Leftovers of Being
by Saqib Farouk
What is left of me? I ask myself while looking at the familiar flare of the afternoon beach. What is it inside me that lingers, that still gives me the conviction to live and not cross the final frontier to death (although I have tried it many times)?
I? Me? Umm…Aha! After all these years of constantly changing places and failed attempts at exploring the unknown, I feel the words ‘I’ and ‘Me’ are a vexed void that constantly stretches into a realm where communication and language are of no use—a mundane, machine-like discourse belonging to the accomplished or those in the constant conduct of commemorating themselves. People who have names for everything, even inexplicable emotions, and are good at creating the bridge between their invisible, inner worlds and the tangible ones outside of themselves. All I have learned my whole life is how to burn bridges down, so who am I to help anyone cross the one that’s been inside my head for so long? Regardless, I hope that they feel the warmth as I blaze along with it.
So, what words should I use, could I use? What language? I will only use the one that I have lived in. Language. A tool. A marionette manipulated by the thin strings of oscillating thoughts between sense and nonsense.
What good are words to someone who has lived in the cold silence of being? What speech would suffice for the madness of the moth that makes it dance around the candle’s flame and then burns until there is no trace left? Far from words, in the spaces in-between, in the trace of the untraceable, all the answers are held, answers that cannot be spoken of. Still, I will dance, even if I cannot comprehend it now.
For so long, I tried to be an accomplished writer and write about the suffering that suffocated me and the people I knew. I even tried my luck with painting my interior life—one smeared and splattered with anxiety and uncertainty. All of it, a half-baked attempt to liberate myself from who I am—my parts, my experiences—and create an illusion of who I hope to become.
I have stopped doing that as of late, however. I do not know if there is a word that I can associate with myself. There are no words, no language, just tears and blood. With all that has been shed, I could draw a map and a word—the map of my homeland and the word, Kashmir.
Strangely, I cannot recall any memory without tears rolling down my foul face, and every time I feel an old emotion, the taste of blood fills my mouth. Annihilation—wet and hot, free from words, language, and myself. I do not exist (I am not even here). I suffer; therefore, I dissipate.
Masquerading as a writer, a hopeless one, hoping that no one ever reads this journal, these words are nothing but the rash ramblings that if let out would consume the world. Ah! These thoughts have poisoned everything. I have been haunted by them my entire life. They have a life of their own. They are real. Cursed. Contagious. Crippling. They invade my sleep. They don’t make sense. Writing, somehow, gives them form—the shape of waves in a vast ocean. The ocean can’t be understood.
And I do not intend to be understood. So, why bother writing at all? (A constant thought in my head).
“You must write because it helps the mad ones!”
Sara does not like to use the word ‘schizophrenic.’ She read a lot of Beat Generation literature before becoming an existential therapist and even authored a paper about one of the founders of the group: “Madness and Creativity – The Intertwined Roads.”
“What should I write about, and how does it help when you are convinced deep down that nothing will ever change?” I had asked her during my last visit a few months ago.
“Write about anything personal to you. Things we have discussed over the past year. Experiences that have left you shattered along so many trajectories. The fragments and shards of glass scattered everywhere. Now that we have worked out the narrative of the story that you kept telling yourself, it is about time you write it down and put the pieces back together again. Recreate that vase of glass and put your favorite flowers in it. You always wanted to try your luck with writing. I’ve read some of your pieces; you are not bad at it.”
She paused, stretched her unwaxed arm towards a glass of water, and swallowed her medication pills. She continued.
“It is your story! You own it completely, right from the cerebral cortex. One true sentence at a time, pure, raw, and uncut. And it does not matter if nothing changes, your story can be a candle in the abysmal despair of being for others, maybe someone just like you. They might relate to it and find comfort in the unchanging and uncompromising situations they find themselves in. If you can save even one of them, it will be as if you saved all of humanity. Forget that; in the process, you will be able to save yourself. This is what great art is about: Save yourself and you save us all.”
“I have tried that before. I do not want to do it again. I do not think there is anything left in me that needs saving,” I replied with a cold sigh, checking the wrinkled brown mole on her cleavage exposed by a low-cut garment. My mother had a similar cancerous blemish.
She held my left hand, which I had placed on the desk between us, and looked intently at me. In a self-conscious, serene voice, she said, “You tried it many years ago when you had the notion that your pain and the suffering of others could be negotiated into a successful career. But now, it does not matter to you. This time, it’s your pain, and you don't know how to contain it. You tried in the past to write about the political and military situation in your homeland, to be like one of those sellouts. This time, it’s about you. About the monsters lurking in the dark that no one is willing to talk about. And you have nothing to lose. No ulterior motives. This time, the purpose is not to prosper and become accomplished, it is to enjoy--or at least get used to—our Sisyphean fate and not succumb to it. Just for the sake of it. Not to create something significant that brings you praise, but to celebrate the absurd and meaninglessness itself... And when there is nothing left in you to be saved… that is exactly when you are saved.”
That’s how she concluded our last session a few months ago. But why recall all this now? It’s because I haven’t been able to write except in this journal, and it torments me. I wanted to work on a novel about a heroin addict with a dysfunctional family. Forget that! I admonish myself and the torment of not telling the story. I have to bear with it…
As I was immersed in water, I became a separate water droplet, lost, searching for a way back to the ocean. Looking one last time at the afternoon sun, which was about to drown at a distant margin, where water and horizon seemed to meet, I recalled a poem by Nana Jaan that he whispered into my ear just before he was stoned to death:
“Fana is the song of the universe,
Human beings are asleep; they only wake up at death.
Graves are just curtains to hide the beautiful abyss.
The thing you lost at your birth; you will find at your death.
Waves appear and disappear, always part of the same Ocean,
Death and birth are the same.
Die! Die before you die!”
BIO: Mir Saqib Farouk is currently working on his debut novel and studying Philosophy. His interests span a wide range of topics, from aerospace to physics, psychology to philosophy and from music to literature. A lifelong learner and curious explorer, Saqib rejects the idea of specialization and instead embraces the interconnectedness of different fields and disciplines.