Whisky I Did Not Drink
I sat in the room with my noise-cancelling headphones on, playing one of the songs that always hits me where it hurts. Soldier of Fortune by Deep Purple. It's the kind of song that strongly resonates with my soul yet also reminds me how much of a coward I am.
The song is about a man who has sailed from one desire to another, who has lived from one place to another, moved from one group of people to another but never made anything permanent. The song is not about regret for the lack of permanence. The artist is resigned to his fate.
I relate to the song because I am living through a similar paradox residing in me, one that I have to work hard at hiding. The pull is so strong that I sometimes fear it will break me. On one hand, I want to be the most reliable man. Taking care of the family. Raising kids. Leaving a legacy that my ancestors will be proud of.
On the other hand, there is an incessant masculine urge to quit everything and wander. Live alone. Live off my skills. Survive through black coffee, cigarettes, and whisky. Sleep with whichever woman I could tolerate. I bet a lot of women would love such an unhinged man regardless of what they say. I could be wrong though.
No permanent home to settle. No woman in the place where I live. No questions I should answer. Most people confuse that the urge exists because I am unhappy with someone. I am not. That's why it's tough to explain it to anybody who hasn't experienced it.
I know I am not the only one in the world. Many men go through this urge and internally feel like cowards because they lack the strength to do what they want. Imagine the uproar if you quit everything and fuck up your life from a societal point of view.
Does it mean I am burdened by the responsibilities of people? Perhaps. Or maybe I am a coward of a different kind. I want to run away because I cannot take it anymore. Or maybe I want to run away because I have had it enough that it's choking me now.
A man dreams of freedom precisely when he feels the lack of it in his life. To have to live like a decent man. A life where one has to constantly defend his ethics, his values, justify his moral compass to people he considers inferior but cannot tell them they are.
The norms of society are tiring to the one who was never accepted by society. I clearly was not. I grew up a rejected child, I wasn't cute enough or had any likability. I further grew up as a discarded young man who was considered good for nothing.
But then something happened. I really had a complete breakdown with all my beliefs and values shattered. I suffered for years and the suffering led to a brutal transformation.
So I am a highly sophisticated man now. I have the right words for the right situations. I have just the right joke to crack as an icebreaker. I am kind enough to people because I wish someone were kinder to me. I am ethical because the world wasn't. I treat people the way I was never treated in the hope that I break the cycle.
But the cycle is a joke. People do what they want to do. Which then leads me to believe how futile everything is—the morals, the ethics, the kindness. Arrogance is such a beautiful weapon to live in this world. The world is uncouth to you anyway, why not be one in return. At least there will be satisfaction in the end.
The arrogant sleep easy in the night. It's the sensitive ones who lie awake suffering the insults again and again thinking what did they do to deserve it. I am a sensitive man as in I can sense when people don't mean what they say. Or when they have an ulterior motive behind the praises they are heaping upon me.
I can sense these because that's practically how I lived my entire life. I know what lies sound like. I know what passive aggression looks like. I know how loathing and hatred look like. I have seen them up close.
Once you realize how hypocritical human interaction is, you would want to quit it. Of course, there is another urge to gamify it to your advantage, which is what I do. But then I have also developed ethics that make me treat people with kindness.
I think if I treat others with kindness, the child inside me who was never treated with love would be happy. But that's not how the world works. It's funny that our mind creates a personality trait that is wholly incompatible with the world we live in.
And so there is an urge to run away from it all. The right and the wrong. The good and the bad. The moral and immoral. The ethics and the corruption. The inner child knows they don't matter. The adult in me still wants to have the values, so there's one less person suffering. So there's one less insult.
I don't like money as much as others do. I know its utility, so I do everything to make enough of it. But if I were to be honest in this essay, since nobody reads it anyway, I am not particularly ambitious about money either.
I grew up without a home and money, so I know what it is to live without one. It's inconvenient. So I want to have enough for my family. I don't want people around me to suffer. But I also want to run away from it all, so there's no ambition to acquire it for myself. Maybe so the family can stay content after me.
I always dream up a scenario, plan for such scenarios where my family is living without me. I am never going to go away. The ethics I cultivated to avoid passing down hurt have also made me a coward. But I do think about a scenario where my family exists without me.
My understanding of everything originates from the absence of it. For instance, the only way I understand love is what it feels like to not have anyone love you, so I think everyone should be loved. I think about myself from the same logic: what if I don't exist, what difference does it make. I realize it's mostly materialistic so I fix those one by one.
That's one fucked-up life I lived. The morality inside me will contradict that there are others who have had it worse than me. And so the suffering too feels selfish. This rationalization further fuels my suffering.
There is a man inside me who wants to fix the world, starting with taking care of his family, which means living with a strong moral code. Taking care of his health, which means no alcohol, no cigarettes, less coffee.
Then there is a man inside who wants to write stories at 2 a.m. without a shirt on, leaving the woman I just met sleeping on the bed, with black coffee or whisky by the desk, depending on the kind of story I am writing. And a pack of Marlboros to go with it.
I want to spend the night without worrying about the morning. I want to sleep through the morning without worrying about the day I am wasting. I understand the consequences of living such a life, but you see, those consequences don't appear that scary to me.
I am aware of the duality that resides in me. The absolute paradox that I am living. I want to share it with someone, yet I also want to hide it from everyone. This duality of absolute darkness reflects often in the stories I write.
When I look back at those stories, there's always a moral crisis with my characters. They are all fucked up. They are all independent, though, to make their choices. The world is equally dark. Maybe that's who I am, but then I see kids in the park, on the streets, and I go soft.
Seeing them doing things alone where the parents aren't even looking at them breaks my heart. When I see a child crying and nobody's there to hold them, I weep with that child without a tear—obviously, they don't come anymore.
I want to help that child, but I also know if I did, then he won't learn how to wipe those tears on his own. And if he is crying alone, then he will have to learn to stop that crying as well.
One of the perks of having a negligible reader base is that I can write such confessional essays describing my inner turmoil. I'm glad there is no comment section here. I don't want sympathies; I am not depressed.
Besides, I am comfortable confessing to strangers. It's the ones I know that I am worried about. The ones who know me don't read me anyway.
They are cocksure of themselves, that they know me well enough, but you, my reader, would be laughing right now, just like I do when they say they know me for years. They don't know what goes on in my head; they don't even bother. They just look at how I behave and think that's who I am.
I don't even like people 99% of the time. I cannot tolerate mediocrity for more than five minutes. Not even in myself. But I do tolerate them because I also don't want to hurt them.
And so the only thing that remains in the end for me is to run away, but then I am thirty-six, and people at that age are trapped for life.
Either you end your life for good, hoping the next one will be better, or you continue to suffer this duality. I live this duality through stories I write.
If you have read till now, you have my full sympathies. I want to be kind enough to say thank you for your efforts, but you know I am not in that mood. Not tonight.
So, maybe in another essay, I will be kinder, I will be wiser. I will wear that mask again. Tonight, I am feeling tired.
Tonight, though, I want a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Marlboro. But I cannot live that life, so I will have black coffee and maybe a protein bar.