The Shedding of Human Skin
It rested in front of me, the perpetual ache of a non-existence that I dreaded as I faded into a gradual unconsciousness. Was it painful? As the colours rusted in front of my globular organs and our worshipped conversations fell apart; perhaps it was not of any significance. “A graveyard full of buried hopes…”, I wonder if these were words that you proclaimed or were they now a constituent of my testament. Hurt; maybe that was an understatement for the human sentiment or a false ideology for it never seems to hurt, it just all seems to tear apart in a numbing silence.
When I was finally at last alone, I felt surprisingly happy. As if happiness was my concluding joke, a poker card that my fate would play to remind me of the everlasting inadequacy. ‘Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD’. That was going to be my resoluting full stop, a psychotic disorder that the majority claimed to be my own utopian ideal and the rest echoed silently in a comforting hush. “You know, friends can help at times. You just have to let them in. Even in this jarring marathon of sanity, don’t put up a front as it will only worsen things”, were the reverent phrases of a professional who aimed to cure me. Cure. How could you cure a thought? If I contemplate about the despondency of empathy and a perpetuity rising in flames, how could one cure it?
“Can’t you see? I need your help because I don’t want to let things fall apart. Every little thing just seems to be of a discomforting magnitude and I…”, my voice would trail off in the recluse of Amnah’s silence.
“I have nothing else to say”, would be her response of appraisal as I surfaced beneath my denial.
Perhaps I am wrong to rest in a sense of empathy that I nestle within, a safe-space that corrodes in the shedding of human skin. Space. Did I take too much of it, for every day walking in the school corridor felt ghastly as if another word or a faltering step would descend into my irrevocable invisibility. I had often heard the words ricochet in my battling head, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Lost. Yes I had lost everything that seemed to be of a value that I cherished, a friend that I wanted to uplift, the strength to remain steadfast in an infinite vale of loneliness; perhaps this was all that was meant to be.
“Could you list down all the things that have hurt you, in points please?”
Were they the words of a distant friend or my psychosis brought back to life, I had lost count in all honesty. “I want to shed my skin.” Maybe that is the root cause of why Amnah seemed to rift apart, a self-inadequacy that would echo in the endless ravines that seemed to flood with my ache to resolve finally.
“I am sorry for everything.” And perhaps these were the only words that I could worship in the silence that one would shove me into. “And this too shall pass…”, but maybe I was mistaken when I sprinted after you that holy day of no date, I am but just invisible after all as it reverts back to me the childhood saying of Arcady that I still seem to reminisce on, “Worthlessness is perhaps all I compose of and despondency my friend, it is all in a stepping stone that we falter and a silence that we shall dissolute in.”
The Genres of Life 