Picture extracted from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkPR4Rcf4ww
Today has been one of those days I felt so empty, mostly contemplating things blatantly as the hands from the clock moved like a ticking time bomb ready to detonate inside my mind-cave. Sometimes I feel like the character Josef K from The Trial where the time conspicuously kicks into my room and arrest me for eternity, unknown of the reasons and me being unsure on how to comply to the series of events that comes thereafter.
Most of the time, my life feels so empty, like an eternal being trapped in a void, and today was one of those days I felt I could just fall into that void surrendering my personification of “self”[1], letting go of everything that has been around. The pain that has been enthralling. The ecstasy that has been torturing like a death penalty on an incineration machine. The ungratefulness of the breath as I take, the steps I try to make sense of.
The dogs howl indefinitely outside. The lights try to surrender to the glazes of dark clouds, layer by layer reflecting upon the mystery of the world around. As the yellow light under which a weirdly involved guy clicks the keyboards, punching onto the emptiness, the sound bluntly wakes up the creatures residing within his mind-cave. The background is filled with silences juxtaposed by the noise from the laptop. I don’t know how he is able to manage to keep up with his flow of thoughts, his typing speed assisted by the memories carved in his muscles. His chat is filled up by one girl at the moment who is as mysterious as the inside of a black hole. Intermittently he sends some happy emoticon just to be sure she responds. And he knows that is just ephemeral and shall vanish in times to come, short-circuiting his mind with a sudden impulse that shall tame him at that moment.
He writes. He writes again. Words after words. Sentences after sentences. And still, the emptiness persists like a relaxed beat from his heart that will attenuate soon, if not forever. The dogs keep on howling like some type of demonic ritual, calling forth the ever-growing anxieties within him. That’s how life is supposed to be for him and he feels he is no different than others. There’s nothing special about anyone and that is what makes everyone special.
The world is bizarre
The world is bizarre, especially when you have to face the bureaucratic nature of reality itself. Everywhere you go, you feel you are tamed by the system, chaining you time and again like someone is holding up a vicious monster inside a cave. You are caged no matter how free you feel. And it’s the calmness within you that makes you realize that freedom is just a state of mind, differing in perception of the people and their behaviour, of the working mechanics of day-to-day streams of life, and most importantly, of inevitableness of living, of struggles, of miseries, of hardships, and above all, of the happiness that illusions everyone. Even inside your own mind, you feel caged sometimes, weighted down by the waves of thoughts that come and go. And there might be a time when the waves no longer come ashore. That will be it. You realize the moon has drifted far away, the heavy gravitational influence of which is out of reach, and you no longer feel a connection to your thoughts. They shall not make sense, if not the least they will die of the judgements that have been passed down since you knew who (or what) you were, like a domino effect of some sort toppling everything inside you.
As the background music inside his headphone rings with dark vibes, this quirky guy tries to assert his insanity onto the void that is slowly being filled in with the booze of words that keep on expanding like the universe, increasing the entropy of the meaninglessness of his existence. His gazes are locked onto something, yet his thoughts are swimming in the ocean of randomness like a missile trying to destroy a moving target, all locked. Boom! The silence now echoes. The dogs are dead mysteriously. There is a long pause in the background music as if his ears have diverted the energies to some other senses like a voltage drop in a network full of other loads. That is unchangeable for now. Slowly and slowly the thoughts are decaying. Maybe it’s the exponential decay and as the curve tries to kiss the asymptote, it fails inadvertently.
Life falls eventually. All the things should fall. That’s how nature works, how the time works. Time doesn’t heal everything permanently but does try to anaesthetize the entities that make up a part of the experience, your experience. And that’s how it should be, to be honest, because a broken vase gets mended to this aphotic scars that signify how things were in the past, the reflections of which are rendered on the single dimensions of memories. Alienation, separation, disdain, or whatever you may call — they are always extant to make you realize the realness of you. The real you who tries to understand the severity of everything around. That’s okay. You understand that. You are able to feel the realness of this complexity, that is life itself.
Life is a conundrum in itself. And time and again, I am reminded of Kafka’s Metamorphosis which inevitably reflects directly upon my life. The esoteric ripples can be seen relating to my career, my family and the relationship I have with the external surrounding. Among such lies the real hunger artist within me for whom nothing seems satisfactory enough to fill this emptiness. I know how the situation is and probably you might also know. These words might resonate with you. Or might not. That’s not the real question. The actuality of these things lies among how you feel about your own life.
Live. Don’t just breathe. But nothing can be done about this. I am here just breathing, and every inhale is like a whirlpool sucking the lifeless boat. It’s alright! Just let it sink and reach the inner depths of the ocean, the insignificant vastness within you. This is the nightmarish side where reality resides; the reality of mine, of yours and of everyone around.
That’s how Kafkaesque[2] it is.