Numb.

The monologue has been turbulent in my mind lately.

My parents, in their silence of late, have been making me feel uncomfortable. I don't know quite how to react around them and the very fact I feel this way is enough to send me on several guilt trips.

Why is it that when they start to show me affection I feel as though I instinctively want to run? Why is it that when I'm sat around them long enough to sit and laugh and feel at ease that a certain distinct sense of unease begins to grow?

I suppose a part of me is petrified that they'll draw me in again, reel me in and I'll be hung out and left to dry. I'll have given in again and given up on my life- away from them... and that possibility seems all too easy.

Meanwhile my misery over not being able to express how I feel to my boyfriend has surpassed any of my emotional bounds. I feel as though I could be the gloomiest fatalist on the planet- and all because I'm in love and miss him.

I guess the above has nothing to do with being Bengali- its something you'd hope you'd feel should you have been raised in the Western culture. You'd miss your "other half".

However, my fear of my parents is something far greater in significance.... I'm tempted to use the word 'portentous'.

What are you supposed to do when you feel uncomfortable around your own parents? They were never my enemies before... and yet today, the very thought of getting close to them... of them trying to get close to me, terrifies me.

I feel threatened- as though I've so much to lose. Why are they a threat to me?

And yet- it should be so obvious. They want me to leave my boyfriend, they want me to chose between him or them... and whilst they must surely know it was never a choice- it is my life- and I would inevitably- if forced to, choose him, the hopefulness I had once envisaged at the thought my parents and I getting close to one another again is not present when it happens in reality.

The crux of the matter simply is that whilst they may want to be close to me again, to regain me, they can not accept me and yet have me feel unaccepted at the same time. The hypocrisy of it is simply too much for me. Especially from my own kin.

An example: I was cleaning out my bedroom and found a door sign I had used whilst living away. It said, "Will be in for most of the day- you lucky people" and I had stuck it on my bedroom door whilst I cleaned the room. It was simply a temporary thing- I was going to throw it away later.

However, this morning, my father read it and he said, coming in to the room, that I should go out whenever I want. He doesn't want me to stay locked up indoors. All he asks is that I tell him where I'm going.

He gave me a hug and like a hurt animal, retreated back to his bedroom and went to sleep.

Whilst his request was heartfelt, my reaction within was cold. I felt anger. Perhaps resentment. It was as if a gift was being offered and I was turning it away.

I don't want their permission...........

I want their acceptance.

Beyond all of that, I'm still missing my boyfriend. And frankly.... sometimes it hurts more to say "I miss you" and still feel far away than to sit in silence and disappear for a while, numb.

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Held Within.

I managed to spend some time with my mother today.... she wanted a hug, so I leaned into her and let her hold me. But there was no reciprocity.

I feel evil inside, like a part of me that was compassionate and warm is gone. I lack empathy, I lack the ability to comfort my family. And as I sat there in my mother's arms, tense, awkward, a thousand thoughts ran through me.

I've forgotten what it feels like to hug my own mother.

I'm so guarded. I'm so guarded against them. Throughout the day my mood grew deeper into a sense of apathy and actually, in contradiction, I found myself feeling concerned at the same time.

My father..... walks into the house, and looks at me with a growing look of.... I can't describe it in one word..... but its an open monologue of "I don't know you anymore". Of, "I don't want to be wasting my energy worrying about you anymore, even though every single day I do, regardless". He seems angry, bitter and sad at the same time. He seems weary, agonised and yet... cold.

I did that.

I wanted to talk to my mother about moving up to the city, today. We were getting to the point where we were actually sat in the lounge together and talking. She seemed her normal self again for once.... which was nice..... her face seemed cheerful, even though she wasn't smiling.

My father- going back to him... he looks like a battered dog. That look animals have when life has treated them hard, you know? But some animals never venture away from humans even after it.

Anyway........ I was going to talk to her, but my cousin came back from work. It wasn't appropriate timing anymore.

I don't know. What does it mean when.... you feel as though you're watching yourself be this stranger around your own parents? When I'm with them, I see the old scene running parallel to the reality- the old scene is one where we're laughing, and I'm somehow just being more emotive. Now.... I'm so withdrawn, and I really can't help that I am. I won't deny that 'refrained' is a word that describes me when I am around my parents. I'm... reserved.

Why does smiling and talking to my parents and saying things that make it seem like I care, why does that have to be "fake"?

The thing is, I know how they feel...... I do- to an extent. I feel everything I inflict on them; I'm able to put myself in their shoes.

I cried this morning, actually- after I called my boyfriend. I ended up making a little small talk, then saying good-bye. As soon as I hung up I felt like total shit.

I missed him a helluva lot, and I knew he missed me, too- but I felt completely incapable of doing anything about how I felt.

My parents, I should imagine, feel as though their life and blood- their child, is so close yet so, so far. A child isn't just a parents offspring. They are their friend, too....

Whenever I think about how sad I feel to know their loneliness, their loss- as well as my own, in any situation, it always strikes me that I can't show them how much it hurts me. I don't want to. I guess its because ultimately showing sadness serves no purpose- it hinders progress.

Does that make sense?

If they see me cry, we'd go a step backwards-..... they'd know I'm vulnerable. They'd know I'm hurting and the emotional bullshit will start up all over again.

It may seem cold, heartless and tough to show someone the stern side of you to get things done (cruel to be kind, Machiavellian approach), but......

Times like this I can see myself being quite alone, you know? I mean.... being quite isolated emotionally from people. it seems easily done, and the self-pity is damned alluring. But......... I'm just admitting that I'm human.

...... I miss my boyfriend so much, and I love him enough to want to hurt. But.

At the end of the day, its not just me hurting. And the day I stop realising that I'd have lost a fair bit of my humanity.

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Hero.

My dad looks at things and talks about them as if to raise the same sense of disgust in me that he has about the Western World. When really, all I see is his bitterness and I can't help but think everyone else feels that way about him, too.

Its not his fault that he sees things the way he does. Its not an incorrectness in someone's eyesight- rather, just like short-sightedness (in all senses of the word) you're born with it, no?

People tend to assume that... one is able to change their sense of perception with just a new pair of glasses. I dunno. I would have agreed with that, but looking at my father, I have to force myself to think 'outside the box'.

I sometimes wonder how he can be so hypocritical. How can he find so many shadows in the (so called) Bright World of The West and still want to live in it? Politics, he'd say- its all politics, my dear.

I'm not going to dispute that, but I do want to understand why he can be so bitterly critical of the world around him and still live in it. Why doesn't he try to get out of it? Or, at least in the superficial of all ways, change it as much as he can?

I think about how my mother was upset when I took my name off that council housing waiting list. The state-run housing system is to die for (- note my sarcasm) its the only way my mother ended up with the house of her dreams- that she still rents from the state today. Years of financial strife- and uncertainty, and she'd used that specifically to justify why renting was better than buying- if they couldn't keep up the payments, they'd lose the house indefinitely. Better to rent, where they give you a bit of lea-way to the payments.

That makes me sad now, to think 24 years old and I'm beginning to see everything my parents do with puritanical criticism- I'm doing what they're doing. And, like them, I think I'm right.

In fact, puritanical is precisely the word. My father- in all his wisdom over the years, has justified time and time again the wrongs and rights of the world through religion. I can't help but envy that. Whether worldly right, or worldly wrong, his way for his spirit is right and that makes that which is unworldly- heaven, attainable. If only I still had that sense of faith, of moral-strength.

Another tangent- morality. If I had to define it now, in simplistic terms, it'd be my sense of wrong and right. However, with my strong sense of superstition, I could argue that morals are just as flimsy and fickle as I am. Not a comforting thought, is it?

But my father- father, oh, father... My Father, My Hero. That phrase echoed tauntingly through my head as I cleaned my teeth this morning. I tried to think when that was real- or true. Heh... and thinking about it again now, I can tell you only in my wonderful childhood, during the late summers of the 1980s and the early summers of the 1990s.

... I don't want to think about it. It hurts too much to remember.

Then something happened. And it happened rather late in my life. My parents stopped being perfect.

Now, the thing is. This is a defining moment, but I had known they weren't most of my life. Even when my father was my hero, I'd known he wasn't Superman. He wasn't Bruce Lee, either. He was just my hero. But when my parents stopped being nice to each other, that's when it set in. When my parents were giving me advice that I thought they knew they'd taught me my whole life, I realised they were forgetful, and repetitive. When i realised the answers I needed in my life wouldn't come from them, I realised they weren't perfect.

Perfect parents (- god help the parent who keeps trying...) need to have all the answers in the world to fill that role.

But that's not my dig today. It wasn't really my dig ever. My dig, is, that my parents continue to teach me why the world is so bad, and not tell me why its worth living in.

That is my dig.

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