the future is an empty room

Always knew the day would come. Lying on the bed, as the brightness of the day continues to grow. It was a work-from-home day, and for all that it was worth, my new curtains make my apartment look darker until I flip the switch on. This place, which has seen so many beginnings and endings, has been new since the repainting and rearrangement. And because happiness and a renovated apartment have a type of correlation, a positive one, I look forward to coming home from work, more so on the weekends. When simple things excite me this much, life becomes alright. Alright in the sense that I have to, at some point, watch all the beauty I now adore start to crack within the next few weeks or months. The timelines aren’t too clear, but it’s familiar. It’s linear; as time passes, the ordinariness moves in the same direction. Something akin to new roles at the office. The truth, if I’m ever asked, is that everything we want will come. But this sounds totally unrelated. Everything we need is on its way. And anxieties, or dare I say, trepidation won’t hasten the process. One has to do right by oneself by trusting, and trusting again. The days start earlier than when I wasn’t getting ready for this exam. I now know what wakes people up in the morning, and the exact thing that keeps them going at night. As fragile or frail as hope can be, it’s hard to kill. You see it: the burning sensation after spending hours on a subject, and on a regular routine that repeats itself too often for your mind. The days then look the same. No distinction. The underlying reason for absolving myself of many things, and even people, now makes sense. All the same. No distinctions. The corporate environment has staged more dramas for me than all Netflix movie producers put together. It’s so weird that your biggest rival as a thirty-one-year-old might be a fifty-something-year-old person. And other times, it’s a power-drunk peer who doesn’t know the difference between respect and dutiful obligations. It can be sickening. The lack of autonomy to throw hands, and the one-sided consequence of the same. On one side, it’s humbling to realize that people go through life without any sense of self-awareness, without any idea that what they do is a punch to the esteem of another. On the other side, it’s just stupidity. The third leg of this realization is that I’m not just a victim; I know that I do this to others as well. It is in this bubble that I accommodate all possibilities bounded, and maybe, defined by humanity. We are to others what others are to us. This fire burns down many other things, and it also lets me see how fickle words can be. I once boasted and embarrassed myself in the face of many. I’ve had to take words back because of how quickly I got humbled at being overconfident about outcomes. I’ve promised someone a “forever”, and I disappointed them. No further context is needed as to why “slow burn” is the order of the day these days. I’ve defended a partner who committed the act she was accused of. But that’s what lovers do, right? I’ve also watched myself do exactly what I said I’d never do, and the aftermath is more than words can capture. Shameful. Though it sounds like pride to think too highly of myself, my mental debilities have left me wrecked, only now able to see the truth that I am just like everyone else. Not special enough. Not special at all. With no perfect childhood stories, and a memory that can forget. Shockingly. It leaves me wondering if it’s even okay to crack under the pressure of my own ordinariness. I’m too ordinary. On days I decide to break away from the people who believe in me, I think it’s just my trauma responding. But what are the details of this trauma? An exact lack of what? Who deprived me? Who abused me? Who spoke words to me that I didn’t need to hear as a child? Or even as an adult? Why does disappointment pull my stock price beneath the floor? On Friday evenings, I can’t place it. Saturday mornings, I forget about my worries and narrow down the problems of this world to whether an option chosen is right or wrong. But after this period, there is a life ahead, and I can already see the difficulty in readjusting to a life where I’m not reading or feeling guilty about not reading. I’ve sent texts hoping it’d salvage situations, and proposed conversations that I had thought would help smooth out the misconception, but I keep looking like the problem or the matchstick hovering around gas. Nothing gets my ego inflamed anymore; I think everyone is lying. I don’t think I’ve heard the truth in a bit; people just keep quiet these days, and maybe it’s me not listening or willing to listen to their opinions, and that saddens me. I once thought I welcomed people’s opinions; now I can add that to the list of things I never do. From more crucial microscopy, maybe my ego has always been this way. Inflamed. The contradictions are in the small talk; I don’t think too much of myself, but I think I deserve better. No shit. I boast of being fine by myself, but on Sunday evenings, I’ve no one to talk to, and for this, I lean into distressful situations. All in the name of talking to someone or to something. I wish I could delete all my texting records. I give people the idea that I’m an interesting person when I’m not. The sanguine days are a deception. Those days introduce me as a person of choice, but other days show me why I don’t want to choose or be chosen. This year, I’ve prayed less; I think I’ve wallowed in my actions, bearing consequences, but also gliding on the prayers of others for me. People still believe, and I don’t know how to repay them. People are still positive, and I don’t know how to tell them that they are better directing their faith to something else. I postpone major decisions, revel in statements made in my direction, build a home for it, demolish it afterwards, and relegate any love interest to transactional needs. I tell them. Be here for me when I want you, but I don’t know if I’d be here when you need me. The problem again. Under the lights, narcissism becomes a word that describes what many are trying so hard to name. But the banality is there too. Isn’t that the pattern I’ve come to know and expect? Was I not innocent enough five years ago? Didn’t I kneel in submission, and didn’t my texts go unanswered for years? As soon as I turned my back, everyone else had an opinion, a reasoning that all I do is a blind spot to me. That I hurt people and feign ignorance as a way of escape, but when I cared, no one else heard. My silence now is the plight across multiple epochs. I once thought if you pleased everyone, then reciprocity would follow. That never happened. Beneath desires, and the untold secrets of what a person becomes when told ‘No’, you’d find contempt, dangerous resentments, and the numbness that even anesthesia can’t achieve. When the dust settles, I see it in the well-punctuated texts. The words. The aphorisms remind me that if there will be any future, then it’s an empty room. It’s with the hope I be better than today, more than that, it is with the hope that I learn to think healthier thoughts. Because the future might really just be an empty room.

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