#Scurf158: Who's an all-time chaotic, poetic mess?
I wonder if all terrible people who are equally terrible writers have to endure these caustic insults in their private lives.
A toxic person who hurts their loved ones, makes all the wrong decisions and yet thrives. Their choices are woefully painful and awkward, not only for them to live through but also for those who merely sit at the fence and watch them. And yet these choices make for an authentic journey of a person thinking selfishly and only ever in the moment.
I, for one, don’t know many such people but have had brief flashes of being one every now and then. Somehow I feel the intensity of these toxic people and the exaggeration of their own state (whether in person or in their heads) makes them for a treat to watch. But to be living through the flesh, skin and bones of that kind of a life by whether being that person or by being with that person, might ruin lives.
Those who have lived with me might agree that this is a kind of a curious sentiment, but a wholly relatable one. For as messy, selfish and altogether irresponsible as I am, when I shower love, warmth and passion I could also undeniably charming. Maybe the kind of person who blows into your life like an inescapably perfect storm. Leaving shreds in their wake.
I have not worked out in months which has caused my chin to double (once again), the stomach flab to protrude, and flailing limbs to gather mass. This in turn shows itself in the jerky convulsions that my life is currently going through. Perhaps a manner of an external expression of how I navigate life, with no awareness of the damage I might ripple.
I know all of this might sound a bit highfaultin’. I am kind of less dependent on these concepts of what a good person might be which also makes it very easy to judge me for my self-centered, almost always disrespectful behaviour. For all my surging, searing emotions I’ve almost always had a high price to pay. In various ways. But mostly I manage to contain everything within. Never let a word spill. Never more than required. Except.
All the blazing hope and their corresponding scrapes on the psyche of the self and those around will forever be a burden on my rounded, padded, chubby shoulders. Conceivably in the form of a self-hatred that cannot be explained in mere words.
Lest all of this sound a little too morose, rest assured that for all these brooding, melancholic emotions and fraught relationships, my life in a lot of ways is also a total hoot. It’s like watching a poetic movie where beautiful people are absolutely shit to each other. There is a certain thrill in living this self-sabotaging life where I somehow just keep on making things worse for myself, and the ones around me (a grand total of three people).
It might also give some fodder to those around me (connected by a first, second or third degree) to laugh, be amused and flatter their own mediocrity in lives. But I know it should make me increasingly exasperated or even remotely tired with my own nonsense but, unsurprisingly enough, it doesn’t. Where there should be a pile of regrets there lies a storm of experiences, emotions and a mountain of feelings. At least, I love honestly. (What a total asshole, ikr!)
On most ocassions, people end up being nurtured in the shade of my cautious, nurturing love. At others, they are left scorched, stung by the uncontrolled excess or sheer lack of it. What most of us don’t realise is that along with love also comes a an immeasurable sense of control and wanting to not “let go” in a way Rumi might ask us to. There is the endless watchfulness of a night manager and a vigil-like pervasion over the life of the person I’ve come to adore.
That might choke them. I do realise that. And yet.
It’s a lot like my sartorial choices. Even at the time of purchase I am fully in the know that the item I’m paying for is at least two sizes too large for me. Yet I go on and pay for it. Similarly, while entering into one of those self-absorbed reveries (wrathful reveries is more like it) I know the door I am opening is not worth it, even totally avoidable.
I wear clothes that always make it hard to overcome myself and truly relate to something outside of myself and really submit myself to, say, a conversation. And then every once in a while I wear something that is really surprising, and sits well on me and I go out wearing that on the street and it really somewhat changes me. Ya, that’s never happened with me and its at best an illusion that doesn’t last too long either. But sometimes, just one of those few and far in between times in life it works.
If a screenwriter worked on a character like mine for a movie, it would be called “interesting” and worst still, “fascinating” by critics. (See? I’m always on the outside of my ownfucking self looking in like I’m in a movie or a book! FML.) I destroy so much of what’s around me, so much of what I come in contact with, like a reverse Midas…
Yet, at 33, it almost seems like I can’t help myself. All the three…two…one… loved ones around me when provoked by me, end up yelling something to the effect of: “Now you can write about this! Why don’t you write about how bad a person I am in your life!”. (I wonder if all terrible people who are equally terrible writers have to endure these caustic insults in their private lives.) And it almost never registers as an insult. It lands perfectly well somewhere between self-satisfaction and a tacit, perverse sense of love, even admiration for one’s writing.
You have to be deranged, unhinged to be going on about life this way, someone yelled at me recently. No one can really change someone like you, they echoed some others. Later, as I puffed hard at a Davidoff, gazing at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I had an epiphany. A moment of reflection that usually recedes into the background music of life. I can really be incredibly self-involved, I thought. I don’t think I am capable of change. Not anymore. Not any longer.
