Duality

This is the duality. The weird, agonising paradox.

I try to look back on my life, but the memories have turned to darkness.

I close my eyes and search for the life I once lived, not the one I am surviving, but the one I lived and I see nothing. The past is wiped clean, as if it never existed. The only things that surface are a few faces, the ones who hurt me deep. But even they no longer sting. They are just echoes from the nightmares that haunt me, phantoms in a void where a life used to be. This is the present. An acceptance, now, that I am not doing good.

The challenge, every day, is not the world. It is my own self, arguing with a cold conviction that this isn’t suffering, but karma. A just payment for my own wrongdoing. The thought turns, sharpening itself, Am I just blaming every other person for what I have done to myself? Isn’t that self-centered? Isn’t it cowardice? There are so many thoughts, and every single one is capable of hurting me deep.

Every single day is a challenge, from the moment I wake to the moment I fall asleep. Yesterday, I was called to the college. I refused. I told myself I would go today. But today is here, and I don’t want to go. I cannot. Why have I given up so deeply that I don’t even want to try anymore? I know the consequences. I just can’t bring myself to care.

Sometimes I use social media to escape, to run from the reality of my own thoughts. But the guilt of not doing, of sitting, scrolling, while life burns down makes me sick. Then I avoid that, too. So I try to peek into my own mind, to unravel the mysteries. But there are no mysteries. There is only hurt, pain, and the one, persistent question, How can I kill myself?

At first, the thoughts were just to hurt. Death is a real thing. It cannot be undone. So I would hurt myself in ways that wouldn’t kill me. But now, I do it to kill me.

This is the duality. The weird, agonising paradox. I do it to kill me, but with a scare in my whole body. It is one thing to talk about death. It is another to stand at the door and feel the draft, to know it can be opened at any moment. It scares me. My body does not want it.

But deep down, my mind does. I am so hurt, yet so self-aware. So unaware of what is truly inside me. I want to run so far away I can never return. I need my consciousness, but at the same time, I don’t want it.

If my own self is this complicated if I took this long to understand and accept my own suffering how can I expect others to? How can I explain to them that this isn’t just a pile of laundry in my room, or the unwashed cups from weeks ago? That’s just the evidence. How can I explain that depression is the paralytic, invisible force that makes the thought of laundry feel like a war?

How can I tell them that suicide isn’t an act of cowardice? That to do it requires a courage or a desperation, that most people can never collect?

The world doesn’t startle me anymore. Nothing interests me. I stare at the sky, appreciate the sheer, vast doing of nature, and think, Perhaps I won’t be able to see this tomorrow.

Suffering is different for everyone. We all have our own little worlds where we cry and weep. We only meet and relate on common grounds, on the symptoms that are universally the same.

I wish these walls could speak. They would do justice to the story. They have seen the war I fight every single day, the one I somehow end up surviving. And maybe someday, they will also see me defeated. They will see my fate.

This is the story I want to tell, and this is the story that will remain forever untold. Even if I wanted to, I could never. No matter how hard I try.

And in the end, I don’t want to leave victims behind. I don’t want my parents to get hurt, to blame themselves for what happened. It is no one’s fault. It just happened. Or maybe it was meant to happen.

I don’t want my body to be reachable. I don’t want it taken to my hometown, to the same alley I used to play and grow up in. I don’t want people to know of my demise. I know the narrowness of their minds.

So many things will remain unsaid. Unwritten. Untold. That is the sad reality of life, I guess.