The Storage Room

Sitting in that very room that defines my understanding of loneliness in life as much as it describes the birth of the untamed dreamer in me, it's like an emotional ride of being myself. I was probably in eighth or night standard, on the thresh hold of my puberty, both sexual as well as emotional,  and we had moved on the new furnished first floor residence from the second floor where we were initially living for many years. It was then when I started finding my recluse hours here. No one questioned me, I never questioned myself. It was like my dug out from the outside world. I try to think, think real deep, why I first thought of this room as my saving grace but I never get it. It was just that this was available, empty and I just wanted an escape from everyone around me. There have been umpteenth times when I have wished had there been someone to sit with me and talk to me about being the recluse, but it never happened and this past has only been stuffed into a similar figurative room that has piled up to a clustered storage room.

I remember coming in my room of comfort and escape just after having my lunch on returning home from school. It had the old bed (which is now sold), the old study table (which is still here), the old Almira of my mother (which still finds a space here) and me. The empty walls were being used to design crazy simple stuffs I like, from stars and balloons to (in huge scribble) VIVA!. It was 2002, about 12 years ago!!

My school days were routine - come back from school by 2:15 in afternoon, eat lunch, change, move upstairs, stay here, go down in evening for milk, return upstairs, stay here, go back down again for dinner and sleep. This started changing to taking my school bag upstairs and doing home work here and then studying for tests in the room, then bringing that rickety old transistor to the new audio-cassette-CD-radio player to upstairs and dancing like a lost but free soul in the confines of this hollow rectangular room. I even shagged for the first time here; not to mention the mute cries I screamed my heart out. The number of times I dream designed and redesigned this room's architecture is unparalleled.

It's been 12 years since. I may have moved out, but the stuffs still lay piled and even many new memories and unsaid thoughts that never let me go and grew from the sapling sown in this room. And the dreams that once made me live through my loneliness have now started to tie, bog me down so hard that its difficult to watch my favorite television shows, movies and music videos.

I don't remember when I last went through a normal TV viewing time at home, alone or with someone from the family, when while watching it I did not rush back in my mind to my dreams and how perfect they were, compared to the imperfect life being flashed in front of me. A work colleague had remarked in jest to me that how nothing is good for me when I was talking about Finding Fanny movie. Now the film is not perfect, per-say, but how a rank stranger who has little idea about my personal life is able to catch my trait so minutely does makes me cringe.

I do not say I want to be mysterious, someone no one can decipher. That is long over in the past and I have moved on to just wishing being simple, living simple. But I surely does not want to be a cynic. Being simple, now it feels, is easy. I really don't know if it was initially difficult as I am not able to jog those old thoughts right now. But how do I not be a cynic without losing the sight to see how things can really be perfect? I am finding it difficult; even more as I write it down that I seem to have turned towards pseudo perfection, a word I feel I am the first in the world to coin and not a good thing about it.

This pseudo perfection is crippling me even more rampantly ever since I got promoted to the post of a trainee employee in my first job in my dream career of journalism. It makes me sniff smile as much as it amuses me my level of thinking. From no more pocket-money (the stipend I was getting as a paid intern was like a pocket monthly allowance only) to having to withdraw money from my salary in my saving's account in the bank to thinking about savings for the future and maintaining proper documents for the income tax returns, life seems to have turned around so much in just one promotion that it is is unbelievable. Sweet but something even I never thought is possible to feel. Two months over as an employee and the change has yet to settle in for my every week-off has been fucked up in thoughts surrounding it and no one to share it. Thereby all these fears are piling up in that old storage room.

However, a first among many firsts is how I would like this road to my life journey be. I have to stop piling secrets, especially with most being completely unwarranted. Every new moment I will live will be a virgin and it can be be fucked up or made love to - all by my own actions. For past is a journey we travel to live in present all the way to a future that lies in out own actions. How many times I have moved randomly thinking about this day and now a little bump in acceptance is making to regret the dream. This is so not done. The storage room is to be cleared and by my own actions.

 

I'm gonna give all my secrets away...