voices in my head

I keep having this recurring nightmare, cutting myself open, with the sharpest blade. My face and my arms. It is not a pretty sight, but simultaneously so calm and soothing. I keep thinking about it throughout the day, trying to find out the meaning behind it. The visual keeps popping up in my head, how blood, red as wine kept flowing out of the slits smoothly. I tried to taste it in my dream but woke up just before I brought it to my tongue. I feel like buying a typewriter, and typing out hundreds of words, and then burning those papers. I want to write about grief. About loneliness, and the dark dampness of winter. About mothers, and fathers. About crippling anxiety, and the labyrinth of adulthood. About how your world becomes less and less wide as you grow up. About the helplessness of it all. About the hopelessness of it all. About the pointlessness of it all.  I have become emotionally numb like never before. It feels like a dam of tears spurring and stuck inside of me. Unattended

  I have never celebrated New Year's in my life: 24 years and not even a single year. I don’t remember doing the countdown ever in my life. I never really saw the point. Also, the timing never came right.  Arguably this might have been the most difficult year of my life to get through. It has definitely been the loneliest year. Nothing much really happened. I learned a lot of stuff, career-wise, and life-wise. Human interaction was at its lowest. I made one new friend and lost countless. But I’m sure the one I made is for life, so that’s good. I really had to throw everything in and give my absolute best to get through this year. There were days when I felt like giving everything up and going back home. I still do, some days, most days. I don’t even know what’s keeping me here.  Though sometimes I like the uncertainty I have with my life. I have never been a planner. Nothing in my life has been planned. School, college, career, friends, love, heartbreaks. Everything just happened a

Dear Rahel, I feel like we're heading towards the end of this story. No matter how forward I look into the future, I can't see myself at peace. I am convinced that this is how it is going to go down. This feeling, this constant feeling of helplessness and chronic dissatisfaction. It is here to stay. This is how it is going to be forever. I don't feel like a real person anymore. I feel like the memory of a person, and memory's fading. Soon it'll be like I never existed.  I have been having these episodes of grief lately. Why do I call it episodes of grief you may ask. I have been having days where it feels like someone had died. It's somebody's funeral. And I sit through the day trying to figure out who had died. It sure feels like someone I knew very closely had died.  Maybe I'm dying. I feel like I've been forgetting myself lately. Like you know how you used to be friends with someone back in school. You used to tell each other everything. And now y

To make life more bearable. It's been six months. Can you believe that, Rahel? Six months. It hardly feels like it has been a month. You know, all of this feels unreal sometimes. Two years back this time I was on a train to Kashmir, and it was snowing. We drank tea and smoked four square cigarettes to keep us warm. The dogs were all fluffy and the kids looked like little apples. Everywhere I looked it was all green and white. Now it is all black and white. It feels unreal. How did I end up here? The dots and lines that led me here. I wish this was just a nightmare I could wake up from. I’ll wake up back in my room, and my friends would still be in the same city and we could just sit on wooden benches and drink tea and stay like that forever.  I read somewhere when they were planning this city, they planted trees for all the seasons, so throughout the year, the city will be covered in colors. As I am writing this, the city’s all covered in pink. By the parks, through the lakesides,

    Day 140  I am scared that I will forget how happiness felt like. That I will never feel the same way again. Even if good times come, I will fail to recognize them. What if I fight them off mistaking them for something else?  Day 141 All I want is for things to go back to when they made sense. Day 145 So this is how it’s going down, huh?  Day 149  We’re still here. I thought I would’ve found a way to get out of this labyrinth by now. We’re still waiting. For someone or something to take away the pain of life. Days are passing by like hours. I don’t even notice when a week starts or ends. It's like clockwork. Some people call me a machine at work. They call me alien. Or a robot. I took leave the other day and this guy said he didn’t notice because I am too silent. They ask me do you work all the time to avoid talking to people. Why are you like this? How can someone go through an entire day without talking to anyone? This guy said, “I have never seen too much silence in one perso

  I am the kind of person who reads poems and interprets them in my own way. I do not care what the poet meant. I kinda let it wash over me, and then write about how it made me feel.   I stumbled upon ‘dreamlessly’ by Bukowski at a very strange time in my life. I don’t know how many times I have read it since then. Like Nic from ‘Beautiful Boy, Bukowski has played a major role in my survival in this city for the past four months.  This is a sinking ship Every day is a battle We’re fighting a losing war Captain, we’re surprised we made it this far Though we may drown any day And no one may even notice We’ll go down head held high For that, we tried And we fought.  Dreamlessly is about, well for me, it’s about having nothing to look forward to. It is about loneliness, and not being loved. It is about having no one and nothing to care for. It is about thousands of souls in every city, for whom every day is a battle. How do you wake yourselves up every morning knowing that there’s literall

I never thought of love as a necessity, you know. I’m talking about the romantic kind here. Like I always thought of it as a bonus thing. Suppose you have it, good. If you don’t, well you can still live. But these days, I realize you need love. It’s like how you feel all tired and grumpy if you didn’t have a good night’s sleep or a decent breakfast. And now it doesn’t necessarily have to be from your boyfriend/girlfriend. It may be from your parents, friends, or siblings. You need some kind of love to survive. And the lack of it doesn’t make you grumpy or anything. Well in my case, these days I don’t feel like a real person. You know, like I’m here, I’m going to work, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’m showering when I feel like it. I’m sitting in the plastic chair and watching the sun slowly turn orange to black in the span of a few minutes. Then what, the rest is a blank sheet. I feel like a soulless person. And I have all this love and words to give, but it’s just me. I feel l