The Psyche

Look at the leaves, the rain drops falling; the sky breaking like something’s going to fall down....

Mostly it’s like sitting in a chair, silence in the house, and no remote existence of a human, just silence and the noise of the rocking chair. I spend most of my days reading, cutting old newspaper articles, and just looking up stuffs everywhere around the house. It’s important for me to research this reality which I can’t perceive myself.   

After what happened to him, I can’t concentrate on anything that takes me off track. I can’t leave this place; it makes me hysterical if anyone tries to convince me otherwise. This house is always dark, it makes me feel closer to him, and my psyche doesn’t know how to differentiate reality from dreams.

On most nights I am awake, just lying down on my bed, there’s this owl which sits on the branch of the tree staring down at me, I look at him. The darkness is comforting, but also deceiving, many times I hear roaring voices and when I try to get around the house I find myself blind, because of the same darkness.

I make good tea, I am a good person, I have lots of books, I was once a surgeon, and I never believed in psychology. I don’t know what’s all this. I can see myself sitting here as a body, but I can’t see my soul, my inner self. I don’t know what it thinks; I can just see the body, getting old by the day, the eyes hollow.

I have no life other than this old house, I work in my mornings tending the garden, but it rains here most of the year, there is no human existence in at least 50 miles. I never travel to the nearest city. There’s this boy who comes every Sunday to fetch me my groceries and eatables. I have no visitors.

This house is always dark, the clouds are always thundering, I am always sitting on my rocking chair reading on the porch, listening to the bursting skies, waiting.

Waiting for something to take me by surprise, for someone to just come by in search of me. But that will never happen. The one person who would have had come is long gone.

Ours was never a happy ending, we never really experienced those feelings, I don’t know what’s all that fuss about love. My heart was never full of emotions. But there was a time when my body was more energetic, when I had first set my eyes upon this abandoned place. He had left me here. I used to work in a hospital then, and I used to visit this house every weekend. When I was tired of solving people’s problems, and tired of giving them explanations, I realised I needed to come to terms with my failures. The worst you feel is when you solve other’s problems and give them a life but are clueless about your own. And when someone stabs you with the truth, you tend to get teary eyed. But I realised, I couldn’t help myself. I always knew what I felt was not quite explained by medicine.

I moved here. And I grew cranky of human existence.  Since then this darkness and this house has been my companion. I was never a great person, nor a great friend, neither a great surgeon. I never did anything out of book. Because I couldn’t figure out what was that held me back.

-The Psyche

This piece has been written by me measuring the outcomes of a feeling unexplained by medicine. I don’t know what’s it called. But it’s when hysteria cannot be measured by any tests, or the seizures are from an unknown origin. You can stock up the patient with sedatives and tranquilizers but you can’t heal the psyche.

Just like schizophrenia which has an unknown origin What goes on in the brain can be seen on the MRI, but what goes in the mind is just a mystery.