The Suicidal Reader

Pain!!! My innards screech for the sake of my powerless and lifeless vocal cords… They haven’t lived for a while. If the theories of evolution ring right, then probably I might evolve, like once the reptiles did; and my sound shall sink into abeyance. In that soulful silence my starving soul shall burningly eat into my last living cell for a knot of existence. And after that miniscule nanopart also wane away into exhaustion and in desperation send out to the already half-dead brain a parting, feeble signal of farewell; my heart shall stop beating and brain shall black out. The question is, will you leave my body, Soul? Or will you manage to cling on an hour longer waiting to imprint this death, all those reeling images from my past that my brain has been endlessly playing out in my inward eye since hunger began to ruthlessly claw fiercely onto my intestines, gashing them open for death? All those images from my happy-sad past?

I remember my Professor, with a twinkle in his eyes and in elation of phrasing an aesthetically artistic, grammatically accurate, philosophical line, springing up with a finger pointing upwards in a gesture of brilliant genius hitting upon him, and in a way, a gesture of warning, stating, “Life is not a bed of roses; it is a conflation of both sobs and smiles”. He used to emphasize “sobs and smiles” slowly, rightly rounding the ‘o’ and stretching the ‘mile’, in a slow motion flipping his two fingers in the air to and forth to imprint the duality of life into our Bachelor heads, awaiting at the shores of the Ocean of Literature to plunge in. Who knew that the life in literature was this expressively phantasmal and excruciatingly liberating!

Continuously raped by the imaginations of the corrugated and varied intelligence of many literary geniuses, my poor brain would plod painfully, yet, unhurriedly into sleep at my reading table. Languorous days of supine plenitude; the profit of an undergraduate life! Delightfully large volumes for my eyes to feast upon and mind to intimately, intricately entangle upon! Pleasingly, I’d slip into a chosen world, carefully crafted by someone’s mind, to explore its abysses and alleyways and lay the light of sight upon their sacred darkness and baneful past. I went exploring people and lands. My soul, happy to meet the disembodied spirits trapped in the curves and folds and cliffs and drops and loops on the printed pages went dearly embracing those created and cloned souls, promising each to visit often. How their eyes took on a blank, white, lifeless haze, as my rejuvenating gaze left the page and passed on to the next to bring it alive! Specters formed and faded in my eyes, and my soul met and bid farewell to many, with each new book.

Was it all of a sudden? Or a gradually fed, growing desire? I wanted to be one of those trapped souls, encased in the words and animated in thoughts and to be alive when someone read me. How extraordinarily magnificent and spiritually rapturous to be brought back to life in thoughts of another; given life by the elixirous sight!

But, will my soul transcend and come alive to meet the soul of the reader, to recount my curious case in the flashing second it reads the page? Or will my soul flee the moment the last of those interwoven delicately fragile, yet, unbreakably robust line of life snaps it free from my body?

Unsure, yet experimental, I starve myself out on these pages, eating nothing but words and writing nothing but life. And as I’ve mentioned, that last impulse my last living cell will send to my brain, it shall shudder my writing hand to a halt and either my soul, eager to fulfill the dream and intense desire it gave my heart and brain, will conduct into my falling pen, dissolving into its ink and transgress into the last drop of ink on the paper, ‘the last full stop’; and through it transmute into yet another soul enshrined in paper and words waiting to be cloned each time the story comes into print to meet the soul of each of its reader. Perhaps, another reader might, just before slipping into sleep, spit a curse at me for penning my soul into paper in such unabated lengthy sentences. Who knows!

Or, dear Reader, if my soul, in a mockery of my obsolete lunacy, flee off without transmigrating into my words; trust me it will be in the Elysian fields in search of those expired, yet, evergreen writers, smacking each and yelling at them, “Your stupid idea of living through literature didn’t work with me!”