Ordinary Person

There was this shitty bar close to the college I used to attend. My friends and I would often gather there after class and drink cheap whiskey and rum. We were vagabonds then, going nowhere in life and talking about fistfights, pull or some lead singer who went mental. I remember one such conversation. As I was dozing off because of the whiskey I’d drunk, my friends launched into a spiel about how Images and Words was the best Dream Theater album and about how Syd Barrett dropped acid and lost his mind. 

The bar was sordid. Paunched, moustached men prattled on about how the garmint was corrupt in Kannada, and corrupt cops sat munching peanuts and burping. You’d find tissue paper strewn all over, and the foul smell of nail polish spiked liquor was asphyxiating. But we didn’t have the money to go to the fancy places that offered free drinks to the women but made sure the men paid up. We couldn’t afford fancy cocktails and sumptuous, gourmet meals, which is why all the girls in college dated wealthier guys with cars and sports bikes.

Once I got piss-drunk and stumbled and fell. I swallowed tissue paper and kept asking people if I was dreaming while Kevin asked me to ‘relax and enjoy the trip.’ I didn’t even know I was tripping. I caught hazy bits of conversation that floated from oblivion, snatched it with an addled mind, and tried to tie it together into a coherent whole. Nothing was lucid, and a smog of ambiguity surrounded everything with its steel-grey taint. I peered and peered into the realm of the living and sane, but only tripped and lay on the tables until two servers and a few friends carried me out and left me in a back alley where I puked my guts out. 

Still, sanity remained elusive, and my head throbbed, and I struggled to find balance. I don’t speak of this as some memory I cherish. Some remnant of the past that spoke of unmitigated freedom and free-spiritedness. Even then, sorrow scraped my heart with her sharp talons (if you’ll permit me to talk hyperbolically). I knew deep down that I wasn’t happy, but was great at playing a role. I played the part of the drunk fool who blithered on about the most inconsequential things, and I believed my friends accepted me. 

Today, I’m tired, and I know that if given a chance to rearrange portions of my life, I’d change many things. Of course, idealism leads to bone-crushing blows, but then again, without naïveté making me blunder, would I have learnt anything at all? I sit in my apartment at 3 in the morning today. I know I still have so much to learn and that I need to get my shit together. I will not speak about closure or something cliched. The pain that haunted me then still does, but it’s become a companion more than an oppressor. It’s something that guides me and makes me lose every mask and try to be as earnest as I can. I’m hated for it in this age of picture-perfect selfies and insta-celebrities, but I’ll take my chances.