"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." F.N.

I once read somewhere that it is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything too deeply. So is overthinking. But overthinking keeps you safe. Perhaps not as safe as you would prefer to be. But safer because you broke it down, picked at it, held it up to the light and contemplated it's every angle and curve and crack, therefore knowing all the things and ways it could go wrong, so you can be prepared. But then, there is mulling over the past or what could be, which is, for lack of a better word; impairing.

Most days you find yourself curled up like a fetus in the warm coccoon of your bed, detesting daylight, human interaction/conversation and making an effort of any kind. Thinking, thinking, thinking and feeling. Regretting, backtracking, despairing and your head imploding. Every second is a trial and The Pit becomes your home. She strips you bare and you scream and scream but it's just too damn hard to try anymore.

You see your people repulsed by your inability to adapt to the norm. You see them look at you and not recognise what you have become. You see them recoil when you spit and hiss profanity and realise how loathesome you have become. You see it all but screaming is the only release that soothes you anymore.

And then one day your heart loses control over itself and you find yourself awake at midnight in a room filled with lights that burn into your cornea and a withered man lying infront of you, his every breath audible and matching the hectic beat of your own monitor. You question your existence and contemplate your mortality for the umpteethnth time. How easy it would be to just escalate it and let it explode. They tell you it's years of trauma taking its toll and absent chemicals in your brain, instead of an abysmal hand compressing your chest and an abysmal voice whispering misery in your ear every waking minute of every waking hour. So you swallow their diagnosis along with their pills and you wait for the magical switch to turn on inside you.

Until one day you realise that if you stare long enough and hard enough at the shadows in the darkness of your room, you see them take shape, breathe and even move. And you know that they had been staring at you for much longer, perhaps days, months, years or even decades. And all the logic and common sense you acquired along the yellow brick road is threatened and you seriously doubt your sanity.

You see the shadows in mirrors, in quiet corners and even in the blinding daylight. You hear them whisper your name over the sound of deafening traffic, like static but darker. And you lie awake till dawn because the shrill whistle of the tune you murmured the previous night echoes in the heated depths of your ears. Suddenly you find yourself inhaling soot, slapped, being bathed in gunk and waking up after a night's sleep without any recollection of how it was possible.

Even She has ceased her vicious scraping and stares at you from across the grimy floor, Her arms crossed and head bent. Mildly amused. Abundantly curious. Smirking at the tall tale about brains and chemicals. And you wonder whether she is right. But then you feel the crippling inability to breathe and you know that she isn't.

The shadows vanish though the echoes remain. You remain armed with ammunition, carvings around your neck and writings below your chest. And you breathe. And you pray. And you doubt the incomprehensible reality of it all. And when you feel that familiar constriction in your chest and the unwelcome pounding of your heartbeat, you question why.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel because the shadows are blocking it out. So you just have to keep walking untill you reach it, though when that may be, no one knows. But you don't really have a choice now, do you, with your frail heart and absent chemicals? Haha.

Gut

Sometimes, we do the shit we do solely for the pleasures they entail, however brief they may be, despite the fact that our guts writhe in indignance and vehement protest. Being a mere mortal, i, too, indulge in that self destructive behaviour more often than I care to admit. 

And just like every single person who dives headfirst into dark churning waters, all the while knowing the demons that lurk within and the ones that might manifest, I make up excuses and ignore my gut feeling and that annoying little voice in my head that rears it's head and snorts in disdain at my complete and utter stupidity.

And I only have myself to blame when shit blows up in my face and consumes me in it's inferno. When the dust settles, i am left on the floor, writhing in agony, cold and desolate.

Gut feelings are not meant to be ignored. Nor to be pushed aside to fester within your mental space until one day the incessant gnawing tears at your resolve and consumes you whole.

Listen to it. I implore you. It is almost always right, smug bastard that it is.

Story Telling

Рюкзак ( Rucksack) ; A story of mine that got published in "DhiYouth Magazine", one of our local magazines. Navigating the site is a bitch so i hope the read is worth it.

http://issuu.com/dhiyouth/docs/dymag_march_2014

Idle in March

It is my inherent belief that we must always be working to achieve something in order to justify our existence on this planet. If we are not engrossed in some task or the other, our lives seem meaningless... the days seem long and the nights, empty. 

It is a proven fact that lethargy destroys the mind, body and soul. And so we put ourselves through trial after trial, forever driven to accomplish the things beyond our reach. We are never satisfied and it is never enough... atleast until we reach the point of finding it all to be overwhelming, draining and worst of all, monotonous. 

We then start wishing that we could be satisfied with being idle and desiring nothing more than to throw caution to the wind and quit our jobs and all our obligations. 

To be nameless and faceless and spend our days lying on a beach somewhere, with good tunes in our ears and the sand nestled beneath our toes. 

And so I wished and I received. The price: a knee injury that has no intention of healing anytime soon. So I lie here, day in and day out, staring up at my vacant ceiling. Contemplating. Despairing. 

Longing to be back on my feet and out in the world, grinding myself to the bone, just to feel something within me again. 

"Lord, what fools these mortals be..."

There are over 7 billion people in this world and more than half of us are desolate and confined within our mental prisons. And all of us are searching for that one person to fill the void within our souls, searching for that missing piece in one another, to complete the puzzles that are our mundane little lives. 

We fall flat on our faces, we get our hearts broken, we lose ourselves in the process and we face consequences that break us and leave us in pieces. And yet somehow, for some unfathomable reason, we are relentless in this quest, almost as if it is a masochistic tendency that is embedded in our very souls. We cannot stop, no matter how cruel and brutal the process is, this damned thing called 'love'. 

We take chances. Oh, so many chances, afraid to spend our lives engulfed by that all consuming and loathed feeling: regret. Afraid to be one of those unfortunates who spend the last years of their lives  confined to a chair, immobile and lost in reveries of what could have been. 

It is bewildering that humanity is engineered to enter and exit this world alone and yet how completely and utterly impossible it is for us to live on our own. Ironic, don't you think? 

I am by nature someone who covets privacy, constantly seeking 'alone time' from the chaos around me. Finding contentment in solitude whenever my schedule allows me to, escaping from the white noise of everyday life. 

But even I cannot comprehend spending my entire life alone. It scares the shit out of me, to be honest, to go through this hell by myself with no family to support me, no friends to guide me and no lover to accompany me. Death is inevitable, and we are all condemned to accept this grim fact. But to die without loved ones beside us is ... incomprehensible. 

It's strange, this desperate need, this almost carnivorous craving we have, to feed off one another in order to seek happiness within ourselves. Strange, yes. Strange and pathetic.

Human nature sure is a contradictory and ambivalent little bitch. 

Money, money, money.

What a fucked up world this is.

Us existing, us coping in our selective realities, desperate for our versions to be acknowledged, appreciated and respected. It's no suprise that everyone flocks to Facebook or Instagram to post pictures of stolen moments of happiness, moments that last no longer than the time it takes to upload said pictures onto our timelines. Acknowledgement is a powerful thing. 

Those born into privilege are handed respect and recognition on a silver platter, studded with diamonds to boot. No toil or trials required. And the rest of us... what we slave for, what we sacrifice for, what we work ourselves to the bone for, they acquire with ease simply because of the power their surnames command.

Then there are the rest of us. Some of who feed their empty souls with blind faith in an omnipotent entity that would grant them eternal paradise in return for earthly devotion and worship  

And then there are us. We exist simply because we fear death and the unknown. We linger in this collective reality, merely 'ghosts in meat skeletons' forever driven by ambition and the ultimate weakness of mankind; Desire. 

The desire to posses wealth. The desire to possess luxury. The desire to possess power and all the earthly presumptions that entails. 

"Money makes the world go around." I learned the undeniable & infallible truth of this saying from a very young age. Money really does control the existence of humanity. It controls the very rotation of our shitty little planet. 

Hard work and integrity is for fools such as I. We delude ourselves into believing that our resilience and perseverance defines who we are when at the end of the day, these obtuse notions count for nothing. 

The world is run by the privileged and has been since the dawn of civilization. We are but the designated masses catering to their every whim and whine. 

Us in our glass houses, a stone's throw away from one another, forever in servitude to the fucktards lounging high up in their ivory towers of ignorance and condescension.  

"Norman" - a short story.

Norman lived in a lovely little cottage by the seashore. It was perfect, with a backyard and a white picket fence and all. He had a garden in his backyard ... or perhaps the garden had him. Rows and rows of buttercups decorated the length of it and he worked hard to keep them healthy, tending to them day and night. Buttercups were hard to come by. 

There was also a circlet of tiny daisies at the very core of this garden, a drop of white that he barely noticed in the sea of gold and green. Passerby's would stop and admire the buttercups that stood proud and tall. They would then notice the center; the daisies that gave the garden it's warm and quaint touch. They would come to realize that without the white, the glare of gold would be too garish for their eyes.  

Norman, however, had long forgotten that he had planted them. Rarely remembered to tend to them. Barely noticed them. They had flourished solely from the nutrition they consumed from the ground beneath and the sunshine they bathed in at daylight. 

One fine day Norman came across an exotic blue flower in a desolate moor. It was wild, untamed and magnificent to behold and he felt the desire to posses it, to make it the crowning glory of his beautiful golden garden. So he brought it home, pulled out the daisies like he would pull out weeds, and threw them over the fence without hesitation or a second thought. He then planted the blue flower at the very center where the daisies used to be and coveted it, like a miser would his gold. 

It became his one obsession, what his life revolved around, the only thing he lived for. 

So much so that he completely failed to comprehend that from the moment the exotic blue flower dug it's roots into the ground, the buttercups around it started to wither and die, row by row, circle by circle and disappear one by one, while the blue flower continued to bloom and grow more glorious to behold. Almost as if it fed off the life force of the buttercups, until there were no more. And one day, when he woke up at dawn and looked out of his window, the garden was a barren mound of earth devoid of life. The solitary blue flower stood tall and defiant but there were no remnants of the splendor his garden had once possessed.

He then noticed the sea of white on the other side of his fence and looked over to see that the daisies he had thrown away had taken root and grown in abundance. They danced in the breeze, wild and carefree and he longed to reach over and touch them, to once again possess them, for he saw the beauty of their simplicity now.

Years went by and Norman tried in vain to return his garden to it's former splendor but everything he planted would wither as soon as their roots touched the soil, almost as if the blue flower had poisoned the very essence of the earth itself. Yet he could not bring himself to uproot it. It was all he had now.

He loathed himself for his impetuousness, for his negligence and cruelty. Above all he loathed himself for his cowardice, for he knew he could not go on without the flower. His cottage no longer held any warmth for him and he derived no contentment from the sunsets. His life had proved to be a monument to the oldest of cliches.

It was a cold dawn when Norman felt his chest constrict and he staggered outside to slump down by his beloved blue flower. He lay on the dry earth and reached over to caress it one last time when the flower changed it's hue to a vindictive maroon. Sensing the life draining from Norman's body, it mutated into a mass of writhing flesh and razor sharp teeth and clenched it's jaw-like body around his neck. Norman felt the teeth sink and puncture his veins as he convulsed and the breath left his body.

The mutation devoured every last bone and every little bit of flesh as his blood lay splattered all over the soil, until Norman ceased to exist altogether. Sated now, it mutated back to it's former semblance, more glorious and vibrant than ever.

And waited patiently for the inevitable.

True Story

"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit." 

- Neil Gaiman -

Skeletons in the Box

Yes. It's something about my face ... & perhaps my demeanor as well, that prompts people to spill their souls out to me. From their favorite color to the filthiest skeletons in their closets.  

Being a confidante is both humbling and flattering. But ... a Pensieve to hold the secrets of the world, I certainly am not. At times I feel as if my head is Pandora's Box itself, (minus the fact that this mythical artifact is one which all of humanity covets) brimming over with all the confessions of friends and acquaintances past and current, coiled around one another in the grime within my skull. The oozing pores of their tentacles gripping firmly onto the surface of my brain... the pressure, unbearable at times. 

Should I choose to open my "Box", even to a sliver... chaos, pestilence & plague shall spill forth from it and the world around me & all that is within the space of that vicinity shall be plunged into pandemonium & destruction.

Much like Pandora's Box, itself, really.   

It is a tremendous amount of responsibility people entrust upon me when they show me their inner demons & share all the grievances & guilt that haunt them. Tremendous. Keeping these secrets to myself when I know what the consequences of my silence are, is at times unbearable. 

But betraying confidences, especially that of a true friend or a loved one, is the height of deception. The few occasions on which I disclosed certain information to aid someone have resulted in severed ties. One, I regret... the other, never have and never will. And so I keep the evils within me now... and I rot inside.

Something about my face, really... unassuming, innocent, trustworthy ... I suppose. A blessing & a curse.

The Pit

It is inevitable.

No matter how hard you try to steer clear of the pit, you stumble down or get shoved back into it, time and time again. One minute you would be walking around, like the unsuspecting ignorant fuck that you are... and the next, you are falling down the side of it, the light above you slowly diminishing, until it becomes a ghostly orb etched in the core of your retina. 

You sink deep down into the seemingly infinite depths of your pit, groping around in the abysmal gloom. And there, at the very base of your self imposed confinement, you find Her. Your inner Demon. 

She stands leaning against the wall, arms crossed, eyes alive with malice, fangs gleaming in hunger. Ready to hiss out the phrase She covets ... and the words you loathe to hear, 'I told you so.' 

You scream and you wail, you rant and you rage, scratching your bloody fingertips at the slimy rotting walls of your prison. All the while She circles you, twisting and tangling Herself around you. Sinking Her talons into you, fangs biting and tearing deep into you, like a vulture at it's carrion,... until you cease to react altogether. Until you curl up in a ball and lie there at Her feet, writhing in agony. Until time, as you know it, ceases to exist. 

After a while, She grows weary of picking at the carcass that is your soul ... and now that She is sated, you feel Her mutate into something less terrifying, something less vicious. She holds you up, slaps you, soothes you the only way She knows how. She grasps your jaw and points it upward. 'Crawl up' She hisses. 'Crawl out. You can't stay down here. There isn't enough room here for the both of us... and we both know what will happen if I'm the one to leave.' 

Not a statement, but a threat. 

She drags you by the hair and throws you against the grime of the wall. 'Crawl up!' She screams. 'Crawl up! Crawl up! Crawl up!' Her waves of fury beat against your already battered body. Over and over, until you scramble up the jagged walls of your pit in desperation, slipping, falling and clinging on for dear life. 

Because if you fall, She waits down there, Her talons scraping loudly against the walls, once more biding Her time. Until your next descent. Until She can feed again. 

So you crawl back up, gaping wounds, bloody limbs and all. Because anything is better than being a quivering mass of flayed flesh down there, completely at Her mercy.

"On an island..."

They say no man is an island. I'm inclined to disagree. I believe that every individual is indeed an island unto him/herself.

You, yourself determine the size, the shape, the climate, the terrain & the potency of this island. And those who are part of your life, be it family, friends, lovers or even those who bear ill will towards you, they are all visitors who frequent a stay.

At any given time, you are at perfect liberty to cast visitors off your island & watch them sail away, leaving you to thrive in your contentment... or to stew alone in your despair.

Some of these visitors, they stay more often & longer than others. Some trespass. Some beat and break down the carefully constructed walls of your sanctuary. And some, a blessed few, respect the distance they are kept at & your inherent need for privacy.

Then there are those who you give free reign to. A select few, perhaps a family member, a friend and more often then not, a lover. Some of them, they crack open & uproot the very foundation of your domain and leave it in ruins... leave you to grope around in the devastation they left in their wake. To put the pieces back together... to rebuild all over again.

But then there are those who nurture the land, those who beautify it. They take residence on your island without you even knowing how it came about. They make the sunsets appear more glorious with their mere presence. They make your island lush, green & potent.

Until one day, a day no different then any other, they leave. Some by choice and some without... and all you are left with are memories to be cherished till the end of time as you know it.

At the end of the day, you alone reside on your island & preside over it.