Eight (Thirsty)

This piece was meant to explain my daily routine as a 17-year-old. However, I’m 19. And it took me around two weeks to realise that since I’ve grown up, I will not be able to recreate the same experiences in me unless I travel back into past with the method of a self-induced somatic flashback. I won’t explain the heavy term, but that shit hurts. That, and the fact that I cherish my friends too much now. Every pain inflicted to myself has never ever stayed only till me. The seventeen-year-old me was too young to realise that.

Anyway, let’s play a game. I’ll hint at the symptoms throughout this piece and you see if you can predict my mental disorder by the end of it.

~~~

I wake up to our maid banging on the wooden door of my room and drag myself to another room to sleep, blankets included. There, I make sure my pillow is horizontally aligned to the bed and sleep properly making sure that the blanket falls evenly on both sides of the bed.

Waking up again takes 10 alarms and a barrage of morning taunts from my disappointed mamma. Not that I blame her much. She asks me once or twice to brush my teeth but I move back to my room and just sit dazed for two hours. Or maybe I check WhatsApp and feel annoyed. And if I open a text I don’t want to reply to by mistake, I obsess over how to un-seen it.

My room is a dumpster with two messy filled tables, one empty table, a pile of clothes on a chair, stuff on my Harmonium box and a newspaper stack somewhere on the floor. And my room isn’t big enough to cover any more area than a double-mattress bed and a small almirah. Mine is a single mattress bed, though. Obviously, I hate sharing my bed with anyone else.

I probably have no pens that work in room; only pencils. Water bottles are kept together, always. My almirah is the only place super-sorted where I keep print outs of unknown books that lie banned in India. They were my birthday gifts for last year. I still haven’t read them.

There are drawings on three out of four walls in my small room. One was about to say something depressing and I couldn’t take it; so I never finished designing the sentence. I’m the only one who understands the reference.

There are also spider webs in my room. Spiders don’t bother me. Lizards do. Lizards feel like robbers intruding on my privacy and I get very self-conscious. So, I never open my windows till it gets too suffocating to breathe. However, when I do open it, I keep a watch on the window the entire time, hitting the wall at regular intervals to make sure that approaching lizards run away.

I look at the walls and thoughts surface up as usual. Me hitting people, blood, violence, people hurting, me hurting, a thousand things that could go wrong with having a wall. And then I push out the intruders of my consciousness with heavy breathing and realise that someone is shouting my name.

It’s my Granny shouting about how it’s already 4 and how I don’t have any routine. She’s not entirely wrong, though. I just conveniently forget to eat sometimes because I don’t want to socialise. Or maybe, it’s because eating isn’t a priority. To be honest, even sleeping isn’t one. I just endure those things as the bare necessities of being alive.

I pick my plate and bowl up, the very same ones that I choose from among at least 5 options everyday. And then, I search for a specific type of aesthetically and practically achieving spoon to go with the duo. Slots are divided in the plate and any chutney without slot also has its place designated at the right corner of the slot for rice.

The worst part about eating, I guess, is finding an appropriate Disney movie to go with it. It has to be according to my mood or I just shut down the TV. While I eat, I finish one item at a time and the rest follow in similar fashion. The only deviance from this occurs when both the curry and the bhujia going with the rice are compatible to a favourable degree. Which they rarely seem to do. And then again, I don’t even enjoy eating because in the end I have always overeaten because I still don’t know how much is ideal for me; and this fact makes me feel the pathetic for exactly 2 seconds after which I don’t care.

I return back to my room and realise that I don’t use any copies at all. Writing in symmetry seems impossible but a copy with inconsistent handwriting annoys me. Well, not as much as before, but still. And that’s why the lack of pens in my room.

I study and thoughts invade. I study and it happens again. This loop goes on till dinnertime when I’m usually the last to dine. Afterwards, I check the gas knob enough times to make sure that I’ve turned it shut. Then I check the RO switch. The bottles I fill in the kitchen lie on a glass table in a colour-coded manner. And if any bottle threatens to promote disharmony in the arrangement, I take that bottle to my room to drink from.

As I make my move to my room, I hear mamma gossiping with my Granny about how the maid isn’t cleaning well enough, how my aunt ate up all the milk, how the kids are unruly and how I never leave my room and she’s been cursed to live alone her entire life. My heart would’ve broken had it been there, but it wasn’t. So, I continue to walk up the stairs with a rock in my throat. I wonder, lying on the bed, if I only could decay on the mattress, unfold beautifully amidst fungi and mould, ready for the earth to consume and build over.

The night is long and yet, not long enough for me to wonder about whether the fan-wing is friendly enough to swing by or not. By the time sleep hits at 7AM, I am already a hunger-less zombie. But I am thirsty. I keep drinking till the water overflows out of my eyes.

P.S. – Wrote this a few years ago. I’m doing better now.