Dreamlessly

 

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 literally nothing for you out there? 

But for some reason, you get yourselves up every morning, and you continue doing it for some days. After a few days, you reach a point where you kinda settle into the fact. So that’s how it’s going down huh? It’s insane how much your mind can cope with when you know it’s either this or ending everything.

I have a vague memory of this day, and it popped out of nowhere when I  was walking back to my room today. So when I was in high school, I used to come and go by school jeep. It was maroon in color and it was named ‘Chathoth’. The driver uncle’s name was Niyas and everyone fondly called him Koyamon. 

So one fine day I was sitting in the front during the return journey. It was me, our drawing teacher, the Arabic teacher, and Koyamonka. He was talking about his everyday routine where he picks up kids at our school, drops them off, and then goes on to pick up kids to another school. Like it was 4 trips or something, 2 in the morning, one at noon, and one in the evening. And every day it was the same. So the teachers wanted to know like, “don’t you get bored, Niyas?”. So he said that the idea was to look forward to little things, occasions, or days that are yet to happen in life. Like going to the beach with family, or trips, or even watching TV with fellow taxi drivers at the Taxi stand. Stuff like that. And he says, “If you don’t have anything to look forward to, then this mundane routine lifestyle is gonna make you go crazy.

It scares me, you know. The fact that we come into this world alone, and we eventually leave it the same. But some people are bound to spend their entire lives here also alone. That stuff scares me. How is one supposed to do that? Go through all these boulders life throws at you. Heartbreaks, loneliness, grief, divorce, everything. But then I think about how you could always just end everything within a second, and that gives me some relief. 

In the poem, Bukowski wonders how these people haven’t vanished, or like killed themselves. 

Fellow human creatures, he says. Maybe they are murdered, he says.

Thousands of people stuck in these loops in every city. People with worn-out shirts and dirty shoes, bound to live their entire lives in the background. Yeah, who would notice if a few of them vanished over days? Not caring about the fact that they do not love, nor are being loved. Because they forgot what it was like.

To be loved,

To be held,

To be touched,

To be heard.

“Did you have your lunch?”, or “How was your day?”. You wait long enough and then you start asking those questions yourselves, just to feel human, and also to get through the day. Someone said, “real sadness is when your whole world's falling apart, and there’s nothing you can do except watch”. 

There used to be a time when there was too much noise inside my head and I just wanted it all to stop. I just wished for there to be a kill switch, to be put to sleep. These days, I feel like it's quite the opposite. There’s just too much silence. The other week my co-worker told me he had never seen so much silence in a person. What do I talk to you about? Is it better to speak or to die? I feel like there’s something inside my throat pulling from the inside, so even if I want to there aren’t any words. All this while inside my head I am stranded in the middle of a desert and I am screaming at the top of my lungs and there’s just no one there. How do I explain this? There’s just too much silence and noise at the same time. 

I went to the museum the other day, and for some reason in almost all the paintings, there was only one subject. And I just stood there staring at the painting of this saint in the middle of the desert and I looked around and it was just me and orange lights and paintings with single subjects, and I wished for the world to shrink and swallow me along with it. 

 

Terrible thing to live in fear, I’ll tell you that. Fear of dying with all this love, and words I have left inside of me. Fear of dying alone. Fear of not being understood. Fear of your world getting silent permanently.

Sayonara.