Psycho Sickness

I have been sleeping for more than 16 hours everyday. I am told the best way to get over your sickness is to sleep through it. It doesn't take much out of me. I swallow my medicine, switch the fan off, wrap half a quilt around and shut my eyes. I sleep well. That's perhaps the only time when I feel well. At all other times I feel drowsy - sleep and sleeplessness overlap each other, I feel weak - there is a strange ache at the back of my head, and I feel depressed.

Sickness is depressive. You feel terrible for yourself. You drown in self pity, your body refuses to stand by you and your mind just has too much time to think. So you think of all sorts of things. Useless things. About ghosts from your past and of potential ghosts of the future.

I tried to get out of the house today to catch a film with friends. I was rather excited given that I have been on house arrest for all these days. But as fate would have it, we got stuck in traffic, decided not to watch the movie, couldn't find another place for cheap tickets so drove back. I felt sick again. I got out of the car at some point and caught an auto back home. I cried incessantly. Till I was back in my bed and in the same place where I could allow myself to slip into the oblivion of my sleep. I slept for hours. Woke up. Lost. 

I have been thinking why I cried so much. Felt bad for my self I guess, irritated at the thought of not having enough energy to stay out or depressed for being rejected by a friend who I loved so much. A friend who used to treat me and my sickness with a lot more love and a lot more warmth. 

See. Too much time to think. 

I'm sick

1.

This space
we're trying to occupy
This middle ground
does not exist

2.

I'm sick
of writing
about you

Good Looking People

This game we play with ourselves. The game of narcissism. The obsession with archiving our lives and the obsession with constantly finding ways to resist it. Many years back a friend introduced the idea of not clicking photographs on trips we made together. I was amused. Why does everything have to be photographed? she said. I remember that vacation. I told myself how liberating it was - not having to think about what to click, why to click, how to click, Click Click Click.

These memories are like photographs, another said. So for a month, I spent remembering my past as a series of pictures. Neither digital not film. No jpegs either. Raw? Maybe. Easy to edit. None of them were sepia as they tell us. Neither colour nor black and white (FYI - black and white are colours too)  

Anyway. I made pictures out of memories. Then took some positives and made stories around them. Narrated stories. Narrated my self. Realized how Raw they were. We appear to appear before people through stories from Raw photographs.

Obsessed about seeing ourselves in photographs. I can't remember a single time when I saw myself in a photograph and not wondered how good or bad I look. This obsession with looking good. Looking good before good looking people. The obsession of looking good in your own archive.

Photograph by the Man with the Camera

Another agreed, the fad these days is to archive yourself but cleverly appear to not care. The bug struck me too. It helps in writing definitions of the self, you see. Definitions of yourself through labels you use to appear before good looking people. These labels are very important.

What do you do? he said. Nothing, she said. But what DO you do? I remember how weird yet brave that moment was before someone changed the subject. These moments should pause sometime. While everyone's frozen I should kiss them both. 

I should also stop. Ranting at the cost of a pending reading. Brooding about the inevitable.

And the irony of having posted this on my blog. This archive of mine!

Madness is enough

“Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be.”

Em and the Big Hoom