Of default settings and the truth.

It's true. All my life it seems i have waited for some sort of happily ever after. One perfect event after which life would be just groovy. In the process of relying so heavily on this preposterous idea, i found myself continually disappointed and disillusioned with life and myself. I was also always comparing myself with others and maneuvering the situation around and about to somehow emerge superior in the end only because there was so much missing inside me. But something has happened. Now i'm not waiting. I'm ready for the yet more painful pitfalls of life, ready for the long haul as i said once. A short while ago i was ready to give up writing forever, i thought it would eradicate expectation from me, it would make me small, inconspicuous and useless, unable to be struck down by fate. In denial i had found anything but peace but there was no escape from the fear, the fear most of all, of hoping again. I wanted more than anything to stand up for myself to myself.  My only true enemy can be me, everyone else is what i allow them to be, their relevance is subjective.

I've also found that humans aren't as simplistic and primitive as i assumed. For the first time they fascinate me and I'm interested in their life stories. For the first time i want to learn rather than have it all figured out. For the first time i crave the experience rather than the seemingly inevitable end. For the first time it seems, I'm awake. 

Bibbidi babidi boo.

Everything is in place. Circumstantially nothing has changed but there is happiness in me again. This time around i will protect it with all i have in me,for i am ready to fight again and fight i will. I ain't suffering from long-term depression, anxiety or fatigue disorders or any crap like that, i will not be reduced to some petty human weakling when nothing about me has ever been merely human.With people like me such peace is transitory and tomorrow i might be back to my pointless suicidal posts but for today...till the clock strikes midnight, i shall patter about in my glass slippers like a delighted sociopath. 

Past lifetimes of thought.

Today i remembered something that i thought was lost to me forever. I had rejoiced previously in being able to get past it only to realize that it was a big part of me and had been for years. Even in its complete and utter exclusion from my life and my thoughts, i had often dreamt disturbing dreams of what i had it seemed so easily left behind. Is it possible to love something you neither had nor lost, how about something you had never known? Without a trace of  tragedy i can't hope to understand it. What is this i wonder, having existed in it in the past for indefinite periods of time i would imagine i have all the answers but i don't. But i am not lost you see. I'm just a silent observer of a mind that works on its own and which i have no hope of manipulating. I was right about myself, i don't have a heart...not really. At the moment i find myself incapable of explaining why exactly,but someday i will. Someday i'll have all the answers. 

Ramblings of an inwardly old fool.

I've been thinking about so many things nowadays. In a certain way i'm regressing, think about it as walking through a never ending line of doors and rooms in unutterable darkness with the haunting whispers of things awakened from the dead that are always terribly familiar. All of this in the hope that somewhere along it all i will find out how to fix what is wrong with me. For some reason i have been thinking about my literature teacher a great deal lately and i don't know why. She did like my work somewhat at some time but she said that i was 'lost in translation' , running the race with both my hands and feet tied, that i was 'holding back', that she didn't know how to help me. I would just look at her blankly, how could i explain that my interpretation of poetry or my analysis of a character had nothing to do with my literary skills at all. How could i tell her that every ion in me was so damaged that my so-called writing suffering was perhaps the most insignificant after-effect. For a while i thought her transient beliefs regarding Bakhtawar Azam could save me. But as it turned out, we were both incapable of it.

I've wanted to write a book since i was 6, had all these ideas that it would be a bestseller, that the whole world would see that i'm good, so good at what i've been taught to believe i can do. My head is spinning. And it hurts all over and recently even eating has become a chore. I feel so done and whatever ambitions i had i've put them on some shaky footing hoping the future will magically take care of them all, completely without my involvement. Save your censure, for i'm embarrassed and disappointed and most of all so goddamn angry i want to run my head through a solid wall... and in the end the only person i can point my finger at is that sad little girl in the mirror who is wondering why she hasn't gotten struck by lightning yet. I realize that i'm in the race regardless and for the long haul and i can run it being afraid, threatened, vulnerable, and haunted or i can run it facing my fears with my head high and failing in some poetic way in the end. The second sounds better, this is precisely it, i always know what the right thing to do is, i do and i do that thing 95% of the time but what if i can't this time around? I don't like myself talking like this but for years all i've done is pace back and forth, yap to myself, write down on little pieces of paper what the solution is...what the process is, build little walls around myself - that is not entirely metaphorical by the way. I'm what is known as a rational, rationals you see according to some tests are the rarest normal personality type on the planet. Maybe i'm waiting for some happily ever after that will never happen, i thought i was brave, i thought i was a lot of things but i've got some of the concepts wrong. 

The time capsule.

It was a very early morning and it had rained the night before. The sky was a dull gray, in fact everything was a confusing dullness that I've only seen a few times in my life. Sometimes i think i'm dead, because death comes in so many forms and yet people still think it's when you depart the world in some ridiculous fashion often leaving behind weeping humans. I realize my views are often offensive, maybe hurtful but does it really matter when you're dead? At that moment i felt almost surreal like i wasn't here at all and then i looked back at my life and realized i hadn't been here, not really...as if i was some kind of forgotten dream whose existence is speculative. Truthfully, i feel like i'm stumbling around in the dark which has no end and where i really have no place to go and most of all i'm heartbroken with a very real pain in my chest that i feel even as i am writing this. As i stared at the little frogs yuppiting about in the garden outside i realized how it was all blank to me. I had these dreams when i was little, these ambitions of being a great writer but how could i have nurtured those lies for so long? Because right now there is nothing and i'm suffocating in it and yet I've lost all courage to leave. I've always had these great expectations from myself, these great ideas about what i am, where did i leave them. Now i look at people, ordinary people, and think about how magnificent their lives must be,while in any realistic universe they should have sold their souls to be me. 

A bowl of rat poison for the soul.

I'll be honest with you folks. I've hated my life as long as i have lived it. Even when it was something like good, the presence of a big, black hole had eclipsed the temporary fits of happiness. For that is all they have ever been...fits. Let me enlighten you as to the primary trait that my upbringing has tried to give me. Fear. Always be afraid. Afraid of people, what they can do to you, the vast world filled with these same beings, all of which operate at some advantage that i will never have. Be afraid of not being enough, for you will never be. Be afraid of places, typically large open ones. Fear the supernatural if you really can't find anything. Also i must let this fear inhibit and crush whatever talent there is in me just so i never have to see myself lose it. All defense mechanisms for something that should never have harmed me. But then again i am not what is in my nature, am i? I sure hope not. 

Malison avenue.

I spent eternity in the pursuit of one idea, only to turn around and realize that I'd never known what wanting anything was like, at all. To find that all the rules had been changed and I was bound to this like the devil has been bound to his boundaries since the beginning of the Earth.

I'm in a fog right now. I wish i could say it's as easy as confusion or boredom but i don't really know what it is. Sometimes it scares me, a whole lot of things scare me. In fact i'm not sure that i've felt any emotion in my entire life as recurrent and disastrous as fear. People say it's natural to be afraid, to be hurt, to love. I say bullshit. Nothing is natural to me, because if i was to go on that, you'd be reading something written by a very very different person. What can i really be, i ask, when all i know is how to be damaged? I learned a long time ago to not live by other people's ideas,to leave them to their mediocre preferences but every now and then i can't stop the hurt. Which is why i would prefer their hate for at least they're putting some thought into that. I can't stand their love because they don't love like i do and they will never be able to convince me they are enough. I want out so badly. I don't belong here, in this house, in this city. Nowhere. I want to go somewhere where no one knows me and never come back. Just be like a lost bad memory. Don't you see? I'm one day away from running screaming out of this place. And i would leave everyone i know behind especially my friends without looking back. Because all of them, all of them in their little heartless ways have most painfully disappointed me. All the early mornings i've spent in my balcony looking out towards the river flowing a little distance away from my house, have i wished i was at the bottom of it, to be somewhere where the pain has stopped and i've forgotten everything. Please let me leave. Please let me be done. 

Creatures by the bridge.

Everyday or almost every day for a long time, I have seen a little sickly dog by the side of the bridge. It's waiting to die for no one is merciful enough to kill it. Helping it, they think is useless for it's not of any pedigree value, obviously. But he's beautiful. He's hurt, I can see, for he limps on one leg and makes little faces of pain. But day after day he's still there. Still very much alive. I pass by in my car on some days with a few tears, on others an incurable fascination glistening in my eyes. He seems as if he has survived the ages of the Earth, I can feel wisdom, acceptance and myself in him. Don't be mistaken my young friends, it's not my lack or excess of self-esteem that leads me to think a dog and I are something of the same,but how could I see him and not notice it, as a short stab somewhere in that soul of mine .I have a good mind to go talk to him someday, he'd definitely be a lot better than some human twits of my acquaintance.By now you can imagine that social niceties are hardly my strong suit. Before you think I'm crazy, that to me is an incredibly flattering idea by the way, I'll tell you why I'm attached to that little dog. He is that creature that no one will shoot out of sheer inconvenience. And in my heart, I know I've been that creature too. Just as empty, lost and bleeding as him, but yes.. a lot prettier.    

Consolation girl.

I used to believe in fate but it's all being screwed.what i can't understand is why I of all imaginative beings, crave certainty, why i must know all the ways about everything as if knowing would or can possibly stop the burning. you see, a few months ago i had it all figured out; my settlements, my tragedy. I had hope but a strong sense of realism. i've been given freedom by unlikely components but the plan is all wrong. that's the problem with writers, they think the people of the real world are as open to willful manipulation as their self-written characters. my way or not, i know now that there is an emptiness inside me that nothing can ever fill,that no matter what i delude myself into loving, it's always going to be there. that all these ideas I've nurtured about myself and life (mostly from Dale Canergie books very popular in the 50s) are just so i don't end up as i am, little miss consolation girl who never quite lived up to her own ridiculously high expectations. like i said I've been here too long, it's time to give up,make a run for it before i'm caught again in the same current as i have been my whole life. I know I really am as terrible as I've always known,then what the hell am i doing having forgotten it for so long?