Dear Anupriy: Letter#17

(This letter is part of an epistolary series Speaking Our Souls and is a response to Letter #16. If you wish to start from the beginning, you can look at the list here)​

As I was going to post this on your birthday, Feb 4th, I wrote this letter in a particular fashion. Let’s just assume that today, in fact, is your birthday. It is a very special day, one I would like to begin with a manifesto.

Today is your birthday. You are older now than before. And I love you more for it. The day marks another year of your survival in this messy, weird world and while I don’t care much for birthday celebrations, it is the notion of persistent self-preservation that gives this day of your birth its relevancy. You have survived. You are living. You are present. You aren’t fictional. And I love you more for it.

I am in the process of reading the book you gifted me, ‘Meet Me at the Museum’. It is a fantastic read and knowing the way we write and how we write, the book assures me that our letters are going to be a treasure to read after a long enough epoch. Each of the protagonist’s letters is complete and permanent, yet wait for the counterpart. I love how the two personalities show up ever so often in their literary choices. The museum director is constantly apologizing for coming up short emotionally to the depths of the English housewife’s anxieties, while she can’t stop admiring his crystal clear gaze of the world of the Tolland Man.

I think the reason I enjoyed this book was that I like being witness to a relationship of the mind, where the physicality lies in the shape of the words one utters and the images one conjures. There’s so much more to see in a mind than there is in real life. Oh, how I wish to enter the holy space of the cranium and never return. In fact, an impromptu conversation with Akhil, partner-in-crime at the old office, the other day led us to confide in each other that we like playing God in our off-time. Our daydreams are filled with conflicts, do-gooders, cars, radical feminists, violence and promise of the new. We dictate what happens, but we also sympathize with our hurting characters. Relishing the false sense of control, our imagination is a calculated escape from the known every day.

This brings me to my conclusion for this letter. That fiction is the ultimate toolbox of humanity. Belief in things and emotions unreal and undiscovered soothes me to sleep in the night and wakes me from depression in the day. A case in point.

I had a small emotional breakdown a couple of weeks ago. I felt myself spiralling inwards, going from rejection, panic, dread to the mother of all, depression. On a train back home, I heard a racket from the bag of regrets that hangs by my shoulder and one by one, saw the regrets whipping into a vision before me. I felt paralysed. Yet somehow, like watching yourself dream, I could see myself being paralysed in the visions. I could feel my veins becoming runny and the blood rushing into my face. At this point, no amount of positive reassurances were going to help because moments like these is when the knives of reason are sharp and scratch away at anything flimsy. I tried but I was outsmarted by the gremlins that were puppeteering my conscious into submission. The only option left? To pronounce this world dead.

I said to myself:

This world is unreal, these feelings are unreal, this train is fiction. Let it all fade.

I repeated it. Again. And again. Out loud and inside.

It took a while, but it worked. Slowly I felt my nerves relax as the clouds in my head parted and the eternal sky began to gleam blue. I stepped down at my station and took a deep breath. Before long, I felt my feet walking me away, far away from the chaos.

Now it is true that my practical approach towards the world is born out of my intense need for self-preservation. I feel the urgency to plan my next steps with care and caution because the stakes in the real world are too high. I value the value of reality and the part of me that freaks out seems to be engendered by my circumspect regard for a reality that might fail to exist. But somehow, by convincing myself that this world is not real and that this life is only a figment of my imagination, I was able to gain some control over my fears. As I pronounced the world fictional, the freak recoiled inwards, her tongues hissing, as she was aghast at the notion of the fantasy island. She realized that one can’t really freak out if nothing is real and nothing matters anymore.

Fiction is the ultimate toolbox. (TM)

Sorry for the long wait for the letter. I was in the middle of some life decisions and my words were arranging themselves pretty for college essays and applications, avoiding my hungry subconscious glances. But I am here now. And there’s nothing better than the present moment to imagine the next.

Looking forward to your next letter from a new ‘old’ city, while I knit some moonwear for our dream time rendezvous.

Yours fictionally,
Roh