The Dust Settles Anyway

I like watching the rain. I hate the rain itself, but I like watching it as it pours. If it were to not touch anything and just crashed onto the ground, I would love it. One could say it is the gusty winds that accompany a storm that influence how and where the rain lands, but I wouldn't want a still downpour. The light buzz of the rain pouring and the winds howling in chorus add character to a storm.

Sometimes, the Sun as it sets makes the mesh in my balcony glisten, and it feels like every hole in the mesh has an individual ray of light it has carefully filtered out, and I often stare at the glistening mesh and these individual beams of light, amazed. Yet, the light that eventually lands on the glass door reveals these tiny specks of lint and dust that would have settled down, and it bothers me that the light is revealing all of it.

Mother sent me an email last week about how my sibling bought a house, and sent me photos of the place. She insisted I congratulate her and be happy for her, like she was for me when I bought a house.

Later, last week, my sibling also sent me an email with a subject line that announced I need to be excited, before I could even register what had happened. Seems she and her husband planned to adopt and are due to be parents by the next month or so. While the subject screamed at me and asked me to be excited, and Mother's email asked me to be happy about an acquisition, both emails refused to evoke anything in me. All they evoked was worry about a kid that is yet to be born.

I have yearned to be at a place where I can be alone, and not mean anything to myself or who I have had to relate to. In being unresourceful to, and disenchanted with, society and who I am related to, I often find myself relating to life itself.

I colour my solitude with wonder and amazement, and latch on to things most people are oblivious to or impatient towards. Yet, it is what I admire often that I fear. While I love the phenomenon of a storm and the pin-holed beams of light, I fear them in the same breath. They lease some meaning to life and inject a dose of suffering at the same time.

I could embrace the dust, accept it, and let it be, but I often indulge in a quixotic struggle against it. The relentlessness of the ever-settling specks of lint and dust makes the otherwise transparent glass seem hazy.

I have been told I have obsessive-compulsive disorder.

These episodes of me fighting what simply is, leave me little room to soak in my hard-earned solitude. To be one with all the wonder that existence offers. So, there is this persistent penchant for death.

Romanticising death, in itself, is not being suicidal, when death is something that offers more meaningfulness than life itself. While suicidality is often termed "selfish" and "cowardice", society does not offer a rationale to continue living.

I have been told I was "childish" and was asked to "grow up", be an adult, and medicate myself rigorously, when I spiralled last year and wanted out.

The act of living needs certain provisions. Provisions that can't be asked for, but earned. I chose isolation, as a rebellion against performative existence. In isolation and eventually solitude, I found life.

Solitude was an emotion that the rebellion offered. A vast space where I could appreciate life for what it is. Experienced and felt in totality, without noise, without an audience and without being asked to feel on cue, or to mean anything to anyone. Just me, myself and my read of life.

To continue living erratically, so I continue existing, is in contradiction to the premises of my solitude.

A choice to live or otherwise, therefore, must be my own, and not influenced or demanded.

Does society provision for such free will? Or will I be called a coward for reasoning for an exit from my quixotic existence?