Wonder

Where are you? Who are you? Among all the questions that crowd in your head all day, do these never knock? When will you give them time? When you are no longer in a where and are no longer a who?

 You know, I get mighty scared by all of these. I’m supposed to do concisely the following:

1        Go to school safely.

2        Do all I am supposed to do at school.

3        Return home safely and on time.

4        Study as much as I can.

5        Go to my tuitions.

6        Score as much as I can in exams.

7        Have a really good Higher Secondary.

8        Not watch too much TV or sit at the computer for long.

9        Not think about girls now.

The problem is with all the things I do outside the list. One of those things is flee, flee from the questions I had once helped germinate, the thoughts I had once initiated, The Chamber I had once helped open. Maybe you won’t know what the bloody hell I’m talking about. Yeah, you won’t, ‘coz those are not normal thoughts of normal people. Those are the thoughts of kinda normal people with dark, hidden, far-from-normal facets. Chambers, alleys, dungeons in the head. They keep asking:

What does it matter in the end?

Are you different from God?

Who are you?

Your girlfriend is the same thing as you, isn’t she?

Where’s happiness?

I’m dead scared sometimes. No, no, I whisper silently and bury my face in the pillow when they wake. But they don’t go easily. And sometimes they come hard, and take away things. Parts of me, my dreams, my happiness; pieces from the meaning of myself. I lie alone and stare at the sepia of the sodium streetlight outside the window — the colour of dreams. And I clutch at the absent person beside me, knowing there’s nothing but air, the pillow, or a bottle of water in my fingers. A few miles away, I don’t know how peacefully she goes to sleep. I wait for sleep to come, hating it and hating to stay awake. I cling to The Matrix with a black fear unknown to the ones who can’t fathom out my mania for the movie. I force my thoughts away; I mentally put my hands over my ears and start shouting to drown out whatever they are trying to say, like a child being told a ghost story he doesn’t want to hear. I fall, I scramble up and fall again. I dare not look in the mirror and find it’s just an empty black hollow.

Sometimes I wish I were capable of only achieving those nine items on the list and not any more. I hate, hate, hate The Chamber.

And yet, I wonder…

1Life.