Pantofolaio

The wailing winds made the leaves outside tremble. There was a thud and he remembered how everyday he planned to fix the fence. He would do it tomorrow. The strew cigarettes like buried logs in snow on the dusty table in front of him ; he’d have to clean it too. He turned his head aside and found himself distorted in a black, glossy lens staring at him - wondering if that is what the eye of God looked like too. He stopped Pink Floyd before the chorus. He got up and went to bed, pretending to lay asleep, to give that miserable lens nothing more, because lenses cannot tell heaven from hell.

“So you spent all your life savings?”, the man sitting in front of him had asked. He did not feel the need to answer that question, but . “ Yes”, and the audience had stirred like a bubbling soup. He did not remember how he ended up there, he was rendered indifferent long ago. He had thought himself to be strong and unaffected till one day he woke up and realized he had been indifferent and in denial. His life had gone hazy like his eyesight and he one day found himself on this show. They called it “Second Chances”. As if. They were proclaiming it like saviors, to quench the melancholy out of the lives of rotten people like him.

He had been a normal person before, he thought. Heck, that’s what that 600 pound guy say too. Or the alcoholic with a tearful daughter. “It wasn’t always like this.” Maybe he was worse than he’d like to acknowledge even now. What did it boil to? Why is he this way? Too egoistic to accept that he is wrong? Probably. Too much psychotic jargon had gone to his grey matter and splashed in with his grey fluids. They seemed to floating around in his head and sometimes slipped down to the arteries too. He still had difficulty comprehending it. On a TV show. That makes money off people ruining their lives? Is misery too appeasing to the mind’s appetite? To watch people get hooked to something and flip their life upside down like a table being flipped in a pop music video? That easy? How could he end up here?

“We are here to help you.” They had said. And suddenly, all of the world had mixed up into an ultimate monster – a big, black lens. Guffawing at his tragedy. Maybe comedy and tragedy are one, like a diamond, they just seem to be different hues based on the angle of sight. Change your perspective and you change what you see.

He disgusted himself with these thoughts. At one time he had loved to talk this way, in the superficial tongue, in words soaked in dreadful nominalizations and dripping with quotes of mystics. Where had it got him? On a show catered to people? For what? The same reason the storytellers gave horrible life to even some Gods?

Connect. They said. He could not. Paranoia? Narcissism? . All the towers that facilitated communication in his system had broken down. Had there been a terrible storm to uproot all those inbuilt systems? Only he knew the answers.                                                                                  

He lay there, in his musty bed, thinking. Wondering if it was the way he was brought up or some other instance triggered the sequence of patterns that brough him on a TV Show, of all places. He thought about the counselling he received and the money he received from the show. Both of them, like wisps, had vanished as soon as he attempted to reach. Poof? He wondered if they knew he’d end up like this. They probably did. What fun is it if every person they helped ended up swimming in a pool full of glittering trophies?

He pictured a family sitting on the couch, the man with his wife in his arms and his kids scattered on the floor below. How they would throw in a statement or two, dissecting his actions, piercing through him. How they could easily tell his behavioral patterns and all the other shit people say when they are on a higher level, like God. Everything seems so different from the gutters. About how they shook their heads when he wasted his second chance too and ended up where he was previously. The wife’s kid might even make a meme or two on him now.

The camera crew. He had heard one of the younger ones, a green eyed girl, trying to argue as quietly as possible. Her forehead was twisting in agony as she pretended to coo in a calm voice, on the phone. Would she like if he documented her stifle? Put it on the television for people to watch. He felt this thought rude. So his mind somersaulted to somewhere else. There were the Woods of Woe full of corpses of past. There was a Canyon of Cameras where his deepest memories were now being prodded out and put on display. Naked. Naked in front of the entire world.

Why? People are self-obsessed. They hardly care for anyone else. They remember faults just so they can gossip about it or console themselves. Their actions are around them. He should relax. No one is watching. Deep breath in and out. In and out.

Being on the show, he felt he was being too blasé. He knew some people who had been on the show, and they had absolute one eighty, or they spiraled in chaos. For some reason, he felt suspended like the mud in an agitated puddle, where would he end? Would he evaporate up and end up as a fluffy, fat cloud? Or sink in deeper and deeper…He saw no point in living now, might as well try suicide or absolute self-destruction to cause some drama. He felt obliged to do it. As if he owned it to the show people. To the audience. To the world.

But he would do it tomorrow.