Desperation

"For once and for all, I am going to do this," says Michael. The bakery shop outside his house was closed so he has nothing to eat today. He always eats only a piece of bread for dinner because he does not want to go to bed felling uncomfortably full. He is holding a knife in his hand although he simply does not know what to do with it. Suddenly, moving images from his dream begin to appear. It was not long ago that he was a man with a chronic nightmare. His life has never been worse since he found out what he wanted to do in life: Everything. He kept a journal that he has been writing every morning when he gets out of bed. He records all the dreams he has; all of them including every little detail he could remember such as the colour of a lady’s skirt who was in the background of the scene in which he was engaging. He never understands why people dream. “How important is the sequence, not only in life (or things people perceive as life) but also everything else,” he scratches his head with his other hand which is still available and then rubs his own right shoulder. He insatiably wants to find out because the answer could be something he has always been looking for throughout his life. He also believes that "this reason" is what other people are also looking for. With a kitchen knife in his hand – it is not s a sharp knife at all as he remembers he could not use it even to cut a red pepper – he begins to think about the past; the day when he had good memories with his parents, who are no longer with him. Michael was a good student, until when he found out that he does not want to be a student. The depression (and this is not a complete sentence). He somehow knows that the knife will cut though his wrist if he pushes it hard enough. One day he dreamed of a big black whole inside an onion he was pealing. The black holes sucked him inside and refused to let him out. In the black space he met another Michael, a worry-free Michael. He could not touch him and for some reason his mouth disappeared. He could not use it to say anything but he did not feel like anything was missing -- that was the power of dreams. “Nothing matters more.” With swirling clouds inside his head, he reckons, again, that he does not want to be expected to live his life the way other famous people have. He wants his life to be his and his alone; although he knows so well from his psychology class that human beings absorb all kind of external influences to help to construct their own identity. He does not know why identity is such an important concept for a man (or a woman). “What if everybody has no identity?” he sincerely asks. The identity is what gets people to discriminate and hate each other. It is constructed though various people's perception towards the way they experience the world. Sometimes one very tiny little thing could change the way a person think of other person, or the entire race associated with that particular person, and bang, a war begins. He thinks for a moment and then sips a cold coffee which he made for himself a few hours ago. The depression (here is another incomplete sentence). The taste of the coffee is, of course, awful (if not disgusting) but it reminds him of the time when life was not always pleasant. He never understands, neither, why people always expect him to be what they want him to be. He remembers one morning when he woke up with a great idea about a "universal social theory." The theory explains: "when people get very insecure about their positions, they will superimpose their expectations on a person who might or might not have anything to do with the situation. The role of that person is to represent the insecure people and to die for, if possible, for those insecure people." He calls it a "victim theory." This story reminds him of the time when he was a middle person between two groups of classmates who hated each other. Simply because he was a middle person, he was asked by both parties to represent them in the psychological fight between them. He did not like what he had to do but he had no other choices. His hand started to shake and he began to feel fatigue. He, however, cannot but continue to hold it as firm as he can in order to prove that he has the gut to do it. He, again, allows his mind to travel in space. He feels that in that particular space, there is no time. In a space where time does not mean anything, he feels independent. He is convinced that time is just a "bad form of social construct." He believes that time makes people feel like they all have to try to get a hold of other people's belonging, both physical and non-physical, to seize the moment. Michael’s girlfriend just gave birth to a baby boy. He and his girlfriend never get married, although he knows that for his girlfriend the most important thing in her life is to make sure that other people “think” that she has an official husband. He, however, does not believe in that. He has been victim of the society for a long time and does not want to live his life to just make other “feel good” about their public perception. He starts to let loose all his beliefs at this point. He knows that he will not kill himself but if there is a moment where he can let himself go, it would be, he thinks, this moment. “Are you with me?” Michael feels guilty that he let this beautiful baby boy into this crazy world; but he never regrets it because he does not believe in the past. Similar to the way in which he thinks life should be seen, he understands the reflection on the knife he is holding is unreal. He wishes that no one has ever invented a reflective surface. His name does not have to be Michael; why his parents wanted to call him Michael when he was born? Back to the identity question, blaming it all on the invention of the mirror, he believes that if no one knows what they look like, they will not create a set of rules to differentiate the beautiful from the ugly – simply because everyone would be afraid of being ugly himself. There will be no qualitative judgement based on things that cannot be corrected (right?). Suddenly, everything turns into a white blank space where there is no boarder that limits the scene whatsoever. In front of him hang a big banner "The Victim Theory," which takes him to another series of idiosyncratic hallucination. It goes on to explain why he was not happy at all for the past two years. In being the middle person, not only must he try to mediate the situation by absorbing everything from both side, but he also had to deal with his own difficulty in not being able to say anything loudly about how he believed the situation should end. “What if the dream is indeed the reality and what he sees as reality has been a dream all along?” another hyper-philosophical question comes to mind of a person who never believes in something as shallow as the truth. Not only does he not believe that anyone on the planet could define trust, but he also sees truth as something not be unravelled. He thinks it is something to be buried under layers of social landscape of things (although, as always, he does not know what the “things” are). Here comes another “thing”: the social networks. His problem is not complicated at all. Not very long ago, everything he posted online to make other know what he was doing was misinterpreted. As he was, still, a middle person – a victim – everything he posted on the social network, including something as simple as "I am very happy today" had been interpreted by both sides to benefit their own political agendas. He does not like the taste of the coffee at all but he continues to drink. He begins to think about a novel by Dostoevsky he read last year. Crime and Punishment was not at all, to him, a difficult piece to read. For some reason, he felt that he could understand everything very well and know clearly what he has to do after he finished reading it. He has a crazy idea that something along the same line could just happen now and that he could escape from the situation. He recalls that he had so many glasses of cranberry juice after he finished reading Crime and Punishment. Don’t ask why; there wasn’t any reason to look for. He then asks himself "why do people want to get involved in others' affairs: this does not make any sense." Still, he does not feel any better. In many novels, when authors get to the point where they do not know where they could go on with the plot, they makes up something crazy, like having a leading role who should be dead having a spontaneous combustion. Nothing makes sense in the reality, but people who read that novel do not feel like there is anything wrong with the story. It is quite interesting to think about how people do not feel that dreams and novels are similar in this sense. It is almost like they both are places where real people can throw themselves into the sea of surrealism, where they can believe whatever they want to believe and enjoy whatever comes ad hoc. It has been 3 hours since he picked up the knife and knew nothing what he wanted to do with it. The room gets darker and darker. The kitchen does not smell good as someone left pans and dishes unclean on the sink. He has been hearing water dropping from the leaking faucet that has been broken for a long time; but guess what, the sound of dropping water, which has been very consistent, helps him to meditate. He finally puts down the knife and thought to himself, "this is not going to solve any problem." He imagines himself to be a person in a novel. He starts to think whether or not he is the only "real person" in the world and others are illusions that were created to treat him ruthlessly the way he has been treated. "Why problems are problems" he asks. The story should not end here.