The chocolate levels in my body are soaring right now, enough to make somebody a chocolate undead revenant if I was a Vampire. I smiled to everybody as usual at work and even got chocolates for everybody around me (I think I did it so that nobody touches mine). I was my usual social self; chirrupy on the face, silent while working and full of thoughts as I always am. I knew what was going in the background, something was terribly upsetting me, I lied that it was the stomach, as if to kill the present and postpone the problem to the next, but I failed. Even I, could feel my empty smiles which were coming to an abrupt end—almost without a warning which would make me look like a mad man in front of the people around me. I needed to talk, talk about it with somebody, not speak, but I wanted to hear somebody saying what I was feeling, yes, without me saying it!!— Person-from-a-developed-country dream, I know. But I felt lonelier by the minute as I was surrounded by more and more people. “Lets go to dinner”, but I instead helped myself to more chocolate, the shopkeeper had already seen me twice buying loads of chocolates, and he grinned at me wanting to say something, but he instead resisted like a good businessman. This was more difficult for me because I am not the old me anymore in some ways. An older me would have been sitting in the bar, or would have indulged in something that would have totally taken my mind of what I had to instead experience in my not so excited senses. My colleague was bothered since two hours, “is it about a woman?” I asked him. “Yes”, startled, was his reply. “Is she asking for money?” I asked again. He looked around as if he was trying to find some familiar person in the crowd who had just exposed his life story to me. “Don’t be surprised”, I said.  Most men usually have two problems– Money and Women, you combine both, and it was just as simple as that. So, again, I went in front of my computer and started writing about “Medical records software”, did the doctors have all the records available with them? May be the tests would have been wrong, weren’t they? Can EMR save lives? I thought about writing something on this topic, but it came back as an absurd idea to me.

I reached back home, while washing my hands, the extra hand-wash liquid created lot of foam that took 10 minutes of clearing off. I tried to smoke but my body repelled, I tried to watch TV but couldn’t make myself sit through more than 5 minutes, I finally decided to eat more and watch a movie, but I was no good at pursuing that activity too. I went to the balcony and thought about it again, ‘the disease debilitates the body progressively, legs, arms, muscles, joints, tongue, in any order that it likes to play the game and eat away an entire full blooded human body’. My friend retained extraordinary amount of poise while telling that to us—“I still would like to live, even if it is only the mind that I would be left with, my ability to reason would still won’t be hampered”—the bright spots in all that was happening in his life, and he could muster up courage to see them!! The chugging sound of the train from the near by railway line got louder and then receded, but I could hear it go away, just like my friend is going to see his life move away further and further, day by day.

I sat down and typed ‘Google’ and I already started feeling more social. The friend I am talking about is one of the folks I have met on the web, and the news came to me two days ago. I created more company for myself by pouring myself a glass of water kept next to me. Unforced socializing, I thought to myself. The guy was not upbeat, but his mannerisms were marked by a blithe unconcern, or may be that is the way he wanted to project himself to the outside world. Apart from other life, this is the only place where I and people like him come together and we feel a sense of connectedness, but I couldn’t imagine him not being able to move the mouse or not being able to type on the keyboard after few months. In my own optimized world there are options of exchanging life-years with each other, if I had been living in my world, I would have given him some of mine, but I can’t do that here. In these terrible moments of sanity, I wish I could recalibrate my sense of scale of the problems as they are and the way I think them to be, but I know, first it will be consumed by what surrounds me, the earth and its gravity that always bring me down.

The evil inside my brain woke up—“So what are you going to, Ha? Save the world, from poverty? From nuclear wars? Eventual supernova explosion? Ha ha, you can’t do anything”. I couldn’t get furious, the evil was right, he really was. Will I be able to speak to my will and tell myself to live if something like that happens to me? The best thing I would think to do is getting myself mummified so that I can return to this world and continue my life again when there are “better” cures for everything, yes, everything. But really, how would it be to use only mind, and not having the strength to even inflate you lungs!! “How does it feel? I’ll give you a pass, why don’t you go Carmo Convent and speak to someone there” the evil snapped again.

I don’t know why I was sad. Time and again I think it is the fear of death, fear of experiencing such a condition, fear of seeing such a promising life ended by natural sequence of events in this huge galaxy, that is how I should approach it, my mind tried to reason with me all along. The juxtaposition of feelings with the contrasting feelings that were striking me from outside created an unforeseen sea of sorrow around me. I feel empty many times, more than I should most of the times, but the emptiness just broke through my vexed mind as if trying to stir it just a little bit, just trying to make me forget about what I was (am) experiencing. An air of unexplained-feeling ripped across me and teleported in the form of stark darkness that I was staring at. I didn’t have enough rationality left inside me to decide if I was running through these emotions because of what I felt for my friend or for myself, “it’s all about self” — JD Krishnamurthy inside my mind snapped. I had never felt so weak for few months until that time, yes, and my eyes were fucking wet yesterday night. I looked outside and wished it had been raining, so that I can put in on the weather this time, but it wasn’t to be so, the clouds had already done there share of crying in the past week—a streak of bland white smoke in sky told me that. I wish I could do something, anything. I wanted to believe someone and something, believe that someone could do some magic, I have already given up on God—“I am sure there are angles up above, she would come, and I will even sleep with roses in my hand”, but I know I was dreaming with a broken heart.

I just can’t go on…