holiday, death, quest, love

As the holiday session clumsily rolls towards its end, I tell myself just couple more hours and I can go back to work. Not necessarily because I like my work, but because I do not like being alone. Now the question becomes why am I alone, I have a family in town who loves me, have friends who care for me. But the truth is I have always felt left out and melancholic even when I apparently had everything. This is how I was created, and this is how I learned to hate and whip myself.

One of my friends asked me recently if I have noticed my pattern for romantic pursuit. I exactly knew what he meant, and I at the same time hated and loved him for at least being another person other than me who took time to see the pattern. Still I asked him, pretending to not know what he was getting at-“what do you mean?” “You have always tried to attain the somewhat unattainable”. I laughed, we both did. But for me the laugh was more like challenging the concept of “unattainable”. Somehow to buy into that to me would mean to step out of the bubble that I have in my head. In the bubble everything was possible, distance, education, body, state of being (singlehood or not) nothing mattered. In contrast to outside world, the bubble in my head has always told me am worth it and people should know it.

Death came to me as a concept when I was four. Losing one of my closest people at that point, who still remains a part of me, I asked “why do people die”. The answer was simple; when we get old we die. This logic of death frightened me, does this mean all will die? And does this mean as am the youngest I will be left alone? A selfish anger and pain made my connection to death very early in my life. My four year old self stood in the dark balcony and cried often, I told god how unjust his rule was. Telling him that I wanted to die before my mother, grandmother and sisters left as I did not want to be left alone. The disappearing tears in the darkness of the nights were in a way death to me, death to my willingness to live to leave a legacy. I would rather die with everyone around me than live long to perhaps leave a legacy of a lonely man. My insecurity with my existence created a sense of self-pity, an apparently miserable state of mind, but for me that was a romantic idea that told me-few more days and then I can leave. Since I can remember I wanted to die, to prove my existence was worth it, I imagined everyone dropping whatever they were doing to come and mourn my end. I imagined and felt a cruel joy in finally having a triumphant moment, the last smile if I might, when I was worth people’s love and time.

My need to be surrounded by love, my self-centered idea where people will love me back the way I loved them, even in this writing when I try to be harsh to myself, I still leave a trail of pity- a subtle cry saying love me please. As I grow older I see that helpless selfish kid in me more and more. Please look at me, please love me, please tell me I am worth it. And the funny thing is I want all these from people who I want and I think should say these-people who often never even take time to look at me. The more difficult the person, the more I want it from them. My friends smiling face, “you have always tried to attain the unattainable”.

Why do I write about my life proving to the world that I am an annoying needy person? Even when I write all these words I know kind words would be thrown at me with genuine intentions. But would that change anything? Would that end my craving to be taken care of? To be loved? Honestly, it is not that I had a completely loveless life. My mother and grandmother loved me unconditionally. My sisters loved me with all possible conditions growing up, but then they were kids too. And now as our lives criss-cross less often their love has become more unconditional. But once again the quest for the “unattainable love” is perhaps in my gene. My therapist often has to remind me that I am intellectualizing my emotions rather than feeling them. Perhaps I stopped feeling and instead intellectualized love, belonging and death. After all feelings can hurt, pierce deep within and bleed invisibly.

I often ask if the lack of a dead body proves lack of death as well. Aspirations, dreams, longing and the failure to get any of these the way one wanted, aren't that also in a way several deaths? All these and much more did not have a separate body than the one we were born with. Just because that lump of bone and flesh and certain chemical and electrical impulses keep repeating, that does not discount the thousand deaths that happened already. I once saw a jute mill by the Ganges when I was a kid; it was closed for a long time the machines, the people coming in and going out, the productions all halted. But still the building stood, reminding what it was and lamenting what it could have been. Perhaps I am like that closed down jute mill. What I was and what I could have been.