Thoughts of a McDonald's-Loving Cinephile

By Mirduvikaa Gokul

It is in my nature to be flooded with ideas. I always have this urge to document my thoughts onto paper in the hope of finding relief. Yet, I was having a severe writer’s block in the necessity of having to write this story? Essay? Excerpt?

(Only Lord knows the nature of this piece).

It is certainly ironic, how my mind goes a million miles an hour when I am doodling or simply scribbling thoughts at the back of my Mathematics book. Yet, when I have an actual solid reason to write, my mind reaches a dead end. It often made me wonder how my thoughts, the thoughts of a young cinephile who is obsessed with burgers specifically from McDonald’s, could possibly matter to anybody other than me? Why do my thoughts matter to the world? And it is exactly at this moment when things began to get hazy. I start questioning things, I start fantasising about my death and I enter a rabbit hole about the workings of the mind and the afterlife.

Do you not think it is an oddity, how we all live in the same world, walking past each other in the dairy aisle at the supermarket or sitting across from each other at the next Tom Cruise movie at the theatre. And yet, we live our own lives, and we forget the people around us are too in the same world, with the same lives.

Does it not worry you, how you could live a vivid life and leave this world without a mark of your existence, simply forgotten by the world ten years later because people need to move on with their lives? 

And does it not seem irritating to know we have no answers about The Beginning either? Mummy tells you to pray to the multiple Hindu gods, the pastor at a nearby Church tells you to place faith in Jesus, and your Physics teacher tells you to forget about that malarkey and tells you it will always be about the Big Bang. The simple truth is, we are afraid to think about those things because we know no conclusion can be reached. Thus, we live our bland lives: coming into the world, going to school, getting a job, getting married, and reproducing, the same meaningless act performed by us repeatedly without realising we’re in an infinite loop.

And thus began, my futile and mindless attempts to figure out the intricate human mind, be mindful of thus.

On a Monday morning, before my Chemistry test, it came as an epiphany to me that the one thing in this world without limits are my thoughts. I could think about anything in this world and no one could know what I am thinking about. I found the idea so terrifying, I forgot to revise for my test.

On the bus ride to school, it hit me that we possess the ominous ability to feel distinct emotions. Infatuation, affection, attachment, intimacy, passion: It all means love, yet it shows how a simple feeling spirals into something else. Different forms of the same emotion. How are we wired with such complexity? 

My brain had begun to hurt. 

At school, I spent two hours finding X and Y (Man, do I hate those guys) and looking at the letters C and H being knotted together in peculiar structures and unidentifiable bonds. And when I sat there, dwelling about the most barbaric things, I berated myself afterward. Because I know I reached nowhere, yet I found comfort in those thoughts and I knew they will reside there for eternity. I really wanted to explain these thoughts, to tell my friends, parents, and anyone human, anyone who I knew would have the same insane thoughts and never paid them any heed. They would definitely think me crazy. Yet, how do those thoughts seem not so ludicrous in my head?

And thus is the beauty of the mind. We sit there at work, at school, at home reading into each thought, millions of us having the exact same thought at the exact same time. We neglect the power we have been given; how so very potent we are. And I came to find out I loved that, the feeling of thinking things without anyone to stop me, without anyone questioning me, although I simultaneously resented it.

Things unable to be done in reality can be done in the normal human mind and your imagination fills in the blank spaces. Is that… traumatising, or phenomenal?

By Mirduvikaa Gokul