“It’s just that the cause wasn’t real. The cause was imagined. The cause…was fear. Let’s think of a minority, one that goes unnoticed if it needs to. There are all sorts of minorities. Blonds and people with freckles. But a minority is only thought of one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority - a real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the fear. And if that minority is somehow invisible, then the fear is much greater. That fear is why the minority is always persecuted. And so you see there is always a cause. The cause is fear.” – Colin Firth in ‘A Single Man’
I have always hated this time of year. Watching out my windshield at the scores of people celebrating the end of another year just punctuated by abandoned resolutions. Moreover I loathe the overwhelming sensation that I ought to be ‘out there having fun’ when I know perfectly well that all my pleasures are solitary or should I say selfish. Is there a difference?
It has been an astonishing year, this 2010. And I am oddly proud of the fact that I have managed to spend it almost entirely ensconced in my own personal cornucopia of books, movies, discographies and procrastination. If ever a human being were capable of hibernation, I have elevated the exercise to an art form. What is proving a tad disconcerting is how easy it all was in the end. I have realised that for me to essentially avoid all human contact (save the acquaintanceships I have cultivated at work) took virtually no effort. Head down, heart closed, mind ambivalent…and there you have it. I have concocted my very own emotional anaesthetic.
At present, I cannot even cling to the justification that I needed a year off and away from…people because I am well aware that I will always need that. While heartache and mind burn are legitimate excuses for many, I cannot –in good conscience – apply them to myself. That would require moping and crying and I haven’t really done either of those things this year. I have simply moved forward…but I did it in a circle so it doesn’t really count.
I thought of a story today, as I sat stuck in a New Year’s Eve traffic jam from Hussain Chowk to Sherpao Bridge. Something silly and naïve to paint my predicament with a stroke of literary flourish: Two sparrows sitting on a tree stare at a cluster of their kin fly by. One says to the other “My greatest consolation is that our first flight will be with the group. That way everyone will keep an eye out for me and I won’t have to think about how I’m doing.” It asks the other whether he is apprehensive about taking to the skies. “My greatest fear is that our first flight will be with a group. That way everyone will keep their eyes on me and I won’t be able to think about what I’m doing.”
All of my thoughts have been splintered and the shards are scattered along the wall of my mind. It has been a year of random, idle, occasionally piercing thoughts smashing all around me and myself scuttling after them trying to keep them in order, sequence and in check. My days are a loop-de-loop: Up at 2pm, shower, change, drive to work (collect scattered thoughts I meet along Defence Road; at the turning for Liberty; in the expressions of the average six to eight beggars that appear at my window over the 14 minute drive; in the leer of the men who do not have the decency to stay behind their car window while ogling me; at the office security guard who tries not to notice my odd outfits every morning), at work read two papers and log into the Guardian, Telegraph and New Yorker, edit district stories, post articles on to my face book (lest the people I never meet forget I exist), edit more district stories, get a coke and a packet of chips (the highlight to my days), make the pages, leave the office, pick up something to eat on the drive back home (collect more scattered thoughts while waiting for a meal to be delivered, cooked or brought to my car window. Thoughts I gather while reading whatever it is I am reading those days under the tiny car light. Thoughts that pinch me while random passersby try and stare into the car at the girl reading in the dark), get home, sit with Nano and Abbi for a while discussing how ‘nothing new’ happened, walk upstairs, change, eat, watch television, read for a few hours, sleep.
That was my year, give or take seven evenings spent with a few friends; a dozen afternoons spent with mom and four dinners spent with my father. And I didn’t exactly hate it. I no longer even crave companionship the way I once did because I am quite confident in the fact that I would be tired of it quite soon. People annoy me, the little ticks, the guessing games, the backstabbing, the tantrums… the issues. Why would anyone want to take on someone else’s neuroses when there is so much to fix of oneself?
So instead, I am taking comfort in open-ended questions that I can pen down in my journal and save for someone to answer later on. This helps keep all the smashed, scattered shards of my thoughts out of the way and I am no longer afraid of stepping on them or losing them altogether. These conversations with myself are fast becoming my salvation and I find myself placing an ellipsis at the close of every idea I pen down. A ‘what if’ to mark every deliberation; my very own grammatical guardian angel. Still, I can’t help but think I may need a few full stops sometime, somewhere in the future. Life simply cannot continue like this, an inimitable see-saw of conflicting opinions lived amid constricted parenthesis. I want a full stop now. Give me a last word so I can finally write a first sentence. But there are never any last words, not really.
Rimbaud and I know this life to be an act. That ‘farce which everyone has to perform’. It is getting harder and harder to convince people that while I make no claims to being ‘happy’ I am most certainly content. Agreed, it is rare, to enjoy ones own company more than that of others and it is perhaps not entirely ‘normal’ to want to keep up the solitaire. But it is what it is.
This is where I covet minority status without shame. Sadly, there has never really been a club or even some trite support group for a minority such as I.
All those lonely people out there and not one who enjoys being alone.
