Why do people drink?
As I snug my cigarette tightly between my fingers filled with all but emotions in the lowest brink of anxiety stress depression or just emptiness, trying to find the words to understand what went wrong question why it went wrong how it could have been different, and when I’ll just get up and run as I always do…staring at the empty dried up lake the distance of barren thoughts dreams aspirations and desires gazing at the skyscrapers peering deep in my eyes reflecting and competing among themselves who is taller who is brighter which one among us will pitch for a higher dollar and which one among us is better to sell the vivid abstract of a dream…Dreams of a better life dreams of a world where it’s you your perfect car your perfect family the pretty wife and the adorable kids only to realize that feet left and a feet right you’ll find someone else with a better car a better perfect family with a golden retriever jumping in it’s own pool a wife now whom you consider out of your league and kids are anyways adorable when they’re not yours…A perfect society with cubes and cubes multiplied and multiplied like the cells of cancer till the limit tends to infinity squeezed in a 1300 sq feet 3BHK wall of fly ash brick sold as the aspiration ambition pleasure not something you brought but earned.
Running the same race as your neighbor as he does with his neighbors and all the colleagues peers friends the random four-wheeler driven by a higher horsepower that overtook you on the highway as with the stranger who was boasting about his trip to Switzerland in a lift you don’t even remember in another skyscraper packed as a better dream that you can’t afford where all your mid-life crisis and existential questions knock and knock and desperately bang the door of your self-esteem prestige respect and the motion where all your insecurities drive the propaganda and scream with the top of their agendas as in a unanimous notion you’re thrown out of your own government your own cabinet and all you can hear touch feel visualize or even imagine standing all around in the circle of fire whispering ravishing to even shouting ‘shame’ ‘shame’ ‘shame’ as you chizle down to a derivation rushing towards the limit zero.
It’s ok my friend why don’t you sit next to me…here let’s share this cigarette in this life shrinking in the cosmos of self-destruction awaiting the sun to shrink… Awaiting sun to shrink to a white dwarf
Awaiting a star to die which we all will remember and forget sooner than the cigarette evaporates.
Before lighting another cigarette let’s just pause our thoughts and look at that guy…vomiting the toxins he had never consumed just another rounding error.
Another who placed all he ever owned in the numerator and the void he always felt in the denominator thinking he was different and he’d be anything but undefined.
I know you’ll ask me now…why do people drink?
And you know what I’ll tell you, my friend…
Come let me show you my perfect life my dream house my superfast car, my pretty wife, and my adorable kids.
By: Kshitij Sinha
05/04/2024