His body was not under his control anymore. The steps he took had reduced to half his former strides. That made him walk like a marionette - a doll controlled through invisible strings, almost like an automaton.
He had deliberately reduced his life to this. He told himself it was because his body was giving way. But, it was also his self.
He had been feeling irrelevant for years. He had spent his youth chasing after the beauty and meaning of something so ephemeral - words. Words in poetry.
His own father was silent for years, weighed down with the grey weight of depression and spent his life starting into the heavens on an armchair, unaware of his surroundings, stewing in his private hell. He was never available to him as a boy, emotionally. Yet, his father became his unfortunate role model. But, even while he had to pick up the broken pieces left by his father, he could not be angry with him.
His mother became his responsibility at ten, when he was a mere boy. That day his anarchic but passionate father had come home, holding the hands of his teacher. The father declared his love for the woman teacher to his wife and son. The house was already hell because his gentle mother had already fallen down in illness, not able to bear the irresponsible but powerful weight of her husband's anarchies.
The entry of the new woman stirred the muddied waters again. The sickly boy that he was, asthma stricken and struggling to breath, suddenly had to grow up. He understood that it was upto him to save his mother from that house, for she (nor he) had nowhere else to go.
So, he killed the poetry welling within him. He got into a banker's calculations of numbers. He was never at ease with money. He could never play with it, like some of his colleagues, invest in stocks and shares and become rich. He only knew hoarding, like his mother, who hoarded one week's worth of provisions and stretched it for a whole month, often giving up on her own comforts.
His own life became interesting only in the evenings - in the verandahs of the local intellectuals. There he found the father he had, but never had. He found the stable, strong and kind brilliance of minds - men who mentored him, disciplined him and whose quiet grace and careful use of words appealed to him. He found a home, finally.
But, today was a world were those words were hardly important. This was a fast world. This was the world of very short attentions spans, where loud YouTube videos themselves became too long to engage and people were scrolling from one video short to another...he, and his world had receded. It had become irrelevant.
He retreated without a fight. He gave up reading. He could not sit for hours anymore, so he also gave up writing. He had already given up walking. His ambition was to give up thinking and then give up, being itself.
Now, he just waited, lying down in the meantime.
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