The Start of an Untitled Story

Earphones plugged in, The Sound of Silence playing, and the volume turned down to a level that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s voices were barely a whisper, he was all set. Pulling up the wooden chair, he cleared the desk top of all the usual clutter and set out just a scroll pad, carefully positioning it at the center of the table. This was supposedly the perfect setting to finally sit down and write his story. He picked up a pencil and touched the tip to the top left margin of the sheet in front of him.

It was at this moment that it struck him. Until now, he had always been very vague; so much so that even he had trouble deciphering his own obscure thoughts. And he also knew why. He needed a unifying theme... a motif. And not just for his story. Lucidity was something that had constantly eluded him. It was not that he didn’t have any ideas. But so muddled up they were that giving a pragmatic close to them was inconceivable.  And with every single idea, came its posse of doubts, fear and incertitude; those floating nimbus clouds addling the otherwise clear blue skies of his subconscious.

A torrent of thoughts was flooding the streets of his head. He found himself digressing from the task at hand. Maybe it was the words of the song refraining him from focusing. Perhaps Ludwig van would have been a better pick for this setting. He reached for the pause button on his iPod. The music stopped, but he left the earphones where they were. He liked it that way.

The pencil started shaping letters precariously, giving way to words that he hoped would eventually turn into a story.

Garden State

He never thought that this could ever happen to him. He had thought himself incapable of it. He had always assumed it to be the kind of stuff that one comes across only in fables. Hell, he had even scoffed at the thought of thinking about it.

But deep inside, there was still this little voice, which now he came to realize, seldom lied. The voice which he had always stifled. And he also knew that it would grow loud and strong one day, strong enough to stop him from ignoring it any further.

Now the time had finally arrived. Arriving in a manner which shattered all his notions, notions he had always known to be false. Notions he had willfully allowed to hoard up, never gathering the courage to face up to the truth and free his cluttered mind of them.

He knew reality was cruel. So he chose to escape.

And then it came, shaking him up from slumber, like a blast of ice cold water on a January morning. More cruel than he had thought it to be.


I snap back. Only to realize that I had long overslept. The window is no longer open, the moment is long gone. Evaporated is the half-chance. Things happen when you least expect them to. The real troubles in life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind: the kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Into the Dawn

As I stood staring

Staring at the stars

The endless sky spread above me

Below me, nothing but naked blades of grass

And I sat thinking

Remembering the left behind past

Most of which I wanted to forget

Albeit some moments which I wished would last

As I lay mystified

Wondering if this was it

Whether there was more that I could have done

Or had I done my bit

And I found my heart discovering

Courage to again stand up on my feet

It was time to start afresh

And wake up from the dream

Beyond the Blur

Where pleasure ends and pain begins

The lines are blurring

Waiting for the letters that no one sends

Life passes me by

Speaking into the phone that is my past

It is my own voice which echoes

Nothing but nothingness at last

As I go through my death throes

Staring into the darkness

A ghostly image it is that I see

It disappears as I reach out towards it

And I realize that it is no one but me

As I gaze into that mirror

Wondering of things that could have been

The pleasure has ended and the pain has begun

No line between the two can now be seen

a little pep talk

Do not assume anything.

Do all you can with what you have. Give it your hundred percent and never back out. If there's even a bleak chance... a glimmer of hope... if the door is just slightly ajar, go for it and push your way through. Do not just sit back assuming that it's all over and you can't do anything about it.

Do not assume that even after trying, you are going to end up failing. If you do have to assume, assume it to be positive. Do not be pessimistic about it. Do not cover up for your laziness by doing so. Anything and everything can be done if you want to do it. It’s not the laziness. It is fear. Do not hide it behind your facade of indifference. Instead, stop being afraid. The first step is the hardest to take. Stop coming up with excuses to avoid confronting challenges. You have the motivation. And you have whatever else it takes to do it. Do not let the fear overpower all of that. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take".

Stop playing the victim. It’s very easy to pass on the blame. Don’t say that it was destined to be that way. Take definitive action to correct whatever's wrong.

Don’t shit yourself into not believing in yourself. The course which your life takes is in your own hands. Stand up and take responsibility for it. Don’t just let it pass you by.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

“Invictus” - William Ernest Henley

Of stress, randomness and everything that’s wrong with me

I don’t know why I keep going back to it. Right after I do it, I promise to myself... never again. But then, as they say, the thing about promises is that they are meant to be broken (so clichéd isn’t it). But what if these promises have been made out to your own self? It’s easy lying to others, but what one should try to achieve, is to always be true to oneself.

wait a minute… what am I doing..? Why do I always start out to write something and then drift off to these vague philosophies of mine, thus ending up with something totally different from what I had set forth to write in the first place. Why can’t my mind just focus on the job at hand.. Actually, that’s one more problem that I need to address. There’s just so many of them. I can never seem to get ahead of them. Anyway, I should learn to rise above these trivialities.

I’m sounding too random now. Time to snap back... remember that thing I mentioned earlier. The one after which I promise myself that I’ll stay away…

I’ve realized that sadness or stress doesn’t make me give in to it. In fact, in such a state, I tend to be more of a fighter (or at least that’s what I’d like to believe) and put in that extra effort to see myself through the rough.

I guess I do it when I am bored. When I have nothing good to do and see everyone else around me buried in useful productive work, I flip (and that is one more thing about myself that I need to change). That is when I try to create this illusion of happiness and importance around me.

I’m sorry that this whole post has turned out to be so arbitrary that now even I can’t understand what I wanted to write (another thing that is wrong with me, and this is the biggest one – I don’t know what I want). So just to inject some semblance of sanity into all this gibberish, I’d just say that this “thing” I’ve been talking about… it could be anything. It can imply different meanings to different individuals. It’s anything you perceive to be negative in your life (yeah, more of my philosophical crap).

And as for me, my name is Kartik and I’ve been clean for a month now.

“what do you do when you feel stressed or sad?
 

I pretend I'm a little kid again and I'm sneaking through my childhood home. I try to remember how doors opened, how closets smelled, how floors squeaked.”
 

(from 'pearls before swine')

Clarifications

It seems that my first post was taken very seriously by some persons who felt uncomfortable reading what I have written. This calls for some clarifications to be made…

I am not suffering from any actual serious suicidal tendencies. (To even think that I would be driven to such extreme measures… but then these are people who really care about me)

The above point should have been clear by the fact that I explicitly mentioned in my earlier post that I tend to sensationalize stuff. So, in effect, the last post was just an overstated description of my state of mind, which I guess overshot a little too much.


I should also pronounce at the very outset that…

My first post, in a way, also sets the tone for my future posts. In effect, there would be more of such dark and obscure stuff written here. This is because when I’m happy, I don’t feel the need to write about it because well… I’m just happy and enjoying life. It is only when I am sad or restless, that I need to give vent to all the trapped negative energy inside of me. And this I would be doing by expressing myself here. But in no way does this mean that my posts would be gloomy and depressing, as everything I write should be seen in a humorous light. No need to get all serious about it.

I guess this much should suffice for now.


“Through humour, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.”
- Bill Cosby

“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
- Arundhati Roy

Suicidal

It all started with birju’s GTalk status message reading "wish I had a gun", which prompted me to give shape to the strikingly similar thoughts already wandering in my head. Immediately, I changed my status message to "I would borrow it from birju and shoot myself"

Suicidal thoughts were filling my head since the morning after I had given a particular exam. But I don’t think that the reason for this state of mind was just this exam alone. I was already on the edge and this was just the extra push needed... the last straw. Of late, sitting alone in my room, trying not so hard to concentrate on the job at hand (usually studying), I had found myself pondering over philosophical questions about life and if it was worth all the effort. I would thus drift away into the surreal only to suddenly realize that a lot of time had been wasted in this futile exercise, and I would then try to shake myself awake from that reverie.

And again today, I found myself falling down that same abyss of depression and self-loathing all over again.

I guess writing about it and talking and discussing about it helps, as it distracts from all that is wrong with just me. It helps me in staying away from all the seemingly ‘bad’ things which one would resort to when in a similar depressed state.

I know that I exaggerate and get all dramatic about it, but then it helps me behave normally again, and as a friend put it, “thus life becomes a bit interesting”. And that is exactly what I have tried to do here in this post.

I know that it is just a fleeting phase which, like everything else in this temporal existence called life, would pass. (see… I told you… I just over-dramatized it again. I love doing that)


I never expected that this, a piece titled ‘Suicidal’, would be my first blog-post. But as it turns out, life is so freaking unpredictable!