First, I will come right out and say that I believe human beings are incapable of change. The constraints of morality and faith no matter how binding, cannot change a person’s inner desires. I strongly believe that we don’t change but become more of ourselves. Now that might be one of the discoveries that I made that changed my life or that might be a lie that I fabricated and subsequently fed myself because I fear the influence of others on me. This dichotomy of reasons is a result of my splitting consciousness. Anyway, every discovery must have a catalyst. Especially if it’s a discovery about oneself. For me, it was COVID. That whole year made me look into myself in a way which I refused to do for a long time. And for good reason. All through the first 6 months of COVID, I spent my college days in my grandmother’s house situated in the countryside of West Bengal, India. Social distancing was scarce in those regions, and I was always surrounded by my family members. But, for as long as I have known myself, I have been prone to alienation. So, every so often I would always take a break from the laughing and the fun and the happiness and go sit in this secluded place above the terrace from where only the vaguely blue sky bounded all around with thick treetops is visible. From here I could hear the loud jokes and opinions and the yell of my mother and her mother, and I would be so excited that I would get goosebumps all over my thin and gangly arms. I found it interesting that to be happy amongst other people and with them, I had to remove myself from that social situation. Strangely enough, when I tried to remember what I was talking about when I was downstairs with them just a few minutes ago, I couldn’t do it. Even if I did, looking at that moment from an ‘external point of view’ that is staring at them from above the terrace hunching over the 1/2 feet boundary above 2 floors is what gave that moment its significance. Little did I know that my life as a ‘spectator’ was slowly dawning upon me. I have always been lonely. I knew that. But it is quite difficult to accept it when you are not alone all the time. It is even more difficult to embrace it in a way which is not exactly positive or negative. Both of those things happened to me after I went back to my own home and had to stay in my room for another 6 months following COVID protocols. I didn’t want to sleep in my own bed, so I was sleeping in the guest room with my bed’s mattress on the floor. Every day I would wake up early because we didn’t have curtains in that room. My room’s window faced a wall, so I hardly had any sunlight for the last 5 years. My 20th Birthday that year was an important one. It was one of my first birthdays where I didn’t want anything. When mother came to the guest room to wish me, I looked at her sunlight face and had the sudden urge to cry. That’s all I could conjure because I declared myself physically incapable of crying a few years ago. At that moment I could feel the passage of time, every nanosecond, surging through my body like wheel spikes on a snowy road. I wasn’t afraid of her mortality, nor was I afraid of mine. I just couldn’t stand that moment of joy in her eyes when she celebrated my existence. I wouldn’t celebrate my existence if someone held a gun to my face. At one point I wanted to go outside naked and run around screaming. But what would that mean? I could feel the self-loathing overflowing. I would often talk to myself loudly, discussing past embarrassing situations and laughing at jokes that I only could understand. We would also have disturbing conversations like “Hey do you think if you use that knife to slice open your belly, it will relieve your stomachache?” “It’s enticing, but I doubt that”. During dinner time, when all three of us were sitting together, they were talking while I looked outside the door and towards the Royal Poinciana tree wondering how it would look like when it’s all red. “Finish your food”, said the clueless woman. Or did she know everything from the beginning? The body dysmorphia was also at an all-time high. I would stare at my body for hours at a time in the mirror, laughing, the mere thought of that body being in the same vicinity as anyone else repulsed me. I constantly said to myself “I have found happiness in misery”. The more I was getting comfortable with myself the more I was embracing the Idea of self-preservation. As I lay in my bed and my father watched television in the living room and my mother watched her serials on her phone in their bedroom, I said to myself that this is what has always happened in our family COVID or no COVID. I started questioning it and seeing my parents as individual people, existing based on their own merit. When my father and I sat down on the balcony in the evening while my mother made us tea, conversations with him always went in the same direction and I gathered my relationship with him was especially very materialistic and situational. Meanwhile, my consciousness was disassociating from myself and becoming very hypersensitive. As I grew more familiar with myself, I started looking at myself from a third-person’s perspective. I grew tired of being aware. Tired of having senses. At times I resented even having a physical body. ‘That Guy’ who floats above me just sits back and watches, he doesn’t control me, he just occasionally chimes in from time to time. “Whoa, that was weird!”. He became a confidant of sorts. A frenemy. Someone who knew me head to toe and someone I could talk to any time, anywhere. And because he was a spectator, he knew the randomness of the universe. He made me accept my own mortality and the mortality of others around me. Every time my mother or father went outside, he would show me numerous ways in which they can die. Numerous ways in which they can be exploited. Every waking moment of my life outside of my home, I have seen countless ways in which cars, bridges, murderers, serial killers and rapists can hurt me. In the end, I would say that before I used to live my life not knowing, living in the moment, not questioning my happiness, and not caring about the conditions of love and now I hover over my own body spectating, unable to engage or perhaps more precisely, refusing to. But this just might be a steady stream of bullshit and a desperate grab for attention. That’s him, not me
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