“Everybody, deep inside, is a lonely person,” quipped Wind Girl, a woman with whom I often chat, during one of our many conversations.
That singular line in its brevity had the capacity to catapult me into a process of deep reckoning. My eyes kept on staring at the bright computer screen while my mind worked itself out to find a suitable response to what she said. Not knowing what to say, I typed, “I believe everyone is a lonely person, deep down inside,” reiterating what she had said a couple of minutes earlier.
Those words were too powerful for me. It summed up, in a few words, all I had been. And perhaps, coming out of Wind Girl’s own personal experience made it life size. Thereafter, I experienced a prolonged feeling of dejavu. A dreamy kind of aura captured my thoughts, and for once I knew, it was this loneliness deep inside that had made me miserable all this while. The words were like a signpost that directed me to travel within as if it read like an arrow pointing “Go Inside.”
So before I went to sleep that night, I examined myself thoroughly. As I plunged headlong into the muddle of my existence, it opened the floodgates to weirdest of my imagination. I tried to disentangle every complex travesty of my life. I came close to getting some answers. Many remained just as questions.
There are people who cannot be on their own. Even for a minute. Yet in contrary there are people who wish to be loners, happy and comfortable in their own company. I fell out from both these categories. I belonged to the third group. And a strange one at that. I was a person who would be as happy in a company of beautiful friends as I was alone. That’s why I say it is paradoxical. The secret of my misery is however too confusing to understand or explain it. There is barely a thin line that separates what is misery from what is not. Often one overlaps the other, and trapped in this chaotic scheme of things, I am a lost soul.
I am a lonely person even among these beautiful people. I would laugh as well and deep inside, I would yet find myself so alienated from the external world. I live in the small four-walled vastness of my mind. A dangerous, dark, and sinister cave where I lived a life of a recluse.
It is like the small room in an attic where as a little boy I would often go there alone and sit for hours. Dreaming of the world that I wanted to be in. Building castles on the sands of time. Only to be washed away by the furious waves of reality. But today, I have no such little room where I can escape into and breathe a moment of respite. Therefore, I read crazy books written by equally crazy authros for mere distractions. I tried my hand on some self-help books too. But it did not help me.
Now, I have become an internet bug. I spend hours and hours traveling in the cyber space, devouring all that I can lay my hands on. And at the end of it, I look back and wonder why I wasted so much time. The next day, I am there again, only to repeat the routine. It offers me but little solace. The only time I experience a little joy is when I meet equally emotional and sad people like me, who have gone through this phase of life. But had come out as winners. They are my inspiration.
When they say, “boy, there is so much to do and so less time. Look everybody has a problem or two; we can’t just stand and be stared at by those moving past us. We have to move along or ahead of them,” it reminds me of what I have not been all this time.
It falls unto me as a hard awakening to a nightmarish dream. I feel this surge of energy rush in my veins, and an optimistic determination to overcome this lethargy, grips me. These strangers I talk to make me walk the extra mile. These strangers to whom I pour all my sob stories, save me a day at a time. I relate with these people I have never met or seen and with their experiences I am not sure about. And sometimes even wonder what lives they must be living through. The best part of it is that I understand what they say. They speak the language of the hurt, the depressed and those who have risen up against odds. They speak my tongue, and most importantly, for me.
Now you may wonder, what I have written. Confused minds can only write something as confusing as this. I sway in the winds of inconsistency. This phrase-constantly inconstant-best befits me. Perhaps, some people are just incorrigible. Like me.
For the larger part of my time, I am a lonely dreamer, an escapist, desperately trying to run away into the Alice’s Wonderland or some beautiful place where I can find peace. That is the fact of the matter. So I am still dreaming and looking for that rabbit hole that will take me to that fairyland san any problem.
But the tragedy of our dreams is we see it all alone!
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