Amidst the cheerful noise and chatter, electric and joyful buzz of the night, I find a place where I can be alone. Inbetween the mingling, conversing and debating, I am all drained out and in need of a recharge. I can only hope you don’t spot me, think I need company and decide to come over. That will be another episode of unnecessary small talk because I will be avoiding the more personal details about me. That will be more of me letting out statements like, “I don’t want to go into that detail now,” or “no why don’t you rather tell me about yourself.” Even if you oblige and tell me about yourself, I would have to fight the urge to ask you more personal questions, because that gives you a fair opportunity to ask about me too. A give and take kind of conversation. If I do decide to tell you a bit about myself, I hope you do not think I am strange because of the awkward facial expressions I make as I tell you that bit. Its an awkwardness rooted in the fact that I rarely go deep in conversations about myself. I hardly put myself out there, I prefer invisibility, I am a ghost. As I talk about one intimate detail, I can not make sense of or hear what I am saying, I think I have the most awful storytelling ability. I cannot breathe, I cannot think properly. I thought talking about stuff is meant to be therapeutic, and yet here I am going through a mini panic attack.
The self-appointed experts on people’s behaviour have diagnosed my condition as emotional unavailability. The funny part is that even though I know that is not true, I use that as an excuse quite often. The benefits of this condition are that, people leave you alone when you tell them you don’t want to talk, they don’t force friendships and intimacy on you, they don’t want to scare you off. They do not expect you to stick around, there is no responsibility on you to look like you care. It has always been the perfect scapegoat, but not today. I don’t think I want to risk that at all, as inquisitive as you are, you will see right through the charade.
By the end of this night, you will realise that this is nothing but a shameless masquerade, unnatural, learned and mastered. It is a wall carefully built as a result of cowardice, it’s a sham in the name of strength, from the thought that prevention is better than cure. It is a selfish withholding of love and emotion in the fear of getting too attached, getting hurt and possibly hurting other people. It’s like the prison wall that someone starts to construct as a joke, but then it gets too tough to break, and despite the discomfort and dinginess the trapped prisoner has found a home and is afraid of venturing into a so-called free world, never mind the fact that he had no intention of being imprisoned in the first place. Is there ever a free world, or is it just a fantasy created by people who are easy on the tongue, people who are comfortable with their emotions, those who can bare their souls on a sleeve? For the imprisoned one, that kind of freedom is threatening to his identity, it’s like some reincarnation gone wrong, being given a body that he would have ordinarily chosen but he still can’t figure out how to be in it thereafter. It’s the moment he has been waiting for his whole damn life, but when it finally comes it overwhelms him into inaction, it numbs him. It is the shock realisation that someone is considered a confidant, how? if they cannot even confide in themselves?
“Mind if I join you?”, you say as you shovel the uneven ground with the chair you have grabbed, to safely secure your sitting. I let out a worried sigh, in a minute I will be exposed.
To be continued, the night is still young.
The unconventional unpacker 