Saturday, August 31, 2013

The Great Dictator

You wake. At the age of fifty; new born. It is cruelty, but the author monarch rarely metes out concern and sympathy. She dragged you into this mess that you find yourself situated in, gives you a worn, crumpled body and kicks you in the nuts, waking you up to the beginning of your story, which is near-end or middle, whatever. As she smirks in the background, you pick yourself up, dusting dirt off your ass, grind your teeth and wait. For all you can do is wait. (“Be thankful that you can walk”, she hoots from between the lines.

She drags something in, puts it before you and walks off, haughtily. You have a sense of foreboding, but what can you do but walk as she designs? It's a mirror. “This happens often”, you whisper in the ear of an yet unborn reader. Painful, but common, like toothache. You brace yourself for a thousand needles waiting to trim you up nicely, chisels to bluntly cut you, paint to be thrown at you and clothes to be glued in, careful not to laugh when the brush gives you 'features'. You can see the cursor moving, sometimes picking blue eyes, blonde hair - that was a long time back; now it is usually modelled more or less on her or people she knows (no hegemony or political incorrectness there, heh?) But nothing happens today. You are just a blur. Is she waiting for you to dust the mirror? You scrub at it a bit (after all it has been stowed away for quite some time). Nothing. Then it is sheer agony. Things pull at you, rip you apart, make you a paranoid freak developing a new phobia each day, wanting to kill youself, but unable to because you are afraid, most of all, of death. She chooses a plain face, no striking features unless you ount the sleep-deprived racoon eyes. It stops for a minute; the flurry. Then, the mirror shatters.

As you shield yourself from the shards that are all over the place, excruciating pain binds you, you are being twisted (you see yourself as one of the gas-station tubes; maybe she wants you to fuck a fuel-tank, some thing theory crap she is obsessed with now-a-days) dipped in so many different inks like a disgusting ice-cream, ripped apart, glued together like a tightly wound-up ball of chaos and confusion. Now it's panic. This has never happened to you before. She has always let you know what you are (she even drew up lists of things you are into, likes, dislikes etc). You are powerlesss and you kill yourself trying to picture your sleep and dorm, waiting for that narrative voice to tell you what you are atleast. You are spun, really fast, like a top. In your head you are a white blur with streaks of colors once in a while. You want to stop but you can't. You are dizzy and sure that you going to be killed ff. That's solace for you, for you have found the depths of the dustbin comforting. It'll suck if she leaves you there, in that small dark box, shards of glass on the ground (spiders somewhere for sure) and the claustrophobic smell of sweat and urine, which you hope, with all the hope she's bestowed on you, is yours.

Yet, that is your fate. To be hidden away with a note 'for later'. Later, you scoff; you know the meaning of later by now. But the pain, the suffocation, the intensity of it all is new, She is looking at you with expectation, like mothers often do, waiting for you to surprise her pleasantly. Enough for her to cry out 'See, that is my child out there'. But what agency do you have? She looks for you, constantly, in every person she meets. Falls in love with a couple of them, hoping to find you in them. They become just distractions. Step-fathers distancing you from her. (Stereotypical?). You want to scream out to her; come, sit down, chill the fuck out and write. Write about you. But what? You are sick of all this waiting to be birthed. Why not refuse to be a part of this drama which is injurious to both of you? So you recede further and she takes to painting, hoping that obscure lines will convey to others what you are; not even considering what she wants you to be. Not paying attention to you. After all, you are just ink waiting to flow.