The Chagrin

He drags his cold listless feet, amidst a herd of blind monks, practitioners of the mundane and the unordinary. He scoffs at them, but much to his chagrin, he knows he is like them.

The dimly lit city encompasses the monks like a tenebrous umbrella. The march continues and he joins in, his will had been shattered years ago. Hundreds of spineless men and women, devoid of energy and light, lost in the energy and light of their personal devices.

Millions sending emotes of laughter and smile, yet the faces tell a different story. He despises this. He tries to disconnect and alas, much to his chagrin, to disconnect he must get lost in his own device.

After an hour of scrolling, scribbling, and scorching agony of the outside world he finds some solace in his home. A damp dusky household – broken pans, grimy windowpanes, flickering lights and pile of books - a celebration of his solitude.

He drops his heavy luggage, but the luggage of life weighs him down and he collapses on the bed. For a moment, he can forget about his day, but the pedestrian churn will begin again tomorrow. He gets up, drags himself to wash his face. He doesn’t want to look up, but he does… his reflection in the mirror, years in his eyes beyond his age, marks on his face like forsaken crevasses, a crushing disdain slices him in half like cold steel through the heart, an endless barren field of reaped melancholy… what has he become?

“I wish I could destroy this life and go back to the womb” He thinks often.

He picks up a book, but his mind is at unrest, like a million beetles stinging his back, bile crawling up his throat, venom boiling in his stomach. He picks up his coat and decides to go for walk, to calm his senses.

The streetlights glowing like equidistant fireflies, lighting his path. He walks alone with the pale companionship of his shadow. Counting fireflies, measuring steps, anything to clear his mind… and send him back to his grovel… a grovel fit for a gaunt.

But it feels different today, like the final string of his living desire finally snapped. He had considered ending it all many a times before, but this slow and steady slaughter of his life through the daily drudgery, he cannot handle any more.

At a distance he could see a group of children in a park, playing in pure nonchalant amusement. The summer rains paint a new picture on the canvas of their youth, yet the same rains have washed away every ounce of mirth from his heart… year after year…

He looks away… He realizes he needs to be alone, but he cannot stand the forlorn and dejected gloom of his house. He rushes up the stairways, skipping steps, panting and breathless till the silver moonlight splashes his face like an ocean wave.

And there he stands, at the edge of his world. A myriad of reasons to make him question his decision, a million more voices saying yes. He has no family, no children to take care of, no wife to love, no friends to run away with. It’s him against the world… the wretched world, that spends more time staring apathetically into a virtual light than the light the world provides.

He has decided.

He will not be the mundane. He will not be the sheep left for the wolves to devour.

He edges closer… to take the final leap… in hopes to wake up in a new world like a new-born fruit that lusts for the dew of morning, like an infant seeking the nectar of motherhood…

He loses contact… and he falls… and he smiles for it feels like flying…

As the essence of his decrepit life paints the porch red, he closes his eyes… his body finally at rest, and prepares for a new life… a better one, in better times, in a better world…

A shriek from a passerby, the children in the park gather around him, staring at him with awe and disgust and seeping sorrow. A funeral circle of unknown faces, looking at him through their personal devices, capturing his slowly draining life for a few seconds of entertainment for the blind monks.

Millions share his death, but none his life… a series of sad emotes, but the faces tell a different story… his death becomes the story of the night and is quickly forgotten before the dawn of the new day… as another man drags his cold listless feet, amidst a herd of blind monks…

“Imagine blindness; unoriginal, plain and mundane blindness. Imagine no lights, no smell, no taste. Imagine benumbing of skin and blood, of bone and marrow. Delude yourself of science and calamity, of cause and reality, of excitement and banality. No senses but the sensitivity of existence. Imagine you exist, yet in what way? For what purpose? And most importantly for whom? Answer this and you answer your existence.”

That Kaleidoscope Guy (August, 2015)