Fear seems like a painfully inadequate word to express what I have been feeling for the past few days. In retrospect, fear would actually be more bearable since it incites, in almost anyone who experiences it, an overwhelming desire to flee from its source. I believe the fear that has now beset me is of a different kind. It consumes and ceases you with a deathly fright yet somehow remains strangely alluring. It shackles you with the promise of a better future and feeds you with enough courage to step closer, despite every inch of your being wanting the contrary. Language hopelessly fails in the face of such monstrous experiences. They remind me that our lives are continually informed by certain inexplicable feelings whose source will forever be mystifying. I do not know what is more painful now. Is it to listen to what these feelings have to offer at the expense of any peace of mind or become so distant from myself so that they fade into faint whispers. My reservations, nonetheless, were never this pronounced. I had always believed it was wise to listen to one’s heart, especially when it alluded to things that were often neglected. But what if the heart is truly not one’s own? What if its apprehensions and presentiments that comprise such a significant part of our lives arise from a place beyond ourselves? A place which, if we ventured into, would lead to our own peril.

I wouldn’t have been compelled to ask any of these questions if it wasn’t for that fateful night. And the more I try to answer them, the more it brings me back to the earliest memories of my childhood. I was generally incurious and inclined to entertain silly things as a child. Like most of my peers, my identity hinged on the imitation of those I found admirable. I had very little thoughts of my own and neither was I interested in developing them since they mostly seemed like a nuisance. The world around me had employed thinking as a mere tool to serve practical ends. I would have liked to remain content with this approach but as I grew up, a peculiar disturbance began to take hold of me. It made itself felt in simple questions like who I was. What I was doing here. Why I had to educate myself and most importantly why there was absolutely nothing about me I truly owned. My name had been decided by my parents. The life I had to live, dictated by those in my immediate surrounding. I felt as though I was a machine, carefully assembled to serve a specific purpose and fade into nothingness once I had fulfilled it. But what alienated me even more was how these problems concerned almost no one around me. They were all blissfully immersed in the flow of daily events, seldom questioning the darkness that engulfed them with every step they took.

During the early days of middle school, I remember my father abruptly visiting my class on account of a family emergency. It was raining quite heavily that day, so much so that the ducks in the garden of my school’s courtyard had been quacking excessively for a few hours. There was an air of general confusion and disarray as the parents of all the students were calling to inquire wether they should come to school to pick their ward. Amidst this chaos, I suddenly saw my father standing at the door asking to speak to the teacher in charge. I heard a few murmurs between them and the teacher suddenly turned to me and gave permission to take an early leave. What I remember, immediately after, is being in a car surrounded by the sullen faces of my family and relatives. Evidently, something had happened but no one would dare open their mouths. Even the rain that poured outside could not drown the deafening silence I felt that day. Once this voyage of silence came to an end, I followed my father into a room filled with faces as sullen as the ones I had seen a few moments before. And in the middle of all these people, I saw someone I knew lying asleep within a glass box. It only took me a few moments to understand that I had just visited a funeral and that the person I saw lying asleep would never wake up again.

As I moved closer to take a better look at the person lying in front of me, I gradually recognized him. It was a close friend of my father’s whom I had met on several occasions. He was particularly fond of me and would often buy me sweets when he visited our house. Although I felt no sense of attachment towards this person, I was still saddened by his untimely demise. But unlike others in the funeral, I was not moved to the point of weeping. What I felt instead, in the few moments I glimpsed at my father’s friend, was another kind of distress. I could not stand the fact that a person I once knew was now in a place beyond my reach. A place even beyond the morbid imagination of a sickly child. In my attempt to grasp this person and somehow make sense of where he now existed, I realized that I knew nothing of the life I had lived so far. That my opinions were just accidental consequences of factors which expressed themselves through me. I was reduced to a point of pitiful insignificance in the face of death. And as I stood there utterly defenseless, I witnessed for the first time that abysmal darkness which engulfed all of human life. I turned my head to catch a glimpse of the person asleep as we were leaving and I could see the darkness enveloping him as he descended into his coffin. When I stood outside for a few moments waiting for my father, I noticed quite a lot of people wiping away their tears as they left. I became envious of them for I knew I could not easily erase what I saw that day through the salt of my tears. Something had crawled into my heart and made its permanent home. I could not tell what it was then but now I can see that it was the image of my own death.

Whatever I saw in the funeral continued to disturb me for the rest of my middle school years. I lost countless hours of sleep thinking about it. Wondering if the darkness I saw was just a spectre of my imagination but even then, the sight of it remained equally terrifying. I wished to relegate this memory among those childhood fancies which would become trivial over the course of time and I was partly successful in this regard. But what I felt remained unchanged. It existed in some distant corner of the storehouse of my experience and when the world was quiet enough I could always hear, within me, its faint whispers.

The rest of my schooling was largely wasted in the pursuit of academic excellence. I made more friends than the ones I lost. In the little time I had, I indulged myself in entertainment and other distractions. I had fallen back to leading the typical life of a student, revelling in the fact that I rarely thought or felt anything I could not express. I diligently made sure I remained within the boundaries of socially prescribed experience but my life, as a result, became increasingly hollow. I was content, for quite sometime, in filling myself with the wishes and dreams of those around me since the prospects of confronting my own illuminated things I wanted to leave in the dark. But in moments when I was truly alone, I invariably knew the peace I enjoyed was built on the foundation of a profound ignorance that was bound to be shattered one way or another. At the end of high school, right after the final examinations, my friends had convinced me for a celebratory dinner. They were all quite ecstatic about entering college and waited, with gleeful anticipation, for the freedom it would entail. As much as I tried, I could never fully share in their excitement because the freedom they sought, seemed to me, like just another distraction. Despite my reservations, I decided to attend the dinner atleast as a token of gratitude. We had planned to go to a restaurant right after our classes had ended. And as we all gathered to discuss a few things before leaving, we realized that one of our friends was missing. We tried calling him and eventually resolved to search for him separately in different parts of the school. I was already ill disposed that day for reasons I could never tell and the disappearance of our friend further exasperated me.

Each of us took different floors to search for him and I went to the terrace just to make sure we covered the entire school. I did not expect to find him there but as I climbed the stairs, I was engrossed by a strange presentiment. I had a feeling that not only would I find whom I had been looking for but also that something extremely morbid would soon follow. But by then, I had grown accustomed to ignoring such exigencies, regardless of how strongly they impressed themselves upon me. And as I ascended the stairs, I told myself I would find nothing that was out of the ordinary. I reached the entrance of the terrace and, at first sight, found no one in the immediate vicinity. Though upon closer inspection, I could make out the contours of a person standing in the middle of the dark. Since the lights were extremely dim, I stepped closer to form a better image but what first reached the field of my experience was the sound of uncontrollable weeping. I could see my friend crying inconsolably, murmuring apologies to someone he had wronged. I asked what had happened and, to my surprise, he immediately turned towards me pointing a knife that was so sharp that it almost glimmered reflecting the light of the moon. I could finally see his face clear enough to infer that he was not in the right state of mind. He implored me to let him kill himself. Through disjointed words, he constantly reiterated that he was consumed by an overbearing guilt and that he had to die in the most painful way conceivable to atone for what he had done.

I could tell, from the look on his eyes, that he was a coward. It seemed irrelevant to further ask why he was doing this because he posed no threat either to himself or to anyone around him. I knew that if I wanted to, I could have pulled the knife away and perhaps even dissuaded him from making such a hasty decision. But for some odd reason, none of these considerations even entered the purview of my consciousness. Instead, I was fixated on the sight of the glimmering knife which he held in his hand. The person in front of me slowly faded into the blackness of some distant void. He was now a mere silhouette who possessed something I had for so long desired without knowing. The darkness that loomed over him beckoned me and as I stepped closer, my friend became increasingly frantic, waving his knife to stop me. He was simply trying to instill fear and meant no harm but he remained oblivious to what I sought in this situation. I realized that I had encountered a moment where absolutely no one but myself could know what I truly desired. It was a moment where I was completely alone. Where every inkling of thought and feeling that transpired within me was severed from any semblance of normalcy. I was at the precipice of that great abyss and all I had to do was take a step closer. And as I stepped, with the utmost awareness, into the trajectory of his knife, it slashed my jugular. Within a few moments there was such an outpouring of blood that I was fairly certain I had reached my last moments. I heard the devastating scream of my friend gradually fade into a distant echo. I was beginning to lose consciousness and I found solace in the fact that I no longer had to live a life struggling to keep myself aflame against the din of the perennial night.

But the life I harboured in me refused to be snuffed out. I regained consciousness in a hospital, surrounded by family and friends who were more than relieved when they saw me wake up. I was told it was a miracle that I survived despite losing copious amounts of blood. The doctor believed that it was also partly because of the swift decision of my friends to take me to the nearest hospital immediately after they learned of the incident. They were all, as I anticipated, under the impression that I was attacked by a rogue classmate experiencing a mental breakdown. I did not bother to correct them for I could not fully understand what had happened myself. According to all outward appearance, the explanation they offered seemed most probable but it was blind to the decadence I beheld within me. Although I was questioned about the incident itself and how I was affected by it, almost no one was seriously concerned with what actually occurred. They were all tenaciously clinging on to their versions of the truth, trying desperately to not drown like rats on a sinking ship. I could not rely on their addled minds to make sense of the things I had seen. Neither could I ignore any longer those wishes and desires which I had carefully hidden within the dark recesses of my soul. Their whispers had become deafening. And I had to choose to either silence them forever or listen to them at the cost of seeming deaf to the world around me.

From then on, my life began to take a drastic turn. I increasingly withdrew from my family and friends as I became immersed in the pursuit of these strange inclinations. I was besieged by gnawing questions that consumed me for most of my waking hours. What was the darkness that I saw in those fleeting moments? Why was I impelled to move towards it? Why had I sought death, especially at the hands of someone who never intended to harm me? Within a few years, I became profoundly disturbed by these questions to the point of dysfunction. The people around me assumed it was the trauma of that incident which assailed me and believed therapy would restore my well being. But I knew what truly dismayed me were not the things I had seen outside. It was rather what I discovered within me. Like a diligent archaeologist, my prolonged isolation helped me excavate parts of myself that were buried under layers of pretensions. And the deeper I went, the more I unearthed remnants that seemed to reach into the most remote parts of antiquity. Gradually, it seemed as though everything I felt became archaic. I started to suspect that there were parts to me that did not spring from the fountain of my own experience. They were much older and often spoke in a language I could not understand. But in the few moments they were comprehensible, what they spoke of immensely frightened me for they alluded to a time when humanity was still ensconced in the embrace of its primeval womb.

Over the course of time, however, I grew weary of the reclusive life I had chosen. Since I decided against pursuing higher education of any kind, there was not much room for friends in my life either. I spent most of my days locked in a room, reading books which I believed would help me piece together the strange experiences I had. Despite perusing such a large volume of literature, I was in no way closer to finding the answers I was looking for. Most books I read either drifted towards an irrational mysticism or suggested that I was on the brink of madness. But I did not in anyway feel that I was losing touch with reality. Rather, it seemed like I was beginning to see, more clearly, the ghastly foundations upon which most of our certainties lived. Even in my attempt to reconcile the varied ideas I found in human literature, there was nothing but darkness separating one truth from another. The entirety of knowledge, as I envisioned it, seemed akin to a starry night sky. It was commendable that many individuals, like the stars, had flickered to illuminate the ignorance that shrouded humanity. But when I gazed at them, I only saw a futile attempt to delay the inevitable nothingness that awaited us all. Much like the stars, the fuel that set them alight eventually succumbed to the night that finally prevailed.

During the eve of new years, that very night which prompted me to write all this, these thoughts had reached a pinnacle. The world was out celebrating the dawn of a new year as I was up at the terrace, staring at the night sky and wondering what life had in store for me. I did not realize it had been past midnight and wanted to go sleep since the exhaustion from the weight of my thoughts had finally set in. But as I walked down the stairs, I was seized by an overwhelming fear of the answers I had been searching for. I felt that if I continued along the path I had taken, it would somehow result in my own undoing. I had an inexplicable urge to cry from the depths of my heart once I fully realized this. I wished that there was someone in the world who could see my plight, extricate me from myself but I was greeted with nothing but abject silence. I noticed that in parallel the world around me also became incredibly quiet. I could not hear any fireworks and neither were there sounds of gleeful celebration. I sat down in the stairs for sometime to recollect myself and eventually went back to my house. Both my parents had gone to sleep, so it was almost pitch dark when I entered the hall. A part of me wanted to wake them up and tell them what truly ailed me but I stopped myself. I went to my room to get some sleep instead, hoping that I would feel better the next day. The night, however, was not kind to my wishes. I could not even get a few hours worth of sleep since the fear I felt cascaded into a deluge of inner contradictions. It seemed like there were parts of myself warring with each other, vying to be seen and heard. I believed I was treading dangerously close to insanity. I immediately ran outside the room to search for a distraction that would atleast offer some temporary relief, quite oblivious to what had been waiting for me.

When I reached the hall, I saw someone standing in the middle of the dark, quite similar to my friend who had tried to kill himself. Within a few moments, however, it dawned on me that what I witnessed was anything but human. It was a tall looming figure, that was draped in a thin grey robe. It looked so emaciated that I could clearly see its veins through a skin which was almost transparent. There were dark moulds scattered all over its body, creating circular patterns that made it seem like someone drew them by hand. It had a face that looked like death and eyes as pale as a moon in a dimly lit sky. All it did was stare at me for a few moments, without uttering a single word. I was absolutely terrified once I formed an image of the thing that stood in front of me. The conflicts which almost drove me insane a few moments before disappeared like a haze. It seemed like I had met the herald of my impending doom. Or perhaps it was the desperate manifestation of a mind that had reached the depths of madness. As much I was consumed by a deathly fright that almost suffocated me, the creature also instilled a sense of awe. There was a strange allure to it, the kind only a sage would radiate after having survived the ravages of time. Although I was briefly paralysed by a feeble attempt to fathom what was unfolding around me, I eventually mustered up the courage to step closer but the moment I did, it vanished within the blink of an eye. I quickly turned on the lights to search for it but found no trace of what I had just seen.

I sat down on a chair nearby, laden with sensations that could hardly be put into words. But underneath them all, there was a looming fear that almost crippled me. I had, for the first time, confronted it in all its magnificence and against my better judgment, I was not inclined to bury it. The fear that beset me was not towards the creature I had seen. It was not born out of any anticipation of what I would see either. It was more primordial and emerged from the very core of my being. It was a fear that belonged to people of all races from all times. It was perhaps what man had first felt when he cleaved himself from the embrace of nothingness. It was the fuel that burned in him and set him alight against the limitless expanse of the primeval night. The fear I felt was the memory which reminded one that despite all that had happened, there was still enough light within to be afraid of the dark.

I sat in the chair for hours, consumed by thoughts that swirled interminably. I only realized that it was almost morning when streaks of light peered through the window. I was tired to the point of fainting and went back to my room to recuperate from the night I just endured. Although in the next few days I was strangely relieved from the weight of my problems, I did not know what to make of the visitor I met that night. All the questions that drove me to the brink of madness remained inscrutable. I still could not make sense of the things I had seen and neither was I able to deny their formative influence on the direction of my life. What became increasingly clear was only the fact that I would always be a stranger to myself. Part of the reason I chose to write all this down was because ever since that night, I could not escape the impression that there were infinite worlds buried underneath my skin. I realized that in moments where I was profoundly disturbed, I invariably saw and felt as someone other than myself. I did not know how to exist when I could not fully possess what lied within me. As much as I have tried, through words, to make all that has happened my own, it seems utterly futile in retrospect. I was nothing but the eye that separated the vastness of the worlds it witnessed, forever at risk of being subsumed by what it saw. And the eye was afloat, in a vast sea of nothingness, only being able to see its reflection in the fear of the unknown. I have finally seen myself and I am afraid.