What am I supposed to do with all these thoughts?

They are all over. Some of them are unpleasant to say the least. The others tend towards being questionable and well, just plain unrequired.

I am sure for a change that they have nothing to do with Monday morning blues in anticipation. They also have nothing to do with hunger or exhaustion or lack of sleep.

One could be hopeful that they'll pass by morning, after I have disconnected from them for a few hours. The thing is I am scared that they won't.

They aren't the transient variety and the fact that I can't really do too much about it aggravates both me and them.

Thoughts. So many, tiring and loaded thoughts.

The night has passed me by and even despite no sleep, I am wide awake in a dark room trying to make sense of things, trying to piece things together like in a puzzle.

The insides of my mouth are dry. Like opening and shutting an old novel which is falling apart with that rasping papery sound. My eyes feel as if something is gnawing at them from within. The sides are gluey and the lids are as heavy as they can go without shutting.

My thoughts are circling me through all this. Sometimes in the night, you convince yourself that the thoughts are mere nocturnal demons which will vanish the second the sun rises. Then the next morning, they're still there, standing and waiting for you to wake up.

The plants died.

Their yellowing heads hung at awkward angles and their white tears stained the thin stems. The owners of the home, unaware of the death of their balcony companions, continued to paraglide and swim and shop for antiques at exotic foreign locations.

The maid came in to an empty home, still battling the remnants of the viral fever that pinned her to the bed for the past week. She looked horrified and then blamed herself for not having foreseen this. She went and touched the leaves, which crackled a little under her grip. She put a mug full of water in the pots, in a desperate attempt to resuscitate them.

The plants remained dead. The maid left feeling bad but forgot about it when she found out that her son had failed the third grade for the second time.

The owners came back a few days later, were upset,yelled at the maid and then got over it the minute the dried leaves were swept away.

They, then, sat on their sofa and looked at vacation pictures.

The rain in my head.

I am listening to the sound of rain.

I also shut my eyes and imagined sitting under the awning of a defunct store, somewhere off the mud road in rural India. Sitting there with my legs drawn close to my stomach. Up ahead in the distance, there is someone walking with a steel bucket. It's only a figure from where I sit, because the white rain blurs everything. 

The sound is beautiful; the muted plop of the rain on the red soil and the faraway thunder.

 

In my head, I am sitting there alone. Writing probably, on damp paper with pencil. I don't know what I'd write. I am taking slow, calculated breaths. I am taking in the smell of the rain, in its purest form, free of smoke and garbage and other urban worries. 

When I open my eyes, the rain has stopped. I am back where I started, but I am a happier person. 

The sliver of the sky that I can see from my bed is now full of birds.
Not just the everyday variety but some pretty colourful ones. If I was driven enough, I'd get out the set of binoculars that my parents bought a while ago but I am not.

I have been lying here long enough to have seen the lemon yellow sky turn pink. I have lost count of the number of trashy videos I have watched to milk the free Sunday download scheme. My back has fallen asleep from having slept so long.

My Sunday thoughts are disconnected.
I'll probably lie here until I doze of again, but not before I have whined about the onset of the Monday blues.

Then there are all those things that you really want to tell someone. You wish that you could narrate them all to that one person, all while sitting on the floor of a dark room, who will understand exactly the way you want them to.

Every day, you find yourself bubbling with things to say. Not necessarily happy things or sad things, just all kinds of thoughts that need telling.

But you can’t – because either you will end up sounding childish or inane. You stay mum for the fear of accidentally hurting someone or ticking someone off. You decide that it’s best not to speak, that way no trust is breached and people don’t flare up.

All those things will eat me one day. If you cut my head open, all these things will gush out. It’ll be like standing under a waterfall – interesting at first, but rapidly trying once it picks up force.

Silently, we are moving to our zen spaces. We are moving backwards, in slow motion, wrapping up our things. We are taking nothing with us. Not our worries and insecurities. Not even memories because we don’t know what they might spark off.

When we reach there, we sit cross legged and quiet. We breathe in thin, cold air. We try and think about nothing. It’s possibly the most difficult thing we've ever had to do. In the quiet room, bursting at its seams with thoughts that people are trying to avoid but are pondering on in the process, we shut our eyes and hold our breaths. We tried concentrating on something neutral like water, but it didn’t work.

By the end of it, there is no peace but a headache from all the effort of emptying out thoughts. We crawled back, filled with shame, to our worries and fears and memories. We sat amidst them and indulged, because it was the easier option.

The black room has come back to me. It has stood strong, resisting the sunshine attacks of the outside world. All the days that I document, on the bright mental calendar or in exasperated word documents somewhere, are all rolling into one.

The blue and white checkered bed-sheet is pulled up all the way to my chin and the thought bubbles spew out of me, out of my ears in a hot, fiery mess. In the darkness, the black room glows green. It moves in and out, pulsating, until I shut my eyes and will it to stop.

The days are here again, when I find myself hiding somewhere in the depths of my bed. In the mornings when the alarm rings, I cringe like I have been stung.

My room is black.

It’s black like the bottomless pit we stared into on some childhood trek. It’s dark like the ocean, in the sliver of time between sunset and the street lights coming on.

The walls are warm and dusty. The bed is full of the remnants of bad dreams. It’s all pretentious but real at the same time. The cupboards are all the same colour and the pillowcases smell of mothballs. The wooden cupboard has all my books peeking out through the glass.

Somewhere, under the pillows, my phone stays hidden, quivering with the suspense of an SMS from someone who remembers me but has the good sense to not call.

The black rooms moves swiftly around me. It’s like being inside a washing machine – with the swirling water and the detergent. The detergent is making my eyes water.

My room wasn’t always black. Last week, it was a lemon yellow. Black is definitely preferred. It gives me more space to think, in the make believe sleepy darkness.

Doom. Impending doom.

It's filling up spaces around me. And quicker than you can imagine. In the mornings, it presses down on me. It smothers me like a TV show murderer. In the nights, it lies down next to me and slowly begins to jab fingers into my back as I try and sleep.

It follows me around like a jilted lover and when I scream, noiselessly, on trains or elevators, it looks shocked that I have such a negative reaction.

In bus queues and cafeterias, it presents me with people I'd rather not meet. People with plans. People who have no idea for whose team they're batting, but they play well anyway. Because, you know, just in case.

My doom is a contradiction. It's shapeless yet concrete and inadvertent yet direct.
On empty days, it sits on my back - like that dreaded monkey.

De-clutter

The mind now looks like the big plastic barrels at sales, where clothes are falling out – but the good stuff is usually hidden. One has to brave through layers of ugly, frilly dresses and cast them aside to finally find something that is pretty and well fitted.

I walk through my mental bylanes for a while, with a rake in my hand and a waste paper basket under the other. I poke and prod at potential waste, collecting crumbling debris and stale things. It’s confusing in here – some parts are chaotic with loud thumping sounds, some are deathly quiet. I am not sure which is more tedious.

I am moving slowly through untouched memories that have a thin layer of dust. I am not sure whether they deserve any jabs with my rake; lest I throw open a trunk of reptilian things that coil themselves around me. I try and find ways to gauge whether the contents are pleasant or otherwise, but that can’t be concluded. Eventually, I spend an hour sitting cross legged on the quivering floor, segregating this little capsules of emotion, all while holding my breath.

I look at a paper carton which looks like a collage of people and almost instantly I take it and tape it shut. It isn’t just anger. It’s also regret. The box has met its end.

By the end of my little journey, I am dragging with me not just the rake and the garbage bin, but also the cartons and balled up remnants of the times gone by that deserve no emotional space.
I throw them all away, in a grand sweeping action, from the top of the world.

I then walk back, dusting my hands. It’s been a good day.

Daze.

There is a sheath of lethargy pulling over the entire day. I have stared at the computer and the open Word Doc for an hour or so, all while a distant marching band tune filled my head. Not in a determined sort of way, but more in a vague manner – as if I am standing at the window of a tall building and far away I can see the marching band.

The pins on my soft-board, in all their annoyingly bright colours, have moved themselves around to form lines and circles to amuse me. Perhaps, I moved them myself but it’s hard to tell. It’s as though my hands belong to someone else and I am watching them move with the same intrigue as you’d bestow on a talking bird. The lists on the board are precise, all written out in my unwavering handwriting. I seem to have lost the motivation towards these tasks that I possibly felt when I made those lists. I now disregard their presence with great ease.

My phone rings several times. The sound is harsh and alien. I don’t answer it because that will require speaking with people and I can’t trust my foggy mind to formulate acceptable responses. I continue to stare at the computer and write disconnected lines – Green feet at the museum, Herring and canned juice.

I skip lunch and drink lots of water instead. It makes my stomach feel like it’s floating away, like a piece of shiny plastic caught in the waves. If I close my eyes, I am sure I’ll see the ocean and the gurgling sound it makes.

The day is dark now, but hardly in a frightening way. I am pleased with this place, where there isn’t too much light but there is lots of room to mentally stretch.