Then you throw it in the bucket.

You have to be quick, you see, to get a good catch.

It all happens really quickly.

Before anyone can tell, the fish is food.

 

Of many nights

It was suddenly difficult to know the right place for anything.

The room was shifting in my eyes.

The walls dislodged themselves from their places and began to walk the room like lost spirits.

The ground under me expanded, until what is between matter, that which isn’t, opened up.

I thought of everyone that speaks of justice for all that I had endured.

A lover once said to me,

If you shut down, I will stand outside your door until you open up again.

They never did. I wondered, often from inside my room, if they would ever walk to my door again.

I thought of people that promise me the safety of a world in which I could maybe speak, recover, heal, whatever are the words they use for ‘survivors’ like me.

And yet, I felt so far away from everyone. I felt victimized by the same kind of shaming, alienation everyone promised I wouldn’t feel among the kind and the just.

I became more and more incoherent.

There was white noise in my ear, that kept getting louder and louder until I don’t remember what happened.

After that, I was sent away, like one with a disease.

The light in the room shifted too, it darkened at the corners of my eye, so that I felt I have to squint to see clearly the object of my gaze. But the darkening spread out.

The therapist asked me to write notes to my bullies. To tell them how they made me feel.

But I had written many many suicide notes, some in my head and some in lost diaries.

I had been compulsively writing them for a long time. That is why no one wanted to be friends with me anymore. That is why I felt wrong in the world and wanted to die.

Time went on, in a circle of the above kind. Suicide notes sputtered out of my crackling body, like flying fragments of fire. Quickly to become soot.

I was scared often and looked to my memory for a resemblance of what is safe. But I could not locate it.

I prayed for it too. I prayed even when I wanted to believe there is no god. But some people don’t have the privilege of atheism. Some people have to arch their backs in pain, rising towards the heaven with their little left over strength and beg. I begged.

A little kindness, for just a little bit. A month of safety maybe, where I don’t have to watch the pain in my bones, travel and change but remain always, burning cold within the rivers of my blood.

I am thirsty. I will go get water.

My throat always dries up when I try to write now.

I felt bitter. I felt love, affection, safety, help was being dangled at me at a distance just outside my grasp. I felt the injustice, I felt it was being done to me with intentionality.

But I felt miserable because I could not even locate an enemy.

Was it my rapist come in the form of a lover?

Was it the woman who with vile words poked holes into what is already shredded?

Was it the therapist? The psychiatrist? The institution?

Was it the mother?

Yes, I located it in the mother who bore me into the world and left me to fend for myself.

I would never have a child in this world because I know I cannot promise them that they will not be molested, raped, assaulted, said cruel words to, destroyed, made to regret they ever lived.

It is always the mother. Soft target, willing to take the stab.

The room was beginning to shift more and more. I could not tell what was closer to me and what was further away.

I screamed help right in the centre of a very crowded market. I screamed it over and over again.

I couldn’t tell if people could hear me.

There was white noise in my ears.

I was convinced I am dying just with despair. I said that to the people. They didn’t believe me.

They said I make up things to get attention. I believed them.

I believed that I am not dying with despair.

But then I prayed constantly that I would. There was so much of it.

I was grabbing at the moving floor.

I had forgotten how to breathe.

Why?

Why did these things happen to me?

I could not breathe. I had locked the door behind me.

Things began to whiten, like an old photograph returns to the absence of the memory captured.

The door was far away, the gap expanded.

I cannot breathe.

What did I do wrong?

I convinced myself that it was a malady of the brain.

I latched onto history like a witches’ mirror that shows you what you desire.

I convinced myself I am a troubled genius.

A literary grace will pour meaning into my endless nights of horror, I told myself in my many mirrors.

Then words abandoned me.

I collected diaries that remained empty.

The pages began to throw up my words like poison. They chocked on my ink and resisted my agonies too. Like so many people did.

Why did the people who loved me run at the sight of my suffering body?

Survival at the time of war.

Everyone in war is a coward. Isn’t that why they are all at war?

I am not a coward, I convinced myself.

I did not even wage a war against my own suffering.

I convinced myself I must embrace my suffering in the name of philosophical inquiry.

I read everything.

I read quickly, I don’t know how did I read everything when I was lost for the most part in the howl of my pain.

The white noise grew louder and louder.

It said, die, die, die.

I don’t remember much after.

I grew alone in my bitterness.

The cure, they said is in reaching out.

But I grew alone, descending into the darkest corners of my many rooms.

I traveled, from people to people, and places to places, hazily like a shadow.

I did not have the grace for silence. Sometimes, I traveled noisily.

Until I grew silent too. But never for long.

The throat forgets to hold a howl.

I searched the streets for compassion.

But I found everyone sleep walking through their own nightmares.

They were uttering gibberish, notes offered to the great music of the nothing, dressed like meaning. To deceive.

I convinced myself I am awake and the world asleep.

Why did I enter the doors of its nightmare and lose my way back?

Once, I said to a reluctant lover,

There has to be a door somewhere.

What? He said, unhappy at my intrusion.

A door, to this night, that I can open and walk out of.

I learnt that nothing he could have said in response could have helped.

He is lost inside the night too.

I do not know why I am saying it all now.

I don’t have to, I convinced myself.

Maybe it is another one of my suicide notes.

I am not dead yet. I do not wish exercise my own will to bring my own absence anymore.

You must know, that the night you try to kill yourself will break your back the morning after. It will walk with you, stick to your skin like molasses, it will strangle your being.

I am not a courageous person. I will not wage a war against life.

But I was compelled to say it more and more. That I do not want to die.

Not because I wanted to live.

I do want to die.

But because I will have transgressed the great rule of life.

I was given the chance of life.

We are the chosen ones.

I must not disrespect the gods.

I say I do not want to die, because wanting to die is blasphemy.

If you express suicidal tendencies, I am compelled by law to institutionalize you. That was the size of care a psychiatrist once showed me.

Some day, maybe, I will not want to die just like that. Maybe because I will stop looking at life like a horror and get busy with this or that.

What was I busy with when I didn’t think there is desire needed, to live.

I didn’t know I will have to mine a will from all corners of my being. That I will have to travel the many tunnels of my skin to locate a little will, just enough to carry me to another day of labour.

It was a very exhausting process.

The door, it was far away.

And I, on the floor. I had forgotten how to breathe. The walls were shifting.

No one tells me if I will remember it again so well, that I can forget it and still do it. Breathe, live, without the effort of gathering a will.

I searched the streets for compassion. But I did not find it. I found terrible creatures and then I looked in the mirror, the witches’ spell gone, I saw me revealed to me and I recoiled in horror.

So I returned to my room with its walls always shifting. And in there, alone, I forgot to breathe.

The door, I had locked the door.

I would have to open it to call for help.

 

 

On Making Sense

(‘Make’, ‘sense’. Say them deliberately, slowly. When you say them, think of what they could mean. ‘Make’, to ‘make’ something, to exercise ‘intent’ in order to ‘create’ something that ‘isn’t’ until you make it. ‘Sense’, something ‘sensible’, something ‘capable of being sensed’, ‘to be sensed’ to be perceived, to be understood in perception, ‘is perception different from understanding?’, sensible, meaningful, coherent. Now say it again, ‘make sense’. What are you asking someone to do? To manufacture meaning?

To manufacture meaning for the purpose of an exchange between ‘sense making’ entities? Sense making entities are us, humans, who can perceive and make sense of what they perceive. They can think, reflect, and respond to what they witness. Unlike a code algorithm, they are not governed by a bounded set of commands outside of which, it throws an error. Their capacity to meaning is unbounded. They can make sense of everything and respond.

If those entities are inherently ‘sense making’, why would one need ‘manufactured sense’?

Why does one need to ‘make sense’?)

It’s an implicit social command. Make sense.

So absolute. Conclusive. The speaker has taken control and told you, you don’t make sense and that you must. Or else.

You don’t make sense. What exists outside of the ‘sensible’?

The non-sense. The not to be engaged with, the not to be encouraged, the demon thing beyond the capacities or necessities of the social mind, the mad, the insane, the irrational, the impossible.

Make sense. It has been said, and you dare not subvert such absolute authority.

Make sense, M. Keep making sense. Do not stop, for if you stop, it is either death or madness and one is better than the other, or not. Both are your summons to the many hells you are sent to by the speaker of the command.

Make sense. Is a cruel command.

As if you could ‘not make sense’. You make sense dead, you make sense even when you aren’t trying to. You make sense because you are the sensing and the sensible by virtue of your being. You don’t have to make sense as much as you don’t have to explicitly and deliberately exist. You just exist without even trying. However madly it may seem, you always make sense.

When someone tells you to ‘make sense’; they are really saying, I refuse to think and understand. They are saying, I have not thought about how my behaviors, my language, my urges and knee jerk reactions came to be, and I am comfortable with bodies well governed, with my body following the order of the invisible totalitarian. And so, I will say what I have been commanded to say to something of the sort you are doing or saying. I come to work everyday, and press the buttons I am commanded to and within such rhythm, I am home and happy. The rhythm doesn’t need to make sense, I need to, within it.

They really do not think and understand for if they did, they would abandon the phrase altogether. No more quick and lazy prescriptions to the psychiatrist. No more the talk of mental ‘illness’.

No more the hammer of such a foolish pleonasm that beats your bones to tiny shards and sends your retired blood into the crevices of a cemented city earth.

You always ‘make sense’ and I promise it is true.

That is all you do.

Make sense.

Believe you aren’t. Try harder. Suffer.

You still make sense.

You can try harder or not.

You still make sense.

Your skin is meaning, and the crusty suffering under it is meaning.

You don’t have to ‘make sense’.

You just do.

I have gotten in the habit of asking. ‘Does that make sense to you?’

Does it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On not writing

It seems pertinent that I force myself to start writing again. My journal for the last several weeks has remained largely empty, cluttered here and there with an odd unfinished sentence. Thoughts quickly abandoned.

And then travelling last week; without pausing to think, I neatly tore out most of its pages and gave it to some enthusiastic children along with my box of paints.

There is arrogance in the act of writing. A said one day.

And it stuck; a lot of what A says stays with me. I have decided to put faith in him.

But also, in the act of writing, there was honesty, and a foolish fearlessness to the molasses of my many miseries. I would let it all out, on paper, like freed blood that begins to coagulate at the touch of the world. Viscous, my miseries then, viscous, my writing.

I reckon my writing will change now that I have changed. I cannot tell until I try to write again, aimlessly, like a child new to her feet. Shaking, tumbling, falling, my jittery words may return again, mirroring the hazy new form that I have become. I cannot tell what I am now, and it gives me no pain, this not knowing. Maybe that is why it is difficult to write now. Or maybe it is something else and I do not want to speak about it to myself.

I speak about very few things now. I mostly keep my conversation frivolous. Very carefully concerning myself only with the most unnecessary objects, the weather, the taste of beer, food, sleep. In a circle, keen and observant, I go through the objects of the mundane, not without effort. This old habit of carelessly making myself naked to my truths, almost killed me weeks ago. It succeeded in significant ways. So, this new stranger does not accommodate the content and style of how the old one used to write.

I begin to write and the anxiety returns because I write from old ways of seeing the world in a new embodiment. The dissonance is stark, unbearable, unnecessary. It became very real to me that I am someone with severe ‘mental illness’. It is a cruel phrase, and its interpretation will inevitably be beyond my control. I don’t use the phrase to describe myself to myself, but the world did and does and that is material. I realized, I have to protect myself from that materiality. And to not write, to not expose myself the the elements, is my long sleep to recovery.

But writing is woven into my skin; it is my bleeding out and it is the mesh damming my wounds. I started when I was a little child hiding behind a door listening to my father describe my uncle’s death. I started on summer holiday nights when my cousins groped for a breast frozen under a mind gone to a quiet place. I started when I would find secret corners with my sister to mimic adults kissing and fucking. I started on endless nights on my nightly pillow next to my grandmother telling me one story after another. I started when I sat on the staircase at midnight weeping about how lonely everyone is. I started when I was a little girl secretly writing a story of a deeply sad little girl who is treated as diseased but does not know why. I started when I was found writing these things and was sent to the old school counselor lady. Writing is very dear to me. It was my way of scratching out a little corner for myself.

So I guess, I will have to struggle for a while. Maybe keep up my rambling, postponing honesty, until, maybe, one day, it will fall out of my eyes unexpectedly, like a mistake.

Maybe that won’t happen, but maybe it will. I am not worried. It will come to me, the same way everything else does; erratic, unexpected, delightful, startling, absurd, new, strange and without cause and purpose.

Sooner or later. It seems pertinent that I begin telling stories again.

March of terror – Daybreak

This morning when I woke up, it felt, like the fever is past. There was a lightness to Einaudi’s piano notes, slowly lifting me up to the infinitesimal specks of light that in my sleep slipped through the sieve of the long night. This morning, I picked up the paintbrush and I thought of beauty again.

 

I spoke to my teachers yesterday.

I have been so claustrophobic, I said, of the people in this world telling me I don’t have a right over my own dying. So I must take pills, and behave the right ways and live, why should I live because I owe it to others? I don’t want to die but it should be mine. I said, frantically gesturing.

But I do, I have a right over my own life, and over how I choose to live it and over my own death. I said, I couldn’t stop.

When one knows that, it becomes easier to not die. He said, looking carefully into the air through his thick glasses.

 

The fever is gone, I dreamt of something in my dream, of something ineffable, really fragile that was being held still with a spell. That was it, that thing I saw, there were only whispers of small stirrings on its peripheries, held inside stillness. And then, the long fever was gone.

 

They do not let me live as I want, I said, but they do not let me die either. I just want to be left in peace as how I am. I don’t understand, I know, but I am not understood either. I complained.

The whole world M, is speaking of not having been understood; in a surreal endless madness. Just live, and do not dwell over the living for too long. Live the rustic. He said.

There in nothing in what I am saying, that she does not already know. She knows that too. He said, in amused Bihari to my friends.

 

And the fever was gone. Just like that, the long night opened its doors, picked me up like a sleeping child and lay me at the threshold of the morning. She and the moon inside her breast held me to their gaze gently before letting me go to the light.

And then, there was a sweetness to the touch of the woman who lay holding me. My skin heard hers like the taste of water and my fingers danced, eager to touch, for they remembered desire again after a long long time. Her touch shed the dust off my skin and kissed light into it.

And the fever was gone.

And my laughter returned to babble and linger a little too long over a joke, surprising my witnesses to laughter too. And my breast felt the laughter cut the weights tied to my waist in reckless bliss; and it soared and let the winds in again.

I have known the sounds of the morning approaching my village a long time, through the many long nights, I have thought of them like lovers I lost to the wearing of time. And I heard the bells and the chatter and the laughter and the lightness and the light and the love and the touch and the greediness of existence; I heard them all make their way to my ruins to make their nomadic stop. There will be a festival, they know, in their quiescence.

The fever is gone. It took 52 days and nights to burn.

This morning, I picked up the paintbrush and thought of beauty again.

 

The March of Terror – Strangeness and the moon

The moon has been lighting my nights up since the night of the white noise. I don’t remember what the moon was like that day. I remember what I was like, until quiet some time at least. I drank, wept and chopped my hair. The third time in the last three years. It is somewhat comical now, my relationship with my hair. To you, dear reader, it may be strange, even alarming.

After all the white noise, I woke up to a fresh day, as if I had been purged. I actually had strength, and clarity. The purge was painful. My whole was shrieking, with the noise of the other I had gathered over time. And in one nightlong shriek, it silenced me to myself. The awkward, tall, skinny girl with a boycut again.

I have not been this calm in weeks, all by myself, on the terrace with the moon. The moon, you see, is an extraordinary lover. It produces an ache that returns you to your own nakedness. Over the years, I have yelled doom at it, and cursed it to the eternity of being witness to lonely beings of the night; and I have tasted it, like a half cut tangerine on nights it stole the yellow from the sun; and I have listened to my breathing, on nights like this one, as it sat in witness, like a friend on a day of mourning. I have lusted for it, and tried to hold it prisoner to the rectangles of my windows, and I have let it flee me, on stormy nights when I needed a little white boat to see me to the shore. I have burnt it with endless cigarettes and gotten drunk on it, and I have walked all nights long looking for it. I have accused it, of stealing from the sun, and I have laughed at it, for always running ahead of it, I have held it’s secrets like a friend, to the jarring sounds of the day, and I have warned the world of its callousness, this lover of mine, never ceases to be. And so, I have loved it.

The nights after the white noise, I have returned to look at it, and every night, I have returned a little more to myself. The strange dark girl with a bad boy-cut. My father and I used to walk to the salon together on Sundays, sit side by side, to get a cut. It was a lousy one. I like lousy haircuts, and lousy lives. I have one, so I must like it. When I try too hard for it to not be lousy, I begin to panic. The noise of the other crowds me out. Language made to stand alert to the commands of objective order startle me. It gathers in me like left-over rubble from a factory. I used to work in factories once, advising my clients on how to make their production processes more efficient. I did a good job at it. I liked my work.

But when language becomes production lined products of reason, and I gather it all, believe it or not, I get drunk and shave my head. This ramble is a plea. It’s a plea for strangeness. A plea for strangeness to not be dear, or endearing, or necessary, or a warning; but a mere plea for strangeness to be so and stay so. I am making a plea to the moon, holding it in a linguistic entanglement that leads nowhere but to sheets of a still white nightlong strangeness I can sleep under, with no one to wake me up to the rigid commands of meaning. Why must I produce meaning, when everything else fails to. Why must I not live in the pure aesthetic delight of the meaningless produced by an utter chaos.

No, what happened the last one and a half months wasn’t chaos. It was bricks and bricks of order being sent into my skull, like buildings they build in this city, forever growing, forever under construction; it would split my head and break my skull if I allow it to go on.

Chaos is stillness, of the moon that has witnessed the horrors of the night and continued to sit still; meditating on the forevers and the nevers promised between whispering lovers, and mothers and their children, and on all those who often choose the night-time to take that silenced leap into their nothing. Chaos is the holding of it in one’s palm, like a gentle lover, and witnessing it, glide and dance and make noise and hear rhythm without demanding it, without tearing it off the chaos in an act of violence, like one skins an animal. Looking for meaning, is like skinning the chaos of living for a rhythm and a beauty that can put our fears to a drunken stupor; for a while at least.

What do you mean? The boy with clay hands often would ask.

I don’t mean anything. Do you? I would think.

I see I am drunk on the moon, three nights drinking now. I am the most sober I have been in weeks. I am tired and I am rested. I am alone, and I am no one. And I am neither happy nor unhappy. I hold nothing prisoner anymore, my windows stay shut. Tomorrow, I will try to return to meaning again, intermittently, I will take care not to stay in it for too long, take breaks from it to talk to the moon. I will do it with will and not with obedience. Or at least, I will believe it is will that drives me to little pursuits of pragmatic meanings. For I have a worrying mother, and a very compelling, mostly undesirable  world I must listen to, for no good reason. But that seems just right tonight, on the terrace with the moon. I would be losing myself again, if I were to begin looking for a good reason to do anything.

Tonight, I will let the moon see me again, as who I really am, the no one with a bad haircut. I had seen it all winter just past, and it passed me by like a piece of furniture and I passed it by too, occupied with the urgencies of constructions and orders to be lived life long. I was a 28 year old woman that needed to get life in control because the other around me demanded I do, and I let the voices in. I am a 28 year old woman, with a bad haircut, and I don’t desire the greatness of meaning, No, that isn’t why I am drunk on the moon and rambling words. I desire a quiet kind strangeness, a linguistic entanglement with my lover, unfolding into nights and nights of meaningless play. It puts me to sleep best, this one. Look, it’s here, the fabric of the moon in my eye, like blankets and blankets of sleep, where it doesn’t matter what it means.

The March of Terror – Chamber of Secrets

I am in a somewhat funny mood today. I will not go into why. But I am not really a funny person. To be funny, I learnt early in school; you must own a penis and want to impress girls with your sharp wit and ability to bully. Even if I were to be funny, I don’t think anyone would get my jokes, this world has a mental block against women and jokes put together, unless of course, they are about them. So this ramble might quickly degenerate to very bad jokes, or worse, a serious rant about something or the other you, dear reader, might find, not so important.

But anyway, I will try to keep the humor up for the sake of the organic serotonin I gathered from today’s labor at IMF. I still can’t sleep though, and TMI, am still shitting more than I am eating. My body is working like one of Ron’s spells. Confused, hurried and doing more harm than good. I have also been watching Harry Potter again, for feel goods. Whatever that means; allows me to suspend my usually comfortable existential crisis which I cannot clearly handle right now. So Harry Potter helps me forget and build with the help of simply and sweetly devised maxims in a magic world.

But I had to stop for the night, I love Chamber of Secrets for all the snake work, no offense, but when Dumbledore cancelled exams for the year in the end, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I mean, in my muggle world, people are dying all the time, and nothing stops. And here, they cancelled exams because the teachers understand that the whole school went through something traumatizing when the Chamber of Secrets was opened.

We go through something traumatizing everyday. No, to correct myself, we are bundles of trauma gathered from the day our parents decided to hand us that toy gun, or yell at us instead of talking, or not talk to each other instead of talking, or we watched something where people hit each other instead of talking, or where we watched a body being objectified instead of being spoken to or when we were sent to play school to prepare for ‘competition’, or when we learnt what a horror groups can be or my uncle decided to sexually abuse me, or other such mundane muggle things.

The whole human specie has one evolutionary advantage over the others, Language. But we have managed to collectively turn the world into a self destruct puddle of perpetual shittiness with stupid affirmations and bad pharmaceutical drugs for fake comfort using language. And no one cancels class. They send you to a counselor on top of the classes, and the other horrendous things happening all around you so that you can become emotionally stunted through the continuous pathologising and being looked at funny. So that the valid ways you learn to respond to trauma are not to be traumatized at all. Voila, if you can emotionally stunt a whole population, we will need to cancel no exams, no factory output, no productivity because something bad has happened.

But then that becomes progressively hard to do, you see, with the power of discourse and the new epistemology and all that fancy sounding crap. It is very very simple. There is a difference between maintaining mental health and emotional stunting. A mentally healthy person near about a contrary of one that is emotionally stunted. Maybe, one must look for madness in eerie silences at the sight of injustice and not in a hysterical howl. And maybe, it is to be found in the silences that have now entered the mind of people, that even the little voice in their heads don’t talk anymore when something wrong is being done, by them, and by others.

But anyway, I am in the mood to be loud and funny today, keep up the feel goods so I can survive long enough to maybe want to be alive again in this world. Words don’t help me with humor. And I have no wit whatsoever. My bullies had enough for all of us through school, college and after. And then the boys I ‘hooked up’ with later, really really killed all the remaining humor left. In our muggle world, the Chamber of Secrets lies strewn out in the open, rotting like an open wound asking to be addressed, and we are all busy running to class. I can’t believe I am using Harry Potter now to say things. So I will stop before it gets worse, I will go cut out magazines and stick them together where they do not belong. And hope, for nothing.