everything will be fine

The red and violet lights of the strip club next door light up the cobweb-strewn wall of my one-bedroom flat, which is a good thing. It is a good thing because they are so bright that I don’t have to switch on the lights for illumination during the night. I’m sitting with my back to a wall and working on my laptop on the lowest possible brightness, which I wish was lower, but that’s okay I guess.

I’m dirt poor, so I like not using any more electricity than I have to. I only use the power switch to charge my second-hand laptop, which is in reasonably good condition. And sometimes to use my shitty table fan, which needs a good thumping on the engine to start. One of these days it’s going to blow up.

I had taken some clothes and my laptop when I left home. I withdrew as much money as I could and hid it in the weirdest possible places I could. To say I am the worst possible failure in modern society is not an exaggeration; at 25 years old, with a woman’s body, having bipolar disorder and ADHD, I have failed in every way a human being can. I am smart, but the disease had eaten away my mental stability and killed any motivation to do any better. But of course, I was just an attention whore, so no one bothered to listen to me.

Sometimes I think about joining the strip club next door, but I’m not fuckable in appearance, so I just don’t bother.

By day I work in a greasy roadside restaurant to buy enough things to exist. I don’t expect royalty, but the pay is enough to keep myself clean and eat enough and drink enough. Sometimes I am hungry at night.

I learned to make a broom out of plants, and I use that to clean my house. I tried cleaning the walls, but the upper sides were out of reach, so I gave up. I have learned a lot of things in the past few months.

I have to submit a deadline of five hours. I have to finish twenty articles, each being at least 600 words, from different subjects. I had the whole day, but the anxiety was like stomach acid, bubbling inside me, and each time I sat down to write, it threatened to bubble over and out, destroying me, along with my second-hand laptop.

I keep thinking of the months-old oil they use to make the food in my place of sustenance. Gooey and blackish brown, it is disgusting and smells like motor oil to me sometimes. Yet they continue to use that, and surprisingly, the customers say that the foods have a unique flavor, which makes me gag.

The only thing that is left untouched by that abomination is the manchow soup. For some reason, the owner has decided to protect its chastity with the highest reverence. Only the freshest vegetables and noodles were used to make it. The tar oil was kept far from its holy presence.

I have been dialoguing with myself for the last eight hours. Sometimes it was about shitty things the government did, that did not affect me yet, sometimes it was about men and their never-ending lunacy, sometimes it was about women and their never-ending bitchiness, sometimes it was about the trouble of having biological sexes, and sometimes it was some scene from a film that I did not agree with, rewriting the scene in my head over and over.

In these eight hours, I have understood,

I did not like being a woman and probably despised everyone and was going mad. Songs that are playing in the strip club are desperately loud and banging, and I want to cry. Why do some people make such awful noise and pass them off as music? But then, their noise helped them live in expensive bungalows, have expensive cars, and have expensive sex. Thinking of sex, I remembered that I have not touched a human being for one whole year.

I wonder why wasn’t I targeted for rape yet. I mean, it’s a shitty locality, I’m barely five feet and the house I live in is so weak that I worry about the next wind that would cave it in. But then I think about the kind of precautions I take most of the time. I remind myself not to slack off. And to find a better place.

It is midnight. The place is finally quiet, save from some loud drunken men, but they are hushed by their companions. A few prostitutes stand outside to bid them goodbye, smoking some cheap bidis.

Cigarettes. Cigarettes are the only things I don’t make comprises for. What I smoke should be good quality and rare. And they can be only smoked in happy situations or extremely stressful ones.

I treat myself to an expensive pack of twenty every year. Sometimes they have lasted for almost two years, but then those were comfortable years. I go to the window and take out my pack. I put one in my mouth and I line the rest in patterns. I put it back and lit up the one in my mouth.

Nicotine. It burns my nose, but the feeling of having my eyes water and my lungs suffocating from my bad choices is the only thing keeping me alive at this point. The billboard, a monstrous, fluorescent shape of exaggerated breasts, stares at me blankly, almost blinding and gagging me with its luridness.

Someone waves at me. I wave back. I take a deep drag, almost coughing, and feel the nicotine burn its cancerous path through my brain. Everything will be fine. I’m going mad, and I have a deadline in five hours, but everything will be fine.