Many of us desire to taste #Wanderlust and experience the ideal way of living just like we see on social media. While it is fancied, in this analogy, you get to read the other infamous side of #Wanderlust
Disclaimer: Reader, it is well established that you may skim through the entire write-up in a matter of 7 seconds. Well, as per some reliable studies, this is your average attention span. Do not fret, this will be quick. If you must know, your time will not go down the drain and you may just end up reading other interesting write-ups published in this profile — you may just.
It was a boring start. The write-up that his friend forced him to read had a disclaimer in the beginning, probably to condition his mind into going through something that was beyond his interests. He does not like to be introduced to anything complex and metaphorical so he switched to one of the many convenient apps. He flipped through some …. wait — he scrolled through some posts with memes, pictures of friends on their vacays, celebs, stalked some exes, followed a couple of irrelevant pages and then Monotony hit him.
He decided to do it old school and typed Love on ogle.com and found what he needed the most right now– oh so many quotes. Quotes on embracing love, Self-Love, unconditional love, Love this, Love that, Love sucks, oh love and then Monotony hit him.
Never mind! Out of boredom, he headed towards the main door with a couple of hardware tools to fix the locks. During monsoon, the latch jams and refuses to cooperate with him. He watched some videos on how to fix a latch. He even skimmed through a couple of blogs and then Monotony hit him.
“Why do you hit me every time I try? I’m trying my best to love you.” And then he stopped trying. Monotony hit him, again.
Feeling unbearably disheartened and suddenly out-of-activity, he decided to give that boring write-up on Medium a slightly honest chance. It was an article about Wanderlust, a guru whom he once met during a trek with a few unknown people going towards a relatively unknown hill in an unknown region. He was mesmerized by his charisma and mannerisms.
The way he spoke, the philosophy he introduced them to, the dreams he weaved for them to implement. “Life would be wonderful in his company,” he thought.
Breaking out of his walk down the nostalgic alley, he tried to hold his attention to the strangely framed sentences. There was a paragraph or two on the Guru’s early childhood — how he once accidentally got lost in a jungle for an entire night. Wolves snacking, pigs wallowing, pigeons canoodling, lions sleeping, snakes snoring. He, on the other hand, was hiding in a corner with his buttock caked up in his own turd. It was nothing like they had described to him. Nobody was attacking him, there was no hissing, no biting, no carcasses, no bloodstains on trees — nothing. He spent the entire night in fear of experiencing the known and fell asleep, conscious enough to know that he had a company of someone else whose face he could not see in darkness but the air surely smelled of comfort. When they found Wanderlust the next morning, he stank of insecurity and regret which embarrassed him. Surprisingly, they patted his back and cheered for displaying courage, exploring new territories alone and surviving them without fear. Nobody knew the real story and Wanderlust intended to keep it that way.
This does not look pleasant. He did not enjoy reading about snores of snakes and mention of bloodstains on trees, so he did what he was comfortable with — switched to a less complex app. He scrolled and scrolled –Why are they mourning and posting pictures of dead trees from one of the local areas? He joined the bandwagon by reposting one of them. “I did my part,” he thought. He continued to scroll some more until Monotony hit him.
“Monotony, this is it. You cannot do this to me.” “Stop hitting me with your passive-aggressiveness” “Tell me what wrong have I done to deserve this ugly side of you.”
These instances have increased over a period of time, he is not able to come out of this one-sided communication with Monotony. There is something that is not yet revealed to him, at least he suspects this somewhere in the back of his head. Afraid that he would be hit again, he switches back to the story of Guru Wanderlust for some distraction.
He scrolled down further, he read random words like journey, inspiration, sacrifice, individuality in the write-up. “Unpublished pictures of him would have been better to go through,” he thought. One of the controversies that caught his attention was about how this Guru once married a young teacher, who taught at the ‘Modern School of Life and Purpose’. Wanderlust sinfully fell in love with the teacher, even the air around her stroked his skin with sensations of ecstasies. Everybody assumed he would settle down blindly with this one who gave him what he always dreamt of — a new sun every day, a new moon every night. But it was also the same period when he found himself infatuated with a strangely familiar face and ran away impulsively — leaving behind nothing but betrayal for her. He chose The Other Her.
The Other Her was gentle and had dull eyes, laughing lines and thinned out hair. Her skin was soft but coarsely textured. She always spoke in silence and had only one reply to all of his questions. Wanderlust found this intriguing, The Other Her challenged his hunger for novelty. She was painfully passive-aggressive with him and never said a word about having any affection for him. Only her actions kept him going on — she would always let him sleep on her lap and stroke his hair repeatedly until he fell asleep but dreamt of the teacher, regretfully.
One day Wanderlust woke up with a horrid dream of the teacher confronting him for leaving her behind, incomplete. She looked at him with such appealing eyes that he could not control his desire to hold her in his arms. In a split second, without giving another thought, he started to pack his belongings. The Other Her understood the situation from his throbbing heartbeats and quietly headed towards the door to lock it. She asked him to stop, threatened to lock herself in the house and starve till death if he steps out.
“Do not unlove me and leave. Do not forget that it is because of my silence that you can hear her laugh. If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have tasted comfort and safety. This is where you truly belong”
Wanderlust ignored her and continued to hit the door repeatedly to break out of her house. The Other Her warned him to quit hitting the door and come back inside — to her comfortable lap.
“Do not hit the door, I say.”
But with one final hit at the latch of the door, it broke apart and Wanderlust stepped out in the heavily pouring rains.
“Monotony, there is no one in the world who’d value you more than I will. But forgive me, for I have dreamed and I cannot undream her, anymore”, said Wanderlust and ran away without looking back.
Monotony starved herself till her last breath and died alone in her house.
He can feel the hair erecting on the back of his neck . He is unable to scroll further, unable to switch back to one of those convenient apps. One word is running in his mind, in a loop.
Monotony.
He manages to gather a few strands of courage and looks at the door from a safe distance. He stares at the latch and analyses the past many incidents that now connect and make a lot of sense.
It’s her house.
Baffled, terrified and shuddered — he throws away his phone and lifts one of the sharp objects to hit at the door with an intention of shredding it into sawdust. He doesn’t want to know what is so special about the damn door but it is valuable to her and if he destroys it, maybe Monotony can be killed. He begins to chant one of the mantras by Wanderlust and aims at the latch.
He hits it. He hits it again. He hits it again, again. Monotony hits him.
“Do not hit the door, I say.”
This was not quick, there were way too many words to skim through even in 7 seconds.
“Even the disclaimer was misleading”, his last words.
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