thoughts typed on trains.

You write in motion these days, the world moves and you get dizzy enough to scramble your thoughts enough to deem them worthy of writing down. As you type, you see your fingers prance around the keyboard, your pink shirt getting caught in between reflections and shadows. You train your eyes to look no where else but straight ahead, straight ahead at a screen in which you write in the minutest of fonts, your own pathetic way of asking for a little bit of privacy, a little bit of peace.

Things get better, and you feel that you can go on, that you can continue, that you will not cut your losses and exit the building- for some moments you convince yourself that perhaps you are better than this, that you can make things work and that maybe, just maybe, you really aren’t as bad a person as you think you are.

And then the world starts spinning at a faster rate than you can fully appreciate and pretty little meadows and hills turn into nauseous blurs of sickly green. And you cant, you cant breathe and you cant function. So pained you figure, so very pained.

I hate myself, I hate everyone I am here with. When this train stops, im getting off and im not going to come back. You wouldn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to tell seeing me sitting here, headphones plugged in, sipping water quietly. But I have plans, the train is going to stop and I am going to stop with it. I’m going to disappear with it, these words are a testament to it.

Sure, stare at me all you want, soon all theres going to be is an empty chair and a note saying im sorry.

But I cant, I just cant anymore.

It isn’t about being found or being lost, there is no right time or wrong time. It is not my fault nor anybody elses, there was no defining moment nor some crash. I have simply been decaying and have now reached a point where I either change my life or stop living it. And ive tried hard to changed, Ive tried for days and months and years. And no, this will not end and things will not get better, I gave time to patience and hope, but ive run out.

‘I love you! I love you I love you I love you!’ She screams, she whines, she pesters until she feels she cannot convey how she feels in any other way. And they just look, shocked, shocked because the box they had placed her in did not allow for love, indeed, it did not require it. And so you manage two reactions; on of a mustered indolence and another of badly muted cackles, the kind of laugh you reserve only for the elderly or a circus freak.

A familiar song plays on the television, your body shudders with over heating, you’re body shudders always, you have never been physically weaker. You realize, you truly must be depressed if fresh air and beautiful sceneries sparked allergies that you didn’t know you had and you spent most of your holiday in bed, sleeping through the days, complaining through the nights. You continue to smoke, your baby brother telling you that you’re truly an idiot, but you tell him that it makes you happy and if you’re going to cough anyway you might as well do it with a smile on your face.

You spend so much time trying to figure out who is worthy of loving and who you should bother spending your time on that you forget why and where you gave up feeling anything real for this constant negative thought process that makes you think too much and feel very very little.

This is the wrong place to think of you. Everywhere is, you plague me to an extent that you come in my dreams and I wake up craving a life that ive never lived, a life that I might not even be interested in.

Someone asked me once why ive never been in a long term relationship. Bewildered by my lack of sexual escapades at college they assumed I was gay, after which they thought I was going through some identity crises. I smiled, plead not guilty to both charges, told you that I thought women were indeed the most attractive sex but sadly I had no interest in jumping them, and that I was pretty acutely aware of who I was and who I wanted.

Then what was it, you asked, pestering on for longer than I wanted. Me, inebriated on some obnoxious combination of drugs and more drugs told you the truth, silly silly me.

I don’t think im worthy of being loved I said, quietly, fast enough that the sentence ended before I could really understand and comprehend what I had just put into words, thoughts that had been fermenting for ages but never had a voice. And there you have it, one of my many mildly interesting ‘issues’. One that I have never been able to get over, one that was recognized only recently, as it was once mistaken for severe insecurity issues. But now you see it, and you see yourself, and you don’t see a future.

With anyone.

Please, get out of my head before I start hurting myself again.

There’s really no way to reach me, he sings, over and over again, because he, apparently, has already gone. You were never were very fond of the song, nor of what he was saying, so you patiently wait for the song to finish and wait for some old Indian woman to croon you ala monsoon wedding soundtrack. Now this, you figure, was music, now this, you realize, was anguish.

And then trains change and you shuffle across ramps and awkwardly maneuver down stairs with your larger than necessary luggage. You open your laptop in another city and with it you entertain a new song, one that screams the way only teenagers can when singing about teen angst and all the merriment that comes with it.

Don’t waste your time on me, you’re already the voice inside my head.

You listen to a lot of music, a lot of music that has to do with loving and loosing and hating and yearning and wondering and hoping, hoping to an extent that you loose yourself in times that are now lost. And when you here this music, these songs, you sing along just like everyone else, you like certain lyrics and certain beats, you often write down certain lines and say them out loud because you like the way they roll of your tongue. But when you do sing, when you do write, you have no image of anyone in your head. When you sing love songs, you sing them with a chosen hollowness, the words being words, the beats being beats, the emotions choosing to simply not exist.

And so, you type to the tune of some of your most favored songs, and you see them differently.
Noor Jehan croons, ‘Teray aankhon kay siwa dunya main rakhan kya hain?’ and you think of all the inebriated nights that you’ve spent listening to this song on repeat, the hours you spent online finding the right version, the lame attempts to try to decipher what the hell the woman was saying (my take on the Urdu language is- weak to say the least). But that line, oh that line, that line is really worthy of all the time spent isn’t it? But you sit right now, stopped at a station called Visp, waiting for the train to start moving and you realize that every time you sang along to that song you never sang it to someone, your mind was blank.

I remember I tried translating that song for you, and I failed miserably. You smiled, told me that you were sure it was beautiful in Urdu and that it was sweet that you tried. But even us, even we, we were nothing more than a slight connection found in the winter when things got cold and we needed to huddle together for heat. In a way, im glad you wont be there when I go back in a month, you still are (and perhaps will always be) the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

‘I too once thought I was worth something’