Who knew not sleeping for 24 hours could be this euphoric. Late-night replies were getting sloppier with every tick of the clock. And sudden auditory hallucinations of steam trains passing by me while honking was making me think, why use drugs when this, forced insomnia precisely can trigger the same effect. In that sea of LSD, I was lost in search of finding my soul.
As a wannabe writer, the one thing I could never escape is my emotions seeping into what I write. Like a cheap Picasso imitation, paints dripping down morphing it into an acquiescent piece of art, whatever I want to paint with my words seem to get all coagulated under the heavy drainage of my sentiments. And that is due to my curse of overthinking.
Sharp pain on the right side of my diaphragm started bothering me right after my eyelids opened. And I knew it was going to be a bad day, as this is how they tend to begin. I didn’t realize that a sugarless cold black coffee and a soggy toast, my breakfast for the day was going to be the best thing for the next twenty-four hours. Usually, when Im down, it seems the universe is opening its doors in front of me, only to show how and what has gone wrong in my life.
My lonely childhood taught me how to live with myself. Messy hair, drooly face, a random book and sudden tantrums were the only things I did for years. My mum tried, but all was in vain. My lovely sister would take me along in her walks under the dying lights of dusk and what she too saw in that glow was a problematic child with no solution, nothing to solve.
These bad habits of mine somehow got carried even to my college years.
All was awry for a while until varsity magic struck. A girl with two braids left a trail of pheromones for me to follow, to the unknown territories of warmth and tenderness. Her hair flying all aloof in violent wind began making my heart disobedient all over again. Sudden touch of her soft hands, an exchange of sweet saliva and the fragrance left after she untangled her braids would make me think, this is what life is. This is what I needed, that magnetic attraction towards procreation.
One day, those hands were not there anymore. I would scream and shake in my nightmarish episodes in the middle of the night. I would search for those hands, again and again, but they vanished into the sea of my stupidity.
Had to go through a couple of heartaches to realize, putting a name on a relationship is a dumb thing to do for guys like me—individuals with no self-control. Cared about things I shouldn’t have, fell for something that never existed. Slowly but steadily, I started drowning again.
My makeup was never meant for this, me falling in love. The people they say to be affectionate towards you by birth always became careless about me. And that is the only unattainable thing I chased after. Care. Doesn’t matter what it comes with, love, friendship or whatever the poets call them by, I was only thirsty of being cared about. And in the last three years, I was almost reforged in the philosophy gradually developed by the solitude of my own design. I thought it taught me to respect those who showed care. But now I realized it taught me nothing but how to overthink and misunderstand simple things.
I always hated my brothers, competing with me for the things that they would get anyway. At the age of forty, they are still partially dependent on our family to give them shelter and whatnot. A sixteen years gap in age never stopped them from bullying me.
This brings us to the climax of our story. How I managed to ruin a perfect thing by doing the opposite this time.
Aphrodite, a godsend gift, a person so suitable, so worthy of the name came into my life. It’s like, Zeus, the Greek god saw the big gaping void my sister left in me and out of sheer empathy sent her to fill it up. My first real friend who listened to me. My destitute soul aching and a guardian fairy, who cared. My downed moods would get better with her songs in an instant.
And here too the overthinking habit got the better of me. Usually, my partner in crime, Lalin, not the Russian revolutionary leader :V, who despite getting bored out of his mind, plays the role of guiding me through tough times. And I saw this girl slowly taking his place. But her friendly nature made my neurons start acting all weird. Made me think “do whatever you can not to botch this up“.
It was raining cats and dogs that fateful day. My brother, failure at everything came home to see our happy faces and decided, why not ruin this. As those two hours of random shouting ended, I was back again at that starting point of my misery where I was at all those years ago. But, Aphrodite was there. Telling me jokes, keeping me happy. My caring friend, and yet, I started going down the same path of making things complicated.
“Aphrodite, if I tell you something will you listen?” “Yeah, what did you want to say?” she replied
“Don’t you think this is perfect?” I asked her. “I don’t wanna ruin this, you know!” “The last few years have been pretty rough, and I have been through quite a few breakups that weren’t civilized at all” “And you too just came out of that complicated relation of yours”. “so don’t you think it would be nice if we never let this move forwards or backwards?”
“But it is exactly like that, isn’t it? Why do you have to tell all this tho? Or do we have to say we are friends to become friends?” she replied.
At that exact moment I realized, I have messed it up aagin. Those words were something that I shouldn’t have said, ever. I am on the verge of losing another good friend mine to my moronic tendencies.
Now, I’m sitting here, writing my sob story in a thousand-word shitpost while trying to understand, why do I always overthink this much?
