Bigmouth Strikes Again

Guess who’s turning 20?
I guess Wallace.
“No”, Wallace says, “You’re the bait today.”

6 Minutes to Turning Twenty.

Why? Why me? I don’t wish to grow up. I wish to stay like this forever. Fat and immature. That is my USP.

Wallace says to break out the L-word. I say “Lesbians?”
“Funny.” Wallace says, full of sarcasm.

5 Minutes to Twenty.

I am aloof. I am broken. I am callous.

“No, you’re just whiny and overdramatic”, Wallace says.
“I don’t think overdramatic is a word.”

4 Minutes to Twenty.

Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking, when I said I’d like to smash every tooth in your head.

“Listening to The Smiths does not maketh a woman cooler.” Wallace says.

“I actually do like them.”

“Do you, now?”

3 Minutes to Twenty

I check Facebook for obligatory wishes by long forgotten ‘friends’.

2 Minutes to Twenty

I’m not ready to make a choice. Yet. Maybe after a minute? I hope for a miracle and expect the worst. I’m ready to face reality, I think.

“What is the big deal? It’s twenty, not the end of the world. You’ll just have to clean up your act.” Wise words from a fool.

“My act, you say? I have none.”

“Everybody acts, you’re no different. You’re just a better actor or you think you are.”

“I’m turning twenty; I don’t need to listen to you, Wallace. Go away.”

1 Minute to Twenty

“Wallace, where are you? I need you, you fucking idiot! WALLACE! Fucking retard.”

I can hear the sea.

Twenty

Happy Birthday to me.

(PS- Yes, it is my birthday (the big 2-0) and no, I don’t know what prompted me to write this broken piece of crap. If you can understand it then kindly explain it to me.)

Ambush.

As I write this, I’m blinded by the steady stream of tears escaping from my eyes and falling unceremoniously onto my bed sheet. The fact that I have been incapable of discovering the reason for their initiation astounds me.
Gingerly, I pick up my phone, do what every female on this planet does whilst in this situation and call a friend. By  doing so I succumb to a trait tauntingly  attributed to females and since I am not usually for all this sappy emotional crap, this act delivers the second surprise of the night.

Disconnected, no, not the call but I feel so. The phone, on the other hand keeps ringing. 

In My Place

La-la-la-la.

I stood in front of the mirror lamenting what I’d become.

La-la-la-la.

I had a piece of glass in my hand stained with shades of red.

La-la-la-la.

I closed my eyes expecting to find an answer, all I could see were little silver dots slowly reverting to black nothingness.

La-la-la-la.

I hummed on. In front of me was the pale ghostly version of a person I once knew. A shadow, I was scared of her. She stopped a tear in its tracks. A sly smile danced on her lips, on my lips. “Come closer”, she said. I crept towards her. She showed me her arms, her legs, her hands, and everywhere I looked, I saw red. A monotony of color. It intrigued me as much as it horrified me.

She beckoned and I crawled towards her. Finally, my face touched the cold surface of the mirror and she disappeared. I stayed like that for seconds, minutes, hours awaiting the proverbial ‘new day, new beginning’.

I kept searching for her, my comrade in arms. I concluded that she had given up too, maybe she had gone to a better place. I felt that I had to do the same but I did not know how to. The futility of this situation had just begun to dawn upon me and I was terrified, I was alone. I screamed, I cried, I begged for her to come back. Silence had never been this excruciating.

I moved away from the mirror and I saw her. I smiled, she smiled. She had come back for me. My faith had been reinforced and I didn’t feel lonely anymore. I was happy, I began to hope.

She whispered a lullaby and I fell into a deep slumber.

Daily Prompt: My Hero AKA An Attempt to chart the course of the classic ‘What Went Wrong?’

I understand that I’m a little late for this but I couldn’t help it. I don’t usually participate in Daily Prompt and contests as such but this one’s different.

My hero isn’t someone who saved me from a burning building, neither did he save me from an animal of some sort nor is he some famous personality. He isn’t even discernible in the crowd. He’s an ordinary man with an ordinary home and an ordinary life. He isn’t even alive.

I was a kid and the apple of his eye or so I’m told. He loved me and was proud of me. It was all about walks in the park and ice creams back then. He helped me with my homework, went to my PTA’s and did a bunch of other stuff that I don’t remember anymore. Memories fade, grief doesn’t.

He used to walk me down to the bus stop and when I came back from school, he used to carry my backpack and ask me what I did in school that day. He loved to chat about politics. He used to play badminton with me when none of my friends would agree to and he was 70 years old!  He was ferociously protective of me and couldn’t see me crying. He stayed up countless nights caring for me when I was sick; he was the last to go to bed in those days.

He had hopes for me, expectations from me. He believed that I would make a change someday. He didn’t influence the course of history but he did influence my future.

I saw him die right in front of my eyes and I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to save him, I wished to be the hero for once, but I couldn’t. Friends consoled me by saying that he’d seen the world, he was old, and it was expected. I was 11 years old and my grandfather had died. The man who had taught me to live life was dead. Irony at its finest.

It’s been 8 years now and I still shed a tear or two when I think of him. To tell you the truth, it’s a blur most of the time and soon enough nature will take its course and I’ll forget entirely.

I hope to see you again, Dadu.

Dusk And Summer

“Anarchy” we yelled.

“Submit” they ordered.

“Revolution” we demanded.

They just laughed.

Ah, I can’t finish this. See, I was going to write about a glorious fight, The Man versus the People. It was going to be a story about this person who stands up, against the authorities; about the atrocities (for the lack of a better word) committed by them on that hapless individual and on the gullible idiots that supported him. It was to end in a tragedy and frankly, being the morose fool that I am, what else could I possibly end it in?

Basically I wonder, how long can a person fight, whether it is against the authorities, the bigger man or a bully. How long, before the flame goes out? How long, before that person realizes that the real battle is raging inside them? How long? There is a perpetual struggle for victory existing between the hope which gives them strength to fight till their last breath ( and I’m not being melodramatic) and the instinct to give up at the first instance of trouble.

The moment you begin to question yourself, you’ve already lost. Give up; give in, the fight is not worth it. Nothing is, really. Run away, there’s always a better place, a better time to live in, to revel in. And then, when that goes to hell, run again. Run hard, run fast and then everything’s a blur. The haze is your redemption.

The song is Dusk and Summer by Dashboard Confessional.

Voice Inside My Head.

I made the introductions, you came over. I tried to be funny, you tried to laugh. We talked and rambled on.  We discussed love, life and all that entails. I miss those simpler days.

“It was fun.”

In every gossip magazines there’s this staple question that they ask from the celebrities, “What would be the last line of your autobiography?” they say. And the aforementioned celebrities in their quest of upholding their so called “awesome” image try to give a witty answer and believe you me; some of them even get away with it while the others fail miserably. Anyway, I’ve come to a point in my life where I direct those questions towards myself. Not the ones where they (celebs) are prodded to clarify their countless affairs but just those ‘what-is-the-meaning-of-life’ types of questions. I mean, I’m not going through a mid life crisis for to be even thinking about such things and hell, I’m not even in my 20′s yet. Someone once told me that they’d like to read a compilation of my diaries. Yes, I kept a diary when I was a kid and yes, I was obsessed with The Princess Diaries but everyone goes through that phase so I guess there’s nothing to be ashamed of, right? For a concluding line to my autobiography, “it was fun” is quite nice and would suffice. Would it be accurate, though? If I think about it, so far along the road, I’ve had my share of bumps. I might be unhappy but I’m here and I’m alive. Sometimes, it’s just easier to forget whatever one has gone through the day when at the end of it they’re content. The achievement of that happiness although momentary, is the reason why they are able to get out of the bed the next day. Hope is a wondrous thing if used wisely.

The title is a line taken out of the song “I miss you” by Blink 182.
And truly my friend, I miss you.

It Doesn’t Matter Where, Just Drive.

I slept.

I drank because I needed sleep. I slept every day and every night. I never was and never would be an insomniac. Being an insomniac while being depressed was the only cliché that I refused to subject myself to, it was my saving grace of sorts in the long road of non-conformism I had supposedly committed myself to.

A little more than half, taken neat, did the trick. My point was to never get hammered but to have just enough so that it could give me a dreamless deep slumber so that if I woke up the next day, the usual weariness would subside. Now, you must be thinking how does that happen? Isn’t alcohol supposed to do the exact opposite? Well, I was and am different that way, maybe I had a high tolerance. Sometimes, quantity and not quality matters. But I am digressing.

So, a certain person whom I called my friend and gladly so, had accompanied me on this particular sojourn. The friend chose this opportunity to lament about the emotional predicament which plagued the world at large whereas I did the utterly foolish mistake of ruminating. I couldn’t help it, and this time, contemplation and alcohol greeted each other like long-lost siblings. They acted like catalysts for my actions henceforth.

Maybe I used the alcohol as a mask. It is a rather convincing one. I can’t help who I am. I can’t help who I’ve become. I’m not dark, just pretending to be. I lie most of the times. I pretend to laugh or smile, maybe to fit in, maybe to get that sensation of being just another face in the crowd. I don’t wish to be unique. Being unique has gradually become a stereotype in itself. This might be unrelated but a great man once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”.

Everyone has their demons, everyone is just a little lost on the inside. Hope is an obsolete illusion. I’m not pessimistic, just bordering on realism.

The song is “It doesn’t matter where, just drive” by Snow Patrol.

Lost in Hollywood.

It’s quite idiotic to consider online personality tests to be accurate. They only provide sustenance to your paranoia and the occasional bouts of hypochondria.
So one wonders as to why our blogger or anyone for that matter gives a damn about them? Why do people take them as viable evidence to their hastily made appointments with the shrink?
It’s probably because these are the only ‘reasonable’ explanations around for their ailments, however nonexistent they might be. These tests are even worse for those people who don’t have a defined opinion about themselves regardless of how pessimistic it is.

When one sees those many options laid out in front of them, the sin of avarice takes over. It’s in human nature to expect more. ‘Karo Zyada Ka Irada’ is a popular and successful advertisement running in India. Anyway, one feels like they connect on a more primal and personal level with those options. It’s like those four choices are an embodiment of their emotions. They correlate with those four options so much that they’d even get them engraved on their headstone.

Or maybe it’s nothing serious and just another way to have a few laughs.
One can never tell.

“Lost in Hollywood” is a particularly soulful song by System of a Down, the one band which can reduce me to melancholy.

Little Boxes

So if you think about it, depression isn’t the end of the world.
If statistics proven by scientists are to be believed, then every 2 out of 10 people in the world are suffering from depression. Half of them don’t even realize it, they just brush it off as an aftertaste of some particularly devastating event and after many years have passed, it’s considered to be a side-effect of an overtly pessimistic attitude.

So one fine day, sipping cappuccino in a plastic cup, I decide that I’m depressed and instead of going to a psychologist, friend or a parent (like any normal person would), I create a blog.
Soon, another realization dawns on me, I’m not a writer.  So the whole point of this blog becomes moot, right? But the thought of being anonymous gave me a euphoric rush bordering on mania or maybe that was the neat Vodka I’d  been drinking?
One can never tell.

Since we’re talking about alcohol, the other day I called up my father to tell him that I had gone to the gym ( I have issues) and he thought I was talking about drinking Gin. He was surprised by my clarifications, obviously.

“Little Boxes” is the theme song of ‘Weeds’ and has been on repeat for the past two hours.