I do not know when it happened to me. I take antidepressants and the occasional anti-anxiety medicines, sure; but if they were to meddle with my mind in as serious a manner as it is happening these days, I would have to be on them for years, right? It had been barely an year now, and…I feel, in a manner of feeling physically, like how you feel that your blood pressure is dropping and you are going to fall down, that I am a changed person. I am someone else.
I deal with people differently these days. It is almost as if something had happened inside, something broke, something fused, something changed irreversibly. I wish I knew what happened, except that I know that I cannot know, no matter how I try. And I also know that I am not going to try. It is just that these days, people appear to me as islands, all different in their topography, geography, and history. History, surely. History. Weighing down all of us into a torrent of events and people and a man sitting by the road, sipping tea from a sticky, grimey glass, trying to cool the smoke in his mouth before sucking it into his lungs.
Yesterday night, I tried to trick myself into dreaming. I was on my bed, laying down, lights switched off and the fan running and I was hungry. I tried sleeping, and as I was slipping into sleep, I thought—half consciously, half unconsciously—of the Zomato drivers, of the Amazon delivery people, and I thought of the road leading from one point of delivery to another, and the workers melting the tar, and the workers sweeping the road. I thought that we are all accelerating towards death—not the certain, literal, biological death but the kind of death that people joke about, that it is not the air conditioner but you who are dead and cold inside. That death. Decay. Decay because the zomato drivers ride for us, that the workers work for us, that the amazon delivery agents come all the way to my building by the road which the workers made, for us.
Today I went for lunch with my supervisor and another professor and a friend. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was not sitting there with the people, really. It was as though I was there, but also not there. That I liked listening to these people, but not sure of it, that things are making me anxious but not really.
I am writing this, sitting in a room, surrounded by people, many others, many people, and I feel that I might be taking a clonazepam tablet shortly. It is not the dizziness of freedom, surely. For when is freedom? I think I will just leave, now.