Liberation from survival

 

It was months ago. Back then, everything was bearing down on me. It still is. This is nothing new. But at that time, I felt it more acutely, rather than as mere background noise. The reason was not the magnitude of the pain—it was the absence of pressure that made it less striking.

I was completely alone in the city I had just arrived in. Of course, this implies freedom—but was I not designed, not to be free, but to survive in prison? I had become capable of doing whatever I wanted. Naturally, I ended up doing nothing, because it was alien to me.

This was neither exhaustion nor laziness. It was more that the weariness that had always surrounded me had finally reached a level I could no longer ignore. Once I shed my life of slavery, that slavery ceased to be my primary focus, and in its place came this suffocating boredom with the world.

When I was a slave, I was only concerned with surviving the day—thinking about how I would make it to the next one. In this way, I distracted my mind. I distracted it for years. While things were that intense, I didn’t even have time to recognize boredom; it could not take hold of me then.

But now, once freed, I’ve begun to boycott even going outside. Why should I go out? To get food and feed myself. And what use is feeding myself? I had asked this question for years, but in prison, food was placed in front of me, and I ate it in a state of estrangement. They fed me like a dog, but technically, that was how they kept me alive.

Now, I don’t want to eat. What happens if I don’t? I die. And if I die, then what? Nothing. I don’t say this with sadness; I present it almost as a mathematical proof.

As a result, I stopped eating. I felt hunger, but it mattered so little to me that I merely noticed it. I acknowledged it, but I didn’t care. What would happen if I were hungry? Nothing.

This was not a complete refusal to eat. At first, I began eating a single meal a day. An ordinary person might have seen this as madness, but ascetic philosophy nourished my mind, if not my stomach—and the fullness of the mind managed to suppress the emptiness of the body. In this way, I sustained my days on portions of food no larger than the scraps given to a bird.

During this time, my family called me once. For what reason? Certainly not because they missed me. If I could be this alone—and more precisely, if I could be this free in such solitude—doesn’t that prove that I never truly had a family to begin with?

I brushed them off. What did I tell them? That I was going to school, exactly as they expected. School. That was why I had come here, wasn’t it? Yet I was so absorbed in my own thoughts and feelings that I had even forgotten its existence—and it never truly mattered to me anyway.

Then why had I come to this city? I had simply come—that was all. For nothing. To lie down and contemplate endlessly. Or to dig my grave here and step into it—because now I had shovels, and the octopus-like tentacles of people that constantly obstructed my every movement were no longer here.

But when my “supplies” ran out, I didn’t bother to procure new ones. If food had been placed in front of me, I would have eaten it; but if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t trouble myself to go looking for it, because I didn’t care. Once there was no food left in the house, I stopped eating altogether.

To conserve energy, I spent most of my time sleeping. These were not deep, nighttime sleeps; rather, they resembled a conscious coma. During this time, my mind was almost constructing entirely new worlds, as if seeking refuge within them. And because I was half-awake, half-asleep, I was able to control them nonetheless. My imagination became reality.

I would imagine a tree, and my mind would place it before me. Then I would touch it, and I could even feel the hardness of its bark. If such manipulation of perception is possible, then what proves that the physical world is real? There is no proof. It is accepted as reality simply because everyone treats it as primary reality—because they do not know how to manipulate their minds.

Whereas I was not escaping from reality; I was escaping into reality.

Weeks passed in this manner. My body grew severely weak. My bones had become visible. I did not look at myself in the mirror—because it had already been years since I last did. To see oneself through something that is not oneself is terrifying, because it pretends to be me, as if it were me—but it isn’t.

Had I turned into a modern Buddha by dissolving my body this way? Perhaps. But I did it not with serenity, only with indifference.

Why hunger? Because it requires the least action. In fact, it requires no action at all. It is simply what happens when action is entirely removed. There is no knife. No weapon. No can of gasoline. There is only absence—the absence of food.

I could not kill myself, but I could end my living. And this could not even be called “death,” because death itself is an event—whereas here, there was no event at all, including death.

I could do these things because I was alone. Yet, actually, I was in the middle of everyone. This was an apartment room. Just beyond the wall, there were people—even if I didn’t know their names. The building across the street was full of people. And the people rushing along the road below, buzzing past incessantly.

Sometimes I watched them, knowing that none of them would turn and look back. I was there, and none of them knew it—because they were not really there. They were silhouettes. Was it not always like this? They always rushed past in the same way. I don’t think they even looked at their surroundings, let alone saw me.

If I were to go out there in my current state, the first thing they would do would be to lock me in a mental hospital—not to sit down and talk, even a little.

So what are they? Why have they been placed there? Is it artificial movement—mere decoration, to give the appearance of life, but never its substance?

They carry full bags in their hands. They are transporting food. All of this noise exists to keep themselves alive. But what happens once they survive? The next day they grow hungry again, and once more they set out on the roads to feed themselves. Then again. And again.

This fact is painful, and that is precisely why they manage to distract themselves—with pleasures and adventures. I, on the other hand, stare directly into that void without blinking, and I feel the void drawing me into itself.

I think about it—what would happen if there were no food? Would they start eating grass like cows? Fine. But then that too would run out. What would happen next? They would begin to eat one another. But aren’t they already doing this all the time? It would simply become physical rather than abstract. Yet is society not already composed, in an abstract sense, of parasites and leeches constantly feeding on one another?

But I would be neither a parasite nor a leech. I was rejecting them entirely, and in doing so, I was reaching the human within me in the purest way. This is precisely why I was foreign to them, because they were not human. If they were human, I would not be able to wander completely unseen—even in squares filled with thousands of people—carrying this ancient weariness that almost replaced my skin.

Because I hadn’t gone outside for a long time, the outside world began to feel unreal every time I looked through the window, so I began to avoid the window as well. Yet even when I was outside, everything already felt unreal—because it was. Looking from behind the glass intensified this sense of unreality, simply because it required no action, which led to thought, and thought led to awareness.

Amidst this torment, my head had begun to spin. My stomach was constantly growling. But why should these things concern me?

Once, the doorbell rang. A shiver stirred inside me. Who was it? What did they want? I didn’t get up. I kept lying there. Then it rang again. I got up—not because I cared, but to get it over with, because they wouldn’t leave me alone. Sometimes even the sounds beyond the walls would wake me from sleep, and I would become frustrated—not at the noise itself, but at how, amid so much noise, I could be completely insignificant—and how this could be presented as natural.

I wrapped a scarf around my neck and put on black glasses so that whoever was at the door wouldn’t realize I was nothing but a walking skeleton. And it worked, because when I opened the door, they didn’t say a single word about it. Or rather, they simply did not care what state I was in to begin with.

Two men were standing in front of me. They were dressed like officials. Who could they be, if not servants of bureaucracy? Were they not responsible for all of this? They worked in order to eat, for whatever institution they served. They received salaries and spent them to fill their stomachs. How could they endure such a cycle?

When I asked why they had come, they said that I—having stepped outside their cycle—was threatening it. Of course, they did not say this outright, but that was what I understood.

What they actually said was: “You haven’t paid your bills for a long time. You must not neglect this responsibility. If you have a problem, you can make use of psychological services, but this is not our concern. If you continue not to pay, we will have to seize your home.”

Bills? Who cares? I slammed the door in their faces, giving them a satisfying but false answer. Of course, I would pay nothing. I would not pay the devil to live in hell. I was going to leave it.

I curled back into bed and pulled the blanket over me, because my body, completely weakened, was trembling violently from the cold. I spent a few more days this way. 

Even though I hadn’t paid the bills, no official came again, because they had allowed a week’s grace period. That was fine, because a week later would no longer concern me. Only these days existed now. My life consisted solely of the few hours ahead of me.

Finally, I shook off my drowsy dreams and, with half-blurred consciousness, wrote this note. What had I written? Was all of this real? I must have been dreaming—and if I recorded this dream as reality, I should have gone mad. Why had I written it at all? Perhaps because even this was part of some dream, since I would no longer bother moving my fingers for anything. But I was now too weak and exhausted to care further.

I placed the note in the drawer of the nightstand in my room and closed it, though I didn’t bother to lock it. Then I curled back into bed again, folding my body inward and sensing that I probably would not see the morning, and sank into another dream.

A. G.