The day lightened. Slowly the dark dissipated as the sun rose, demolishing the remains of the night. A lone jogger on the road, I watched her slowly from my window. I am too high up for her to see, her focus too strong on the road ahead. Just an observer currently, any activity catches my gaze. Grabbing my coffee, staring into the cup, taking a long sip, I hope the hurt inside me disappears just like the drink. But it’s the opposite effect. I am ingesting more pain, more disappointment, more wondering on why I can’t be what others want or need. Self-pity, the worst of my emotions, now seeps into my coffee. Shaking my head, I continue watching outside, as two ducks now roam around in the cul-de-sac. Sitting in this quiet, watching the birds gives me solace. A constant battle between my insides takes place. I cannot let the pain win. The suffering is not to be shared, though. It is just for me.
Willing more action to take place, I continue drinking the rapidly cooling liquid, knowing I will need another one soon. A chance to do something other than look. Anything to kill the time, and hopefully numb the turmoil inside me. To avoid and deny. I know what must be done but facing the suffering sounds like very hard work for an early morning. Better to waste time, to sit and look out the window, and not accomplish anything. Yet even that is a lie. The thing inside never stops, like a motor grinding away, it needs attention, but like a TV remote I keep switching channels by looking outside. Inside too tricky to handle, better to do something rather than feel. Actions to deaden the churning inside. Even staring into a laptop or a phone better than allowing the emotions to bubble outside. Yet the boiling continues, picking up steam, the pressure building, the explosion soon to come like an orgasm.
Being vulnerable in writing a lot easier than spitting the words to another person, to my wife, my family or other loved ones, to dear friends, or colleagues. Quietness my armor. No! Weakness is not an option even though I have been here for others countless times. Being a supporter comes easy for me, but to ask or be supported out of the question! There is a growing need to just put it in here but not out. The struggle to not appear weak so strong that it mutes my soul. So, I sit, sip, look, then click onto the keyboard. Rinse and Repeat. Time passes. More looking, more ignoring of myself, and then relief, the timer dings. Time’s up. No longer need to share. I did my bit. I spent my time. More like wasted. A few measly words to show for it. But it’s done. I tried.
Papa stares at me. His smile ever ready, his hair combed to perfection. His black comb still in my possession when I removed it from him before the funeral. He appears to watch me as I put these words down, and a sudden warmth of grief chokes my throat. Only in this early morning when I am half awake do the tears seep out. Just the tears and I, nothing to see here folks. Move along! That is the philosophy that got me so far, yet it no longer serves the way it used to. That pain turned into something as black as the coffee in my hand, transformed into negative energy blasted onto others. Undeserved, but needed to take out some of the blackness inside me otherwise it coats my heart so much so that I don’t wish to get out of bed anymore. Dreamless sleep beckons where no nothing happens, no feelings, no thinking, just an endless blankness that stops the fucking mind to stop serving up images I no longer need or want. The irony of waking up early just so I can then crawl back into bed, yet most days I am able to get over that. I push myself awake.
And so it continues, this cycle which exhausts me. A yawn draws near inside, and just for a moment, I am tempted to go back to bed. Better to be covered with the warmth of my bed, wife, and dog. The feeling dissipates as quickly as the yawn, the coffee too strong, the thoughts too great. It mut be faced, but how do I break it down? A general malaise comes over me, and then the cackling of the birds draws my attention outside. The distraction better than doing the work. The bird reminds me of mornings in India, instead it was a chicken, and a thick warmth blanketed the room. Blankness rules inside me. I can’t go any further with that time. Too many gaps on what happened there, unsure whether it was real or my imagination but a single gif-like image. Me taking my hand away from it, and him putting it back. Over and over, that’s what comes to me. Back and forth. Cringing my eyes shut, shaking my head loose from that, I get up. This is the worst time when I dare not make that memory into a movie. Better to keep it at the one picture because to think about it deeper make me nauseous.
Stretch. Pace back and forth in the small room, staring outside not but not seeing anything. My mind elsewhere, bringing up images of Papa, my aunt, Rex Simpson from high school, the first real death to affect me, Sukhpal, Elias, Surjit and suddenly the pictures turn into a blur of people and time lost. Then it switches to loss not of death but of deceit, lost relationships, marriages, friendships, severed connections that disappeared without notice, like a videogame, imageries shoot through me as the coffee cools. And then it stops, and it feels like I just woke up. All of this happens in the silence of the room, never to be shared out loud. Just kept inside, bottled up right because it’s easier not to think about this out loud.
Why? I don’t know. It’s become harder and harder to bring this up. I’d much rather focus on the most recent happenings of my day, from work to family life to working out. Those events blanket me, muffle the agony of life. But that’s not true either. It’s part laziness in a weird way. It just sounds exhausting to process all this, and so I just continue with the daily and not reflect on what has happened until there are mornings where I cannot breathe, cannot think, feel, just have to be, do the smallest and simplest actions to just feel like I am alive. It seems pointless sometime. There is nothing I can learn from the past I tell myself. This is my suffering to bear alone. It need not take up room in others minds and souls. I get to protect them from this. Suffering is all mine.
Is this it? Just me talking to myself? Is that what will allow me to get this thing inside out? Or am I just deluding myself, pretending not to know something which I do, playing games with my mind just so the days can pass, and I can get on to the next thing. This is my life? Then another sip. More looking out the window so that the insides don’t come bursting out. More things to scroll through, consume, read, glance, more images to keep blasting away at my eyes so the mind does not bring up the ones from the past. There is failure and then the wounds act up and I am back there where I don’t want to be.
“I didn’t realize it, but your accents are an issue.” The white man told us. I looked at my debate partner, Lay. We’d known each other since junior high school. Mr. Coop’s glasses hung around his neck, and for a moment, I lose myself in the sunlight glancing off them. His words pierced me in a way I couldn’t quite understand, branding me, scorching my self-esteem, burrowing themselves deep into me for years to come.
“You two are my best students, but I didn’t count on the fact that it’s hard to understand you when you two are under pressure.” He meant well. After all, if you can’t be understood then it won’t matter what you know or must share. A common theme in my life. Not being understood, not being able to communicate effectively. We both looked at each other, despair our common bond, our normal confidence in tatters in that history classroom. Countless hours spent on debating, studying and playing racquetball together, Lay and I weren’t used to hearing what Mr. Coop had to say. He also was my favorite teacher until then. His words demolished something in me, put me to dust, taught me to just accept the words since he was older. That’s how it worked. The adults ruled the world, their words like rulings in the court of law. Nothing to challenge but to accept his “wisdom.” I often wonder what if he had taken a different approach. What if he had made us practice under pressure. Given us a heads up.
He’d been running an experiment, too maybe. Put an Indian and Chinese kid and see how they fare against the true Americans. We were the Other. It hits me now that he probably felt super woke for doing that. Or did he not see our color until that day? My love for him wavered over the years. I visited his class many times after I graduated high school, and he looked older and not the man I remembered. The heart hurts at the memory. Stop. Don’t go there and off the mind goes another place.
The classroom buzzed with chatter and laughter. Sitting in the back as usual, notebook on the desk, the sounds surrounded me but didn’t include me. A common theme. There but apart from the conversations, the chatters, the small jokes, lost In my own world as a way of coping with the loneliness. Most times random thoughts of family, cousins, and comic books fed my brain, the class just a background noise until a cacophony of laughter broke the spell. No that’s not right. Hearing my name got me to look up and down. The white boy crowded the desk next to me, and in a loud voice said “at least you are not as ugly as Sanjay.” My ears got hot as the incoming laughter entered them, those words staying with me for years as I found it hard to believe anyone could find me attractive. And off I go to another memory, jumping around haphazardly just like in my life, unsure and unclear on where I wish to be.
Lots of my hurt came from school, from junior high onwards till I graduated law school, and it never occurred to me how the quiet humiliations burned into me, scarring me in a way I didn’t realize. And then the other cause that I tend not to speak of (only in my writing), my first marriage where I got lied to in a way I could not image (not infidelity) and I buried it inside. And then my own mistakes that piled up. Easier to keep look at the past hurts and not want to focus on my own actions. A late bloomer, that’s what I told myself as I began my private practice, the only happiness I had in the beginning that Papa got to see me as a real lawyer. And then an uneasiness creeps inside me as it hits me that none of this is true suffering. Its ultimate narcissism because I am at the center of it all, and none of it shaped me. My actions or lack of them did.
The responsibility feels heavy just like my eyelids, yet something steels inside me, hardens into determination. The few words now turn into a sentence, then an essay and suddenly what felt like me not saying anything now means growth. The sitting, the sipping, the looking out all actions that allow me to move forward even when I am still. The suffering rages on, but it melts the emotions so they can spill onto this space, molded into thoughts, better than just marinating inside me. And at the end, that’s all that matters. Suffering equals writing. And maybe, just maybe, that’s good enough for now.