Waking Up (A short story)

On the surface he is calm as a lake is. Deeper down, he is tumultuous as a river gushing out from rocks. Fighting the monster up above in the head, he threw away the quilts. The existential dread stared at him with the looks that pierce right through the soul and for a moment he cowered; he cowered because it was tiring, because facing the same question every morning and then coming up with the same profound-sounding but subjective to the level of hilarity answer was exhausting. The questions still rang in his mind.

The touch of the mattress was soothing than the clear blue sky, which he couldn’t see because of the building blocking his view by the window, but which he could imagine from many earlier sunny days. On other days the prospect of rain was scary. Wasn’t it soothing to let the rain dribble on the windows instead of going down the street and face the inconvenience; not the inconvenience of being soaked by rain but by the maddening noise that melancholy on the rainy days the streets is.

Or what if you go outside and find that life is normal for everyone else, like it always is. Will you go through again the feeling of being left out? The feeling that everyone else around is just fine. And then suddenly feeling guilty for negating troubles of strangers. But how else will you treat strangers? And then coming across the idea that if you treat yourself as a stranger, you will appear as normal to yourself.

The quilts still are touching his body. But they are melting away like snow does. He finds himself in a mirror. Rather, an imposter who just looks like him stares at him through the mirror. Stares are a constant fixation in his life. He doesn’t look at anyone or anything in the eyes. But stares of disfigured, shapeless, ambiguous monsters keep him in their grip throughout the day. Even when he is asleep, like he was last night, ghosts swirled around in the room. And some ghosts were shameless, cruel enough to enter his dreams, distorting his memories and clowning his fears, making him to want to wake-up, but then he was afraid of the hydra that waking up is.

Showering is difficult. It seems like a betrayal. Freshening up feels like giving up the morose skin. The hot water brushing the skin marks the start of a new day. But the dance of water tinkling down is old. The steam as dull as antiquity. The wetness on the body as archaic as the fears in the mind. Sometime down the shower the emotions fade away. It is he and the water. A moment of escape. A moment of bliss. But he feels a jolt when the water turns off. It is the same old jumble of silent shrieks and calm cries. Like an 80 years old crying but not able to produce a cry. Like a kid wrestling with unseen demons but unable to articulate himself.

The dressing is senseless, just another chore of just another day. The day extends itself before his eyes: as vast, as unchanging as a desert. He cannot make sense of the day. Deserts are not meant to be made sense of. Deserts are meant to be survived. To understand a desert you have to go through it, live through it. Have you ever seen a picture of a desert? How meaningless it is? But how can you photograph unchanging vastness, unrivaled ruin-ness? You have to be part of the ruins to understand the ruin. You have to be just another particle of sand to fathom the existence of the desert.

“Bam,” door closed. Dizzy. Sunlight. Trepidation. But it is all fine. The sun is shining as it was shining just before the dinosaurs were consumed by fire and before the second last Tasmanian tiger died and left the last Tasmanian tiger to be the strongest of all Tasmanian Tigers. May be a kid will walk down the street and will smile at him. And he will be happy for being alive. May be he will come across the misery of life in the street and he will try to amass all the numbness to look the other way. May be he will roam the streets all alone and the only misery he will have to fight will be of the last day; making today the extension of yesterday and today the yesterday of tomorrow.