Essay: The Side Effect of Living

Editor’s note:

‘Depression’ sets alarm bells ringing in individual and collective minds, raising ogres of doubt, fear, hopelessness… Bijaya Biswal writes a personal account of how ogres can be abolished, at least sometimes, and life lived trekking to the top of the world or simply sitting, legs dangling over terrace ledges.

By Bijaya Biswal

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?
Albert Camus

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

It seems of the same order to me. It’s been months now that I stand at the terrace, looking at the ground below and wondering if it must take a very long fall – a very long time spent in the air to rethink if the problems were fixable, a very long period of helplessly jerking your arms seeking help with nothing to hold on to, and a quiet last second when you hit the ground and everything blacks out and you finally find out if there was a God at all. You fool yourself into living another day with tiny excuses. Vesting hopes on the last leaf of the tree outside your window till its fall, only to come back from college and see that the storm took down the tree itself. Reaching out for a piece of poetry, or a cigarette butt, another cup of coffee or another romance but the thing about them is, at one point they all come to an end, leaving you sniffing for more and it’s just a vicious cycle that goes round and round. Like days and nights which mean nothing for someone who does not sleep. Like the ceiling fan which gives me company while I stay awake; like my aching heart which beats like it’s a backward countdown every single day but does not dare to stop and ends up counting all over again.

I think they call suicide an act of cowardice, because they know no one is bold enough to succeed in it the first time. We can see it in the signs it leaves behind – the scars of a thousand shallow cuts before a deep one; too many public breakdowns and family embarrassments before your mother can boldly accept something has to be wrong; a lot of worthless questions from the therapist before it’s too late to start with the right ones; too many occasions of having denied sex to the boyfriend before he takes you out one day and with welled up eyes asks you if there is someone else. Your hands intertwined in his tremble like a broken heart and you nod and swallow some of your words and say, “Yes there is. Me.” You hold each other and cry for the rest of the night.