Regarding Myself

autofiction draft one phase one who even journals in private anymore?

It was the beginning of summer, that period at the end of April where you are teased with the false promises of rain. I had been in this university for over a year, and had ultimately lost more than I had gained. I felt like an utter failure no matter where I went, but especially on my bed. The laundry was piling up, but I had enough clothes to last me another month. There was enough sunscreen to last the whole of May, if I decided to not go out during peak hours everyday; maybe three times a week. Sunscreen was important. I did not want to come back feeling a burn all over my face, and more importantly, I did not want to look old when I got older. Aging, beauty, body fat - these things demanded my attention when I chose to not think about things that were of  more pressing concerns in my life. It was horrible. I felt like a man, but didn’t look like one, and I kept ruining the kohl in my waterline, making me look like an ex-groupie on a walk back home. Except I wanted to look like my mother, if she had gone to university and was embracing her pretty looks.

I had at least five sanitary napkins that I could stretch for the entire period cycle, if I went to the toilet frequently. 

When my shampoo started running out, I cut my hair short. 

I decided to design my day around rituals. Routines were too boring, and demanded that I get serious. Rituals were romantic, and made me feel better about the emptiness I felt constantly, erratically. The emptiness felt like a drill digging a deeper hole for itself, so that the pain could be felt more intensely by me. It was the hole, it was the thing that filled it. 

I would go to bed with a show playing in the background, imagining myself in an apartment with the tv on all night. The fantasy was only comforting because it alluded to the fact that I could afford an apartment alone later in my life, and I could watch whatever I wanted all night long, like that one unrestrained year when my aunt with breast cancer had moved in with us and nobody bothered about me. I started experimenting with her pills, mostly because I was susceptible to things, and easily impressionable. Some TV show, where everybody who did pills was hot and skinny and cool. Probably, definitely  Skins UK. I learnt how to not eat from that. Actually, I learnt that from my mother.

I woke up to the show in my laptop either paused or on a new season. I would then smoke a cigarette in my bed, and then go back to sleep. Ritual. 

I would then sit in my chair, smoke another cigarette and think about what all I could get done during the day. If I was lucky, I would get five of the fifteen things done, or else I would just give up and wait until I started feeling hungry to get things going.

When I would bathe, in the communal bathroom of our hostel, I would always choose the second cubicle. The door was heavy, and you would have to sort of lift the door to fit it in the frame. I never locked it. 

Inside the bathroom I would sit with my face in the bucket for as long as possible. I would think of masturbation, and then think about how it would feel to have a cock of my own in my hands. I would then lather myself in soap, think of lines I could use in stories if I ever did sit down to write one, and wash everything away, these lines down the drain before they could take a definite form. 

If lucky, my roommate wouldn't be in the room once I came back from the bathroom. It would allow me to stand naked under the fan, thinking of what to do next. I would smoke, I would put on my creams and lotions and then sit on my chair again, thinking. I would then go eat.

Somewhere along the line, I took to praying. I would think of the temple at my grandmother’s place, the mosque in our first neighborhood in Delhi, and the church which I never got to go inside of, and I would pray a little. It would usually be a variant of a list I had in my head. May I do things that I have to do. May I feel loved today. May something exciting happen. May things go well. May I have money. May I get some signs for a better future. May I feel better. May everybody feel better. May my mother feel better. Better better better things for EVERYBODY. 

The urge to feel better had been inside of me since I was in fourth grade. I just wanted to be better at things, at being a person. I did not have a family to flaunt, or wealth to depict to my friends that I was one of them as well. I did not have permission to meet people at the mall, or have birthday parties at places deemed cool by the children of the upper middle-class. 

So I thought if I was smart and had layers to myself, it would take a long time for people to get close to me and figure out the actual truth about my being. I did whatever was in my control to appear better. 

Moving to university made me go easy on myself. I still cultivated layers, but I left enough cracks for people to peek in and make a decision. I thought I was getting better at the whole people thing. Turns out I was years behind, having stayed holed up in my room and only having one real life person to talk to, somebody I fell in love with and then abandoned when the big bright world of my early 20s decided to welcome me. 

The world was an oyster, and I badly wanted to be a pearl. 

KATHY ACKER