Talk To Me

01-I || The Eyes

Life sucks.

I probably shouldn't start off with that, because it might make you roll your eyes, judge the rest of this book with one disapproving sniff, and bitterly guess there's probably going to be 350 more pages of exhausting self-hate and depression concluding with a gruesome suicide that you saw coming five pages in. You'll throw this "piece of shit" aside and find something more optimistic and cheerfully fake to read. If that's your reaction and now this book is lying back in the cobwebbed corners of your bookshelf or back in your school-bag to return it to your friend lying it was a great read and you "finished it so quickly!", so be it. But I know there are some people who'd continue to read this, still out of judgmental disapproval, or maybe out of a wary curiosity because deep down, you know you relate. You know it's true. Life does suck.

It does. It truly does. Sure, you meet a lot of friends, who turn out to be backstabbers and liars but still you push through the horrible betrayals and make at least a handful of true friends; you have a few scattered, awkward and cringey moments with your family, some crazy times in school, all of these making you smile in one way or another and making your heart warm and fuzzy with content, but it doesn't stay that way.

Someday when you're leaning against a pillar in a crowded room trying to not brush against anyone accidentally and make eye-contact with even the wall, taking little sips from the glass of orange juice in your hand which lost its ice-cube-chill long ago, you'll almost vaguely realize it: Life. Sucks.

That morbidly truthful phrase will float dreamily, invisibly through the air in a fancy WordArt form and slowly seep through your head and settle down at the lowest point of your brain, making you feel as though you were settling at the bottom of the deep blue ocean.

"He was just too young, too young to leave so soon."

When you're dismally bobbing around in the depths of the murky ocean of Life-Sucks-Realization, you can always count on fucking people to throw out an infinitely long fishing hook that'll plunge into the small of your back and drag you back up through the dark folds of water, back into the upper-world full of false promises and fake hopes.

"I heard he was just about to open his new company, it's such a shame."

Whereupon you'll be plopped onto a rotted boat and the rusty, serrated hook will be ripped out of your bleeding and most definitely infected back. But instead of being dumped in an ice-box and taken to the monger's to be thrown on to a slimy cutting-board and sliced with a bloody cleaver into uneven chunks, you're forced to sit there shuddering and gasping for life, expected to tune in to the world's craziest current dilemmas and trends, because that matters more than your unexpected journey into the depths of the ocean of Life-Sucks-Realization.

"His mother's barely holding up, poor thing."

Oh, and I'm in a funeral.

It is a Sunday, so of course I didn't have any plans. Uneventful, antisocial, boring old me. People don't count staying at home and curling up with a good book as plans. People don't think anybody else's plans count as plans. You're at home, and all you want to do is read the latest Jodi Picoult, when the phone rings and it's someone's voice you don't recognize and you feel like an asshole for it, because the person on the other end clearly knows you. Anyway, after a few minutes of extremely awkward cringing and faint flashbacks, you figure out their rank and serial number, only to wish you hadn't. Because they're calling to inform you that someone has died, someone that you yet again do not have the slightest memory of.

But you have to go to their funeral, because hello, it doesn't matter if you didn't visit them when they were alive, somehow not visiting them even after they died seems downright hostile in today's world. So you didn't meet them for a cup of coffee every now and then and give them a new pair of trousers from Bloomingdale's for their last birthday? That's totally fine. But you didn't come to stare down at their lifeless body in a coffin in the oldest black dress you own and mutter some fake words and shed a few fake tears about how sad you are? God, you are truly heartless.