Saturday, November 18, 2017

On being handed a vial of sulphuric acid

Life, somehow, always finds ways to one-up me, and always throws balls at me that I can't play.
I've gotten plain tired of the strategy of giving up but my fate knows how to trigger my existential crises.
See, there are things I think I foresee. I worry about them, I mull over them in my mind all the time. They keep me up at night and melancholy during the day.
Or they did for a long time. Then, quite recently, I decided to send them all to hell, because I do not care, and I realized that my happiness was my own and not to be affected by anyone or anything outside.
Thing is, these things usually never come to pass. My problems, when they arise, are quite different.
My mother calls me a chameleon and I had it recently stated to me by my first-semester professor that I have changed quite a lot (twice) but even my transformations can't help me escape my fate.
Fate is all-reaching, and I guess that is why it is called fate.
So today, on the 18th of November in the year 2017, I got up in the early noon of a Saturday, feeling like a queen because
1. I had cleaned my room the previous night
2. I had had a bath last night!
3. It was early noon and I have been rising at 6 30 in the morning for quite some time. Early rising is good in the long term but lazy lounging feels nice from time to time.

I am behind on a project report but I was happy nonetheless. I am doing the project by myself and I don't know if I am going to complete it at all and the professor refused me a LOR and I might lose my only nice grade because of the report being late and the assignment that I submitted last night being incomplete (I didn't do the extra credit thing) and I screwed up the last assignment too but-I was happy.

I was happy because I figured that yet another B grade or a C-school only acceptance list or the fact that the boyses in my linear algebra class have ten times my level of understanding at minimum (God knows what the infinity norm is) and my poetry is third-grade and the set of my real friends is really small, a singleton set these days I think and that I am going to be homeless and jobless come January 2018 and that I never, ever, ever fit in anywhere be it East or West or that people always find me intimidating and way-over-the top serious even though I only talk to them on one subject out of that weird list of poetry, politics and philosophy and then they don't talk to me about that either-don't matter at all.
No one loves me and no one cares about me. That does not bother me in the least, because at the end of the day, I believe even my mother isn't obliged to love me. I might write stuff about it that people like but really I don't even give a quarter of a damn about it.

People never ever understand me, and that still rankles me to quite some extent, even though I try to keep a lid on it. People so rarely bother with listening in the first place, and I so rarely condescend to talk out loud but when I do, I feel that I am speaking a different language altogether. I suspect that the longing to be understood and to connect with someone on an equal level is a primal instinct of the intellect and it'd take huge amount of effort on my part to overcome it.

The need to be understood. Duh.

Maybe, maybe I should focus on my writings for this reason alone. People do get it when I say it in the form of poetry, and they don't need to be good friends with me to get this. it has happened twice in the recent past with two different people and I guess it does soothe my burnt ego to some extent.

So someone told me that a shiar of mine was super awesome, and that he could relate to it:
اک تبسم کو نظر انداز کر دینے کے بعد
اک تکلف تھا کہ میں نے درمیاں رہنے دیا
  
This is, to be honest,  what I call a sedlyfe shair. It is very honest and that is why he was able to pick it up I guess but it depicts a life I wouldn't wish on anyone. A life where you maintain a distance with everyone by choice. The distance is visible to anyone who cares to look a bit carefully, and your facade of rakh-rakhao and worldliness and girlish smiles can't deceive everyone. When someone tries to come closer in the metaphorical sense, you grow stiff and snub them and put them in their place instantly, even though you might spend hours whining about the lack of interesting people in your life, later.
I don't think I'm talking to him, again, ever.
Another incident was something that happened when I tried to show someone how to incorporate an idea in a shair. Another thing that I appended to the entire ghazal was:
سننے کی تاب ہے نہ سمجھنے کی آرزو
بہتر ہے میری بات یہاں ان کہی رہے
 
I thought of it as just another thing that I said but this guy called me out on it and he was like, pointy point! Again, this is very true, and equally sedlyfe. I think I appended it because I don't even expect people to understand this , though now I see this was naive of me.
Anyways, this time I gave my frank opinion that this is a sedlyfe shair.
I think my writing are the only way, ever, through which I might hope to get some understanding from the world.
Though I still don't see why this matters to me.
Oh, the existential crises. So I saw a couple of white hair on my head and I think this signifies that the end of my life is very, very near. I think I should keep this in mind, from now onwards.
I have learned to live without love, empathy, understanding, money, people, and most importanly, grasp of linear algebra. 
I guess I'll have to learn without a mane of beautiful hair, too.
Life is cruel indeed.
 


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