The end of a song shouts gloom as much as the end of a lifetime.
November 19, 2018
The winter transpired itself, sooner than I anticipated. The sighs of desolation are getting longer and the confabulations are getting shorter. While Rama is being lauded for defeating Ravana, my return from the institution is guarded under stern confidentiality. The festive knick-knacks around the neighbourhood provide tranquillity to my apprehensive, nevertheless, glassy eyes.
My house does not smell of raw carrots anymore, there is no warmth left. I can neither trust the new marble floors nor the altered wallpapers. It's been two days since my return and I haven't stepped out of my room. Earlier, I had thought those three months of vomiting in the latrine of a lousy drug rehabilitation centre were disgraceful, until I discovered that my parents had to clean out their medicine cabinet while I was away.
November 20, 2018
Those moments alone in the bathroom, trapped between the alabaster coloured tiles, are the worst. Their bleached and whitened surface mock me for my inability to move on from the wreckage I once called a home. We had similar flooring in the rehab; I used to count all the even boxes with my right eye closed and all the odd numbered boxes with my left eye closed.
November 22, 2018
The cemented patch that has been used to cover the previously embedded showcase in my bedroom wall, stares me to sleep. Sometimes when I feel choked and suffocated, I dream of a person breaking through that patch and attacking me. The new house haunts me, like It’s eternal and can’t be burnt to ashes. It smells of paranoia and phenyl.
The very first moment I entered my house, I went straight to the store room, to check if they had painted over the list. But they hadn't. They say they will renovate the storage room in the end.
November 25, 2018
They say they don't eat ice cream anymore; it hurts their feet, they say. They now eat soup every Sunday night and did not even bother to tell me. It was the only thing I was looking forward to the entire week.
November 26, 2018
The land stands on rage, the water on melancholia and the mesmerising air is nothing but sheer madness. I dismantled everything inside and now, I, and only I, can see the bestowed gloom and wreckage. I read the list every day, because every today is the same as yesterday and yester will be the same as morrow. The store room and the words in the list are the only things that haven't changed, they don't make my guts wrench. I sit there every night and move my fingers through all 456 words on the wall:
1. Lust
2. Malignant
3. Ostracize
4. Vestigial
5. ...............
I have so much rage inside of me, so much that it can end this infinitesimal world. What do I do now, where do I go?
November 27, 2018
Even Bukowski and Dostoevsky don't work these days. I mean, what do they know, they are dead. They died the same miserable way and still wrote worthless books and books on their misery. The moon doesn't fascinate me anymore. I wonder if it was all the psychedelics and pills and smoke that made everything lovable about this least lovable universe. "My existence concludes with my inability to curb the paroxysm of frenzy that this world gifted me", I recited for an hour.
November 28, 2018
Nobody talks to me like before, they are extremely careful. They think I can't see it but I can.
Yesterday, I dreamt of my mother. She was dressed in mahogany brown and her hair was virtuous black; she looked younger, almost my age. We were sitting on a dining table across from each other, conversing like sisters. With every word that came out of her mouth, the wrinkles around her eyes deepened. Her hair was not black anymore as if I was stealing her youth away. Every breath that I took, came seized from the physique that gave birth to me.
December 1, 2018
They are going to alter the store room in two days, they are going to take away my last fragment, my last sliver of memory.
December 3, 2018
Some people find ruin and destruction very enthralling and I thought I was one of them. My endeavours to save the little left of my world didn’t work and now, this new world doesn't make any sense to me. Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 doesn't make any sense to me, my now disappeared list doesn't make any sense to me. The half-pasted posters on top of my bed don’t make any sense at all. They all died with my capacity to cherish them and now they are just a memoir of my nostalgic shivers, that revisit me in waves.
With the end of everything, I end my sobriety too, not because I am weak or I am addicted to their trance but because this world and all the things it has to offer, are simply not worth waiting for. My rage ends with me and perhaps so does this world. I was the last bridge between the new and the old world.
Written by Ayushi Sikka
BA (Hons) English, Shivaji College, Delhi University
Ayushi Sikka's "The Bridge" bagged the 2nd prize in the Short Story Writing Competition, 'Prose It!', under the literary fest, 'Breathe', the theme of the competition had been - "Perhaps the world ends here"
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