ezra

black

I am scared because, I have scarred myself, one too many times. Tonight, I feel like I am on the verge of another bad week and it doesn't matter if my birthday is in between, it is just a day. I want it to end, all of this. All the thoughts, memories behaviors, and not able to get the right words for what I mean.

I miss him and I am very scared that when I do try to open again, someone, no, everyone will do the same. So, I want to change myself, not just hard and harsh, but different, another and this makes me think like I am two people, at once.

One who wants to love and be loved, touch, and be touched, as everyone else does. Another that knows there is no such thing as loving(touching) and being loved (touched), and I am tired of fighting, acting like I fight, wanting, even at times failing, is a performance.

So what do I do?

When I decide to be one, another picks up an ax from somewhere behind and stealthily comes and cuts my back open. I do that to myself.

I want to be one person, clad in black with long hair and nose pin, somewhere in winter, walking through the cold mess around me. I will smile when I open my door to my warm apartment. My black little cat will come and rub itself against my leg, it will know I am happy, and I will throw my coat over at the coat corner, and sit near the window, read a book, smile at the words, while sipping hot coffee and smoking a cigarette, waiting for death to come.

But do I fly here? Dream my way forward? Try to cry. and read maybe? I know, if I wake up mindlessly, live and sleep, wake up again forever,

I will not.

Is it time to wear black? Move away to a warm apartment, and put the kettle on the stove.

Call out for my cute little kitten, and while I wait for the cat, I will seep for eight hours or so. Maybe if I do the things that lead me there, I will go there. Simple.

like black.

A comfortable sense of self has always been either alarming and scary, or a jolt of energy, as if I have never tasted a barf ka gola and suddenly an entire ball of ice, dripping with sweet and sour, colorful juices, has just appeared in my mouth.

These few words are not for you but for me. You have no idea when I say I hate that panda for not matching with me on hinge. You don't know that months ago I saw his face, his torso, the dark nipples, his very thin frame, moving down in an almost V shape to the end of my phone on the stories of an Instagram account which curates and shares male nudes and sexual content for an aesthetic pleasing.

He is a stranger and I dislike him for being one to me. If this isn't my hate for myself, then what else? Humans' perception of themselves is reflected in how they perceive, comprehend, approach, and react to other stranger humans. It is when I don't have to keep up my charades. Don't act like you don't. You do the same. With your family and friends, your lovers, the co-workers and bosses, the people you see on the way, at noon, night, and say, they all, all do the same. I mean keep up the charades. Of course, we have to. Its the most human thing to know the boundaries, think of transgressing them, and not doing so. Control is what makes you human. It is the choice that one has, makes, constructs even.

Of course, it means there are gray areas, but these are areas in the human psyches and not objectively about a certain topic. You cannot tell me that its a gray area when it comes to how the caste system is horrible, but also someone needs to do odd jobs or that abortion should be an option only under certain circumstances because it is life at the end in the womb of a woman or some crap.

This objectivity is also constructed of course, through consensus (maybe not organically all the time – influenced and coerced). Therefore our limits, to want, to fuck, to text, to build, to nurture, to buy, to slap, break and hate are always pushed and pulled. We are at all times controlling ourselves from being and non-being. When we are in a new or foreign land, situation, world, in an environment with people strange to us – the control loosens. It is easier for us to move from the gray areas to black or white. As Jungian as that sounds, I don't want to make this about it. I think yes, we keep up a show with everyone we know, engage with, and love. We are scared that they won't like us, approve, or in one way or another not love us – so each of us, by pretending, not telling or lying, play parts that are not our true selves. It does not mean that these parts are not us. They are definitely us, just not all of it.

When we come across someone we don't know, the ability to hate them, like them, and love them rises at an exponential rate. I want to argue that the initial contact between humans/ideas from humans set their relationship. Here is where we can go out of our control, play a part differently. And this goes out of our control, this playing of the part differently – changes the parts, it changes us.

When a few friends and were on call, one of them mentioned that he has taken a liking to nurture plants, and went on about it. I wondered in my head “who are you even.” and correctly so. When I knew him more closely, spent time with him physically, he hardly bothered about mushrooms, let alone a photosynthesising living organism. But a book he engaged with, (and so he engaged with the author too) brought out some very interesting points and since then he has been trying to be nurturing to plants, to learn, to tend. This engagement with a book, a strange zone, the author – a stranger and even the topic of trees and plants and tending them, a strange topic, made a chance for my friend to change a bit.

There are sad, dangerous and creepy versions of engaging with a strange situations and strangers too. These change people just as much the one above, maybe even more, maybe less but I am not going there now.

You may completely disagree with me and that's okay because these words are absolutely for me and my reflection.

Anyway, panda has no clue about anything and life goes on for him. He goes on to write academic books on law and politics, eventually retires as a pretty well known academic on legal matters and dies in a hospital of old age. He and I will never cross paths.

But my mind has expanded and engulfed the digital image, and whatever little information is available on him. This stranger unknowingly might be the reason for my fall or rise. But because there is neither, he will only be the reason for my aching back as I type this blog out, well past midnight while sleep-deprived and discomforted by the ulcers under my tongue.

Will seeking out for stranger people – actual people, books that people wrote, shows, and films that people wrote and made, art that people made, strangers created, change me so much that I will look back and see a stranger? A stranger in the past and a stranger in the future, who engages with whom? Who learns from whom? If my perception of myself is reflected in this future stranger version of me, aren't we the same?

The thing is, this thought makes me comfortable about myself and now I am—