A Midnight Sacrilege

By Mohith S

01:08 AM

The world outside the walls went silent.

I was seated on an easy chair with my two legs crossed, stretched, struggling to reach the edge of the bed opposite to me and keep it rested, with my hunched back; above the bed was a window, which was left open, masked with a mosquito net. The ceiling fan, at its highest speed, mercilessly swept the cold wind of the November nights over me; I was subtly shivering and repeatedly reassuring my frozen feet by moving it to a different place and angle from time to time. My mind is rotting and has already begun to slump since the last three days.

It was just that some moments before; I began to feel death.

It was a pale breath of cold air, which I was taking in. Suddenly, a flaccid grey stream of consciousness gushed onto me at my face, like the first few lukewarm moments of the dawn; it resembled the act of administering anesthesia and was sour to taste it in my mouth. It felt so heavy and light at the same time; a commotion of life and death, I thought.

Yes, that is life, after all. Dying every single day only to rehearse for the final days; by days, I refer to the days of solace, senility, and serendipity nearing the end of a new beginning—not the painful days of my youth, filled with utter anguish, melancholia, and the unreasonable want of becoming something rather than being something. I just so felt something envious about suicide, as if it was a person with an enormous and profound intellect, on its charm of endowing a guiltless, unethical, rational solution to human suffering; I vividly imagined it endlessly laughing with might at the downtrodden face of the God, the dualisms, the ethics, the jurisprudence, the duties, the responsibilities, the very existence of me.

It was a moment of discovery for me, of the deep chasms of suicide present across the unforeseen space and time of life. Interestingly, we find it increasingly challenging to learn to jump across it whenever we come across one, as we become more aware of ourselves with time. Life in itself, nearing these chasms, seems like the endless, dark, cold woods which have never seen the sun and the stars.

I now promptly come in terms with the moment; the ceiling fan, the same frozen feet, the sore ankles of my legs, the same legs. The coldness is now precisely localized to my feet. I have been breathing the cold air all this while. Maybe the air took away all these purposeless rants, but I get a strange premonition that it is still around me.

A whiff of death.

The air suddenly smells of death.

Phantomsia, I thought. Nevertheless, it frightens me, not of what it smells around, but of my anonymous faculty which smells death.

Death. Death. Death.

Now, I could not think of anything else but:

DEATH.

By Mohith S