Emptiness and I don’t want my present

I miss home. This is the third monsoon I will not see. I feel like utter trash. I miss it. But I can’t go back. I have till June. Then I can choose to for two whole months. But I won’t. I sleep in the guest room when I go home these days. The family computer is in there and my parents work in it in the day. The pull out bed has wheels and a crack that you fall into in the middle. Any personal effects I want I have to shuttle back and forth. An overnight train and so much public transport in both places that luggage is a pain. I travel light. The result is I’m missing half the things I need when I’m at home. I’m always most relieved to have my own pillows again when I come back to college. Not to mention the paternalistic emotions attached to living under someone’s roof again. I can do it for 10 days at the most.

I can’t cry. I haven’t cried in months. I have no feelings. I feel completely numb. I hurt myself a few times last week. The cuts are healing. I used a razor. I didn’t remember how itchy they tend to get when they heal when that’s the implement you choose. I manage feeling this nothingness by taking pleasure in taking care of myself I guess. The thing that brings me the most comfort in life right now is doing laundry. Sitting wrapped in a handwashed bedsheet I painstakingly dried indoors is comforting me more than anything in the world right now. I’m dying for a cigarette, but it’s a boon the shops are closed. It’s coming up to two years as a nicotine addict. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as one. I keep quitting but it never sticks.

Two months ago, I consented to sex with a man I didn’t want to have sex with. I was scared of what he might do if I said no. It wasn’t rape. I never said no. I said no to kissing. He forced it on me many times. I was afraid. I made up my mind to leave when sex was over. The time came. He didn’t let me. I thought I might never go home again. I thought I might die and something unthinkable might happen to me. I pretended to want whatever he wanted for an hour. I let him touch me and make me touch him and said whatever he wanted to hear. He let me leave when I said my friend would call the police if I didn’t get back that day. I don’t know what to do about the memory.

The memory of it is clogging up my mind. I can’t stop thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about it at all till last week. I’m scared of everything. Of dogs on the road. Anything and everything unexpected. The more sleep deprived I get the worse it’s getting. I haven’t been sleeping much. I’m abusing my body. And I feel completely apathetic towards the fact. It’s like it’s not my actions anymore. I have no thoughts or feelings. I’m only a conscious body (by that I mean my physical body) of impulsive desire. My mind is not my own, but a cloudy slave of this impulse.

I want to cry. I tried really hard to a few days back. I was not very successful. The problem is even if something hurts me, no feeling seems to penetrate deep enough to move me to tears. All I feel is this very animal confusion, like I’m watching my feelings enter and leave my body from outside. Something like how an animal might see the world. In fear, threat and the incomprehensible actions of other living things. Sometimes I feel intense discomfort, fear basically. Anxiety sometimes. But it’s never anything I can name, or resolve. The only strategy I know how to use is to calm my feelings. Till I feel nothing again.

I want to feel something. I’m exhausted. I want the memories of the man to leave my mind. I want my best friend to believe it’s wrong. She doesn’t. I want him to confess and apologize. He didn’t. I want 8 hours of sleep tonight. More than anything I want to cry and move past whatever the fuck the present is. Most of all I want to quit smoking once and for all.