For the last two years, I suffered bouts of sadness, which was everything from feeling blue to having clinical depression. Having some sadness is considered normal, but being constantly sad is the other thing. I was given to fits of rage and nihilistic moods of despair. I had complaints about life, but it was a problem I could see no solutions for. I longed to be an artist, but writing never came easy to me, and the work at hand did not mean anything. I had a vision of myself lying on my deathbed, clutching a handful of poems begging to be read. In my most private moments of life, I spoke of the fear of death, of being unheard or unread, which got elevated to tragic heights. Looking back, it feels like an act of mere narcissism. Self-obsessed, self-righteous as I was, everything I wrote was never untrue, though.
The sadness took hold of me the moment I knew who I was or what I should be. During that precise moment of self-enlightenment, a feeling of despair crept inside my marrow. But it was not so intense. Just a meager wave of sadness. This followed for weeks and the sense of sadness, instead of going away, made room for emotions. A low, sad mood lasted longer than a month and interfered with my life. I kept ruminating. Replayed the moment of enlightenment and thought about it to the point of obsession.
As a result, my grades started tapering. That intense, ferocious sadness gripped me – and it was hard to fight. Then all I could think was my slim possibilities of getting a job or even getting an entry to grad school. I worried about it too much; in fact, I worried about it all the time. The more I worried about my grades, the worse they got. Trapped as I was in this vicious cycle – it seemed impossible to find a way out.
Like Harry Haller, the sad and lonely intellectual for whom life held no joy, I struggled to reconcile the wrong I did and the right I should have done without surrendering myself to fatalism.
For hours I sat silent and petrified, like concrete foundations buried under the sand of an earthquake. It was an extreme torture: mute but defiant. I sat on the floor, watching the dark and waiting for the dawn. With vicissitudes of times and seasons, I became more silent. I looked pale and frail—as if a tempest was broken inside me—it cast me down to dry and perish.
I was a story with many layers, and in every layer I was a different story. There were so many things to think about, so many ideas to ponder over. Somewhere, while I was still in the deep and dark dungeon of thinking, I lost my control. Then ‘thinking’ became my prime obsession, which later got transfigured into ‘worrying.’ I worried about life. I worried about my future’s pay. I even worried about the food I ate or the pen I wrote with.
I wanted to strangle that looming wariness, that hideous process. I wanted to rip it off. But all in vain. Tears guttered down my face and what followed was melancholia. I remember being ‘slow’, crying at the most trivial of things, and being watchful during nights.
Meanwhile, a dream recurred more than often. A ditch alongside the road, a gutter, where I lay dying was now flooded with rainwater. The muddy water seeped and slopped through the permeable pores of my body. Bloated like a corpse, bluish and flaky, I could do nothing but wait for a touch. A gentle strike with the tip of a fore finger. A divine intervention? Maybe. Someone’s help? Perhaps!
I had but one desire—to knock this dream off. To get out, away from the whooshing and chilling sound of that rainwater.
I tried but failed. Countless times.
The sound does not go; the dream keeps recurring. All I can do is avoid them. Just like I avoid the clogged gutters during rainy seasons.
Bibek studies at the Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University
Related story
Inebriated man drowns in gutter
