I hate nights, I have always hated nights. As a child they stood for deceit, later they stood for loneliness and eventually became anxious, plain, and unadulterated. Now they make me sad. A panicky sort of sad when I am in Pune and when I am home, the calm sort of sad, what A calls melancholy. It feels heavier than melancholy though. Everything a battlefield of life goes through in a day settles down like dust on a window sill in the uneventfulness of nights. All thoughts kept at bay by distractions during daytime come stuck in difficult crevices one can’t reach. Catastrophized thoughts open my eyes and start circulating in the cave of my mind. Bumping, shitting, stinking the whole place up.
Someone’s happiness can be held as proof of how sad my life is going to be. Every missing person is evidence of my un-lovableness. On one of these nights, I could, like a radio jockey, tell, to no one in particular, everything a mother’s schizophrenia-ridden mind ever said to a child. About sadness, protection, love, power, and about deceit. I would not leave to your imagination the sort of rules such houses must make to survive. I would be breaking some sort of unsaid code of conduct then like I do every time I admit in public that my mother has.. you know… the S word. I shouldn’t.
Netflix is an easy temptation. So is texting. It is not an option tonight. So I will cuss, out loud, like I have imagined Margaret Atwood to secretly do like I have been taught not to. It makes me feel uncomfortable. And powerful at the same time, rebellious, for standing against operant conditioning. And then there is the power that saying of obscenities grants “it deflates people, reduces them to the common denominators where they can be dealt with.” I learn life from authors. She also says that in reduced circumstances, one’s desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. That explains why I must miss those soulfucking Bourbons so much.