Musings–A Diary

Today, one of his friends suggested a diary.

It was like a flash of insight, a streak of genius, and a revelation of at the same time. Of course. A diary.

Why has it never occurred to him to make one?

Perhaps it’s because he had tried before and found it to be a waste of time. The idea had seemed so wonderful and romantic at the time; a boy and a book, alone, sharing in the absurdities of the world.

But it was tiring. A notebook will listen to him no matter what he says, but writing on it was a tedious process. His hands ache after a few days. The things he says become less and less important. Mundanity disillusions him. Nothing new can be said anymore, and his diary is lost in the unimportance of everyday life, pushed aside by other, more important, things.

A diary requires patience and willpower to maintain. That he understands. What he doesn’t understand is the purpose to which people would keep diaries.

Is it to channel all the dark and ugly feelings we keep bottled up in order to coexist? That’s the most likely answer, he thinks. He has felt the sensation before. It was as if a current of hideous thoughts flowed from his soul into his pen and poured forth into the white pages. He could almost sense the stream of emotions beating against his blood vessels, raging, frothing.

It felt ecstatic.

And tiring.

He could start again. Now would be a good time; he had many things to say to the diary, things that no human should ever hear.

Except after he dies, in which case the diary would be a fitting eulogy for himself. Who knows, maybe they’ll find a fitting epitaph inside it, too.

Discovery–Being Him

Today he discovered that he hated being him.

It was not self-hatred. There is a fine line between hating oneself and hating one’s own personality. The two are not the same, not exactly. Once when he hated himself, he had wanted to find a hole which would plunge him into a sea of flames for all the horrible things that he had done.

This emotion was different. This time he wished he wasn’t him at all, but someone else.

It was a horrible thing to wish for, he had realized. He was supposed to be happy with who he was, to be able to accept himself, to embrace his faults as part of his identity. Failing to do so would mean a life filled with the kind of angst that should only be seen in fanfiction.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but dislike his personality. It was an awful one. Because of it, he does not comfort, does not incite laughter, neither befriends or aggravates, embraces silence, kills conversations, frightens others, ignores the outside world and prefers to be lost in his own construct of reality.

If everyone was like him, the world would be a boring place to live in.

But still he couldn’t wish he had another personality; because even though he hates it, it made him the most interesting character in this show.

Observation–Laughter

Today, something rather unusual happened. Instead of observing it from a distance, today he found himself in the middle of the noise which is often called laughter.

It wasn’t a bad thing that happened, not by a long shot. In fact it was the best thing that had occurred to him in a long time.

However, when he is in the middle of laughter, he cannot observe it. He is swept by it, carried by it, lost in it, indulging in the pleasures of happiness, joy, and maybe friendship.

He needs to watch from afar to see everything, such as the way some people stand far away and just separate themselves from the riotous cackling like he usually does; or the way the sounds bounce to and fro between the walls, filling the room with cheerful cacophony. Today he didn’t notice any of those things.

It was rather similar to a reporter’s ethics. He remembered a line in a movie about reporters: “You’re not writing the story. You are the story.”

In order to observe, he needs to be separated. Detached. See things objectively, not subjectively. He had made the connection only recently; that in objectivity, you are an object, while in subjectivity, you are the subject. Not a subject, the subject, the only one that you can be certain of, the center of the universe.

This time he was not detached; and so, this time, he did not observe.

He didn’t regret it. He was not one to regret things. However, he did feel the slight pang of missed opportunity. There’s a term in economics that describes it—opportunity cost, he thinks. Mass laughter would be quite a sight to see from far away.

He would also have liked to see his own laughing face. He had been wondering what it would look like for a long time.