Exhaustion

There are these evenings when you are sitting with an assortment of people-- friends, strangers, foes, in-betweeners who, while they're talking and sharing stories, are fading into and out of focus. It's like those popular cinematic shots where you see everything around you but comprehend nothing clearly. It is a surreal feeling. Of being there and not. The firm weight on your shoulders, the pressure on your temples, the heaviness in the air you breathe three dozen times every minute in the hours you sit there attempting to settle into the ambiguous ritual of a social exercise.

Maybe such a thing is hard to experience if you aren't sitting under a velvet cloud of sadness. Not your usual deal, mind. As a qualified expert in the subject, I can tell you that miseries you can't verbalise are the hardest. Not flimsy little pains that translate briskly into tears. These are the ones that are stomping the ground of your lungs. It's the pain in your face when you wake up every morning after nights of dreamless sleep. Then again, it isn't always solemn. It is the strange numbness you feel when all your sincere hope of being wiser at a later time gets crushed by the pathetic spectacle of seeing somebody twice your age a few drinks down and gingerly breaching the subject of someone they once loved.

Everything has been a blur these past few weeks. If there's any time for anything, it's only to stop and review the list of failures -- past and waiting to happen. At work, people religiously believe that nothing is worth doing more than twice. I'd like to apply that attitude to mistakes. Ha Ha.

Very learned people have reasoned that it is a phase. I have now gracefully accepted the fact that I will always be surrounded by people who have known me forever, know nothing about who I am, with very imaginative ideas of what I should do to be happy. Happier. It feels like I am a wrinkled, broken old hag conversing with children who haven't yet learnt that it is easier to take misery when the source of it is somebody else.

I have realistic demands. What I'd really like to do less than twice is explain myself. Actually, I don't want to do anything at all. I wish to dedicate no effort. Haven't you had mornings when you'd do anything to be left alone to fall back in bed into a deep, limitless slumber?


 Like other vain people, I like mirrors. I must've been around eight when I was standing on tiptoe in the room I shared with my sister and was stuck to the mirror, examining a scar on my forehead. My sister walked in and gravely admonished me for the incongruous vanity I had at such a young age -- rattling off judgement she'd heard from some idiotic adult, needless to say. I scurried out of the room, embarrassed and all the while wondering what the word vanity meant.

I have a four foot long mirror in my room. It's where I've looked at least once everyday for the last five years. Perfunctorily before heading off to college; doubtfully when wearing something that's supposed to be pretty and more than anything else, despondently while examining the always worsening state of my hair. When you are newly young, these things are of much interest, they tell me. When I was newly young, I was never very seriously dissatisfied with what I saw in the mirror. This was until I walked in to a brightly lit room in another part of the house one day and caught an unexpected reflection. I looked nothing like me.

Nobody deserves to be disappointed more than twice. The trouble, I have concluded after much, much thought in numerous long-distance bus-rides is that this bumpy ride to adulthood was doomed from the very beginning. You go from getting attention, toys and expensive vacations in exchange for good behaviour, fantastic grades and obedience and somewhere along the way segue into attempting to please every person you shake hands with and coaxing life to take the second right at the roundabout and throwing tantrums when things don't work out. This trip is also called maturity, by the way.


I'm looking at the years it took to finally arrive at some kind of stability and comfort and easily throwing it away at the hands of people who've found themselves in shit, for a change. I can't kick myself enough. The inevitable truth is, it happened. And will happen again. Again and again and again and...yawn.


I'm looking at not looking into a mirror again. I'm looking at a million tired utterances of What's the point. I'm looking at the powerlessness of a child. I'm looking at other people's lonelinesses, fears and regrets enveloping me. And frankly, I don't want any of this shit. All I want is to go back to sleep and not wake up until they've all gone away.