Things have come to an unceremonious halt these days. I don't feel like making my way to work. I don't feel the necessity to bathe. I don't attempt to pick my nose. I don't harbour a craving for chocolate. And generally, I don't seem to have a purpose to do anything at all.
Last evening, I reached home at 7:30, promptly walked into my bedroom, and sat in front of the computer. I had no fixed agenda. In fact, sitting at the computer wasn't even thought about. It just happened.
So there I sat and opened three Web sites that every bored and zonked man and woman visits:
- Facebook.com
- Gmail.com
- Twitter.com
I looked at people's statuses, glanced through their photographs, noticed that they had updated their profile photographs with snaps of what they looked like 20 years ago, and then I went on to check my e-mail. It's not as if I had a whole lot to anticipate. I perused my e-mail simply because I could not think of anything else to do.
Thereafter, I tweeted a bit. I made silly comments about my life, the way it's going, and how it's going to go, and then I got fed up of the whole exercise and closed Google Chrome.
For the three silent anxious minutes that followed my dismissal of that browser, I merely sat looking aimlessly at the screen. I had a cloud - a very heavy cloud - of a sinking feeling sitting somewhere inside my chest. And it was making me want to do something to prevent it from taking my being and soul down to the bottom of wherever it wanted to sink to. This sitting in front of the screen was part of my 'doing something' to keep me afloat.
Mother Dearest walked in and asked me about my bathing plans. I said no, I'll bathe later. Why don't you eat? she asked. I said, okay, I will. And I continued to stare into the screen.
Half an hour later, dinner was served. Prawns made some space for an omlette. And the omlette pretended to be an island in a sea of curry. The plate in which this accommodation took place was shiny and all of stainless steel. Yet, all I did was eat it all in seven minutes and run back to my sitting...
I delayed my bath by another hour, then yet another, then another two. And by the time my ass got fed up of supporting my hip on that chair, it was around midnight.
So, I postponed my bath to early next morning! I was THAT reluctant to carry out that cleansing ritual. And I think that reluctance pervades my thoughts, actions, and feelings - this reluctance in cleaning, in getting rid of the linen that's dyed a dirty brown.
It's dirty linen for sure, but I hold on to it as if it's my only friend without whom I'll be nowhere. I am so familiar with it, I feel we have known each other since kingdom come. It has seen my cry in the most awkward places. It has seen me shocked into silence. And it has seen a whole lot of morbidity in me, done to me, and around me.
So, it's hard to let it just sweep into an abyss and not remember it as a friend. This dirty linen - I cannot, for the life of me, watch it bid me farewell...
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