Inside boredom

My journal lies over The Bell Jar, overlapping it at one corner. The book is face up on page 77, page 76 tucked behind it like an arm under a tired head, waiting for the pillow. A placeholder. Each page keeps the frame for the next. I set the tip of my pen where the two corners meet.

Each day passes with fewer colors than the last, as if my eyes are slowly being shut, the lashes lacing into a sieve through which the world comes in flat and hazy.

I have passed each house on these streets hundreds of times, every evening from six to seven on my bicycle, and I don’t remember a single detail. It seems they were built not one by one but all at once. The same walls in a color between light cream and light gray, the same tall blue glass panels shielding the stairs, the same metal handrails over decorated glass around the balconies.

If tomorrow, without telling me, you dropped me in Jaipur or Ahmedabad or Indore to ride through, then brought me back, I’d probably not notice.

The streets leave just enough breathing room for whatever passes, a bicycle or a truck. Life has shrunk into a narrow pipe I crawl through every day. At the end is a tiny white dot, so far away that it doesn’t grow no matter how much I move.

Time has frozen everything else in place. Or maybe I am the frozen one? Suspended in a coma, not yet jolted back to life.

I live more now in my imagined quarrels and fantasies, only hitting reality in transient bursts, when my name is yelled or cold water hits my skin, then dissolving back. Perhaps this is how people go crazy?

Sylvia Plath stares at me with hope.

Writing, like wind, used to clear the gloom that hung over me like a heavy cloud. Now the wind has stopped, and the clouds have veiled all character of my thoughts in a dark shadow. My pen pinches blue into the paper but I leak no words, only the buzz of silence.