I'm back (kinda)

a journal-like collage of true stories...

What have I been doing? — well, I have been about my life, quite in a regular manner. I never stopped writing; my Substack just didn’t get the privilege of knowing what I wrote in journals. Yes, Journals! I have been editing like mad. My manuscripts kept me up at night and I was always tired in the morning and active in the evening.

Now to what I came here to type…

Society has this way of indoctrinating us, I don’t know how, but it does, and we absolutely eat it up. Societal sayings become almost scripture, and often, we don’t even think through it much, before accepting it.

One of such things society says is that ‘life starts at 30’ sometimes they even contradict themselves by extending that to age 40— whatever that even means.

But how about biblical characters like Abraham who still lived with his father at age 80. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m getting at it, but let me stop pretending I have anything useful to say and just get to my random story already.

Well maybe life does jerk you awake from your long daydream since childhood at age 30. I don’t know, the age 30 has this specificity attached to it, this odd sense of sudden maturity. This abrupt realisation that hits you like a hypnic jerk.

Here I am, again, pretending I know what it’s like to be 30 while I’m not even 30 yet. I guess it’s because of what I’ve heard from SOCIETY.

But yeah, let me run you through a regular day in my life, though, honestly, each day differs slightly, sometimes even vastly from the other.

On a normal day I wake up the same morning I slept. That is to say: I always sleep way after midnight and wake up a few hours later, sometimes, for no real or solid reason. But mostly, I’m writing, or thinking, or reading, or checking mail or just doom-scrolling.

I wake up, waiting to thaw from all the sleepiness while i sit on my bed—clueless, with the haziness of my mind at an all-time high. On days, I am unlucky, I am rudely awakened by my mother, which means that I don’t get the chance to defrost. On days like that, I may display overt symptoms of grumpiness, prolonged silence, failure to understand or process whatever is told to me for over 2 minutes, tardiness in giving responses, irritability, throwing the refuse in the sink and throwing the spoon in the thrash and realising it after the deed is done.

But apart from all this, I usually check the oil and water in my dad’s car, and spark it up to be sure that it can move for the day. On some few occasions, I am to make Chocolate drink or tea for my dad. I do it with my everyday litmus test; making sure the milk isn’t gone bad, typically the milk should have a subtle smell. But I know it’s gone bad when it begins to give off this intrusive almost flatulent-ish pong. When that happens, I pour it away and refill. I let it flow from the jug into the beverage and watch it suffuse slowly. I watch with quiet glee as the face of the beverage turns misty.

Enough of that, but speaking of scents and odours. There was this one day when I had to be at the market in the morning. I sat in a trotro to go, and I wouldn’t lie, there was an almost tangible smell in the car, it was somewhere between wet dog and decomposing carcass. But what could I do? I wasn’t the only one smelling it, everyone else was quietly enduring it, or pretending not to smell it, or rather so used to smelling awful things that this smell paled in comparison to anything they ever smelled in their lives. But yeah.

So I arrived at the market, I really can’t recall the time, because I am writing this after some weeks of the original occurrence. But so much was going on that day. Everything was chaotic and happening in a frenzy. There was a demolotion exercise going on close to redco flats…

To be continued…