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Sunya & Tithata II

A HALF EMPTY GLASS IS ALSO HALF FULL

Sunya was an artist; a poet; a writer.

She was creative, but at the same time destructive.

It was like the dance of Shiva: an ongoing procession in which new life is only brought about when existing things are ruined. And ruination, surely, is part and parcel of human existence. Doesn't everything that rises fall?

Is there any point in being creative when the fruits of your labours will inevitably with time grow rotten and fade away?

Because with genius, they say, tends to come instability. They are integral parts of the same process; flip sides of the same coin. Tathata would have reminded her sister of a passage from the Tao Teh Ching. Front follows back, dark follows light... You can't have one without the other.

This made Sunya's a tortured soul. Tortured by her own unsatiable longing to write; to create. To get what was in her head down on paper and thus somehow prolong its existence. To battle against the process little Tatha would call Paticassamupada; dependent origination. What rises falls. We can create, but we cannot expect our creations to last forever. Death follows life. Non-existence follows existence.

This fact irritated Sunya like a noisey wasp her first ever meditation session.

Even walking down the street she'd be struck by that uncompromising desire to write, and she'd have to get it down onto a page before it all swelled up inside her head as if her brain was a self inflating balloon filled with that frantically expanding hellium called creativity.

She'd have to stop in the street, whip out that worn notebook she always carried around as if it was an apendage as necissary as her arms and legs and scribble her wildest mental meanderings down before the metaphorical balloon started scratching at the inside of her skull, threatening to explode.

People would stare and think she was some kind of crackpot.

Perhaps she was. Perhaps 'normality', if such a thing existed, was not such a lofty goal anyway.

Either way, she was past caring what people thought. They didn't understand. Nobody understood.

All this made Sunya firey; driven and untamed like a big cat in a tiny cage.

She was scrabbling around all the time; countless projects always on the go.

If only someone would invent a machine by which she could transfer her thoughts and feelings direct onto a compter screen.

She possesed this deep inquisitiveness and with it a feverish imagination.

Ideas tumbled out of her workaholic brain as if it was a war time munitions factory conveyor belt. They tumbled faster than she could jott them down, which infuriated her.

She had to loose herself in other things to escape the mad enthusiasm of her own mind.

She had to force herself to forget her artistry just to be free of its demands for a brief period of time.

It was like one of those parasites from the movie 'Alien'; about to burst out through her chest at any moment.

It was driving her mad. Perhaps it already had. Do mad people KNOW they're mad?

She hoped so, because of herself she wasn't sure.

The funny thing was that as that mind stoked the fires of insanity, it also whirred unknowingly towards an eloquent bliss, it was just that neither Sunya or her brain knew it yet.

She lost herself in trying in vein to be 'normal'.

In staying out all night at clubs and parties where she never really fitted in.

By drinking herself marginally saner than she felt in soberness.

By falling well and truly off the rails in a dailey basis just to prove she enjoyed being like that. To prove that she liked beings wild and crazy.

She might have fooled everyone else, but she didn't begin to persuade herself.

That disobedient mind of hers; that monkey mind; needed calming down.

Which was why she was here, now, where she was.

Which was why she was summing up the callous cocktail of courage and stupidity needed to perform this, the ultimate destructive task: the craziest jig Shiva ever danced.

Which was why she had come to this drastic but apparently only possible solution: suicide.

What was the point of living anyway? Wasn't she just putting in time between birth and death? Human beings are born, they suffer and they die. ALL beings are born, they suffer and they die. Why persist with such a rewardless chore as life? Why love things; why love PEOPLE, if they're just going to die and leaving you alone with your heart shattered and strewn across the cruel, dark earth like a bloated bloodbag dropped on the cold mable operating room floor by a clumsy surgeon?

Why bear this eternal agony when one deft slash of the wrist could take it all away?

Tears were beginning to well in Sunya's eyes by now.

She didn't know why, but there was something sorrowful about all this. Should there have been?

Life was meaningless; she'd established that. Nobody cared, she had persauded herself that.

Life was an eternal and ultimately fruitless struggle; that was abundantly clear. So why was she crying?

She held the blade tighter to drown out the dissenting voices in her head.

'This is the RIGHT decision; the only one', she told herself, unaware of the fact than one does not have to convince oneself if they actually BELIEVE wholeheartedly what they are preaching. 'A little bit of pain now or a whole lifetime of it to come...' Suffering; 'dukkha' as Tathata might have labelled it if she was here, which thanfully she wouldn't as Sunya wouldn't have wanted her to see her this way.

The razor was digging into her finger by now; coaxing her into making that swift, fatal slash.

All she wanted right now was to watch her lifeblood slip away; gush out of her like the contents of a plastic feeding bottle squeezed excitedly by a hyperactive toddler. She just wanted the relief; the feeling of all that pain, all that misery, all that hate and disatisfaction slip out of her and leave her empty. Leave her without responsibility, without expectations, without those torturous fetters of self and feeling. Without the mysterious, ever present spectre of the future. Without existence itself.

But she couldn't. That short, sharp action was too much. A step too far. A step something deep within her didn't want her to take. A deep emotion which comforted her now in her hour of need and proved to her she was not alone. Which proved to her that this was not all there was; suffering. Which showed her that she was loved, that she was appreciated, that she would be missed.

What was she doing throwing this intangible, incomprehensible thing called life away?

How could she put an end to this thing without giving it a fair shot?

How could she neglect life without ever attempting to understand it; spitting it out like a kid coughing up his greens in disgust without ever wondering if perhaps they were GOOD for him?

Sunya was suddenly overcome with a bitter sense of guilt which made her shiver.

How could she be doing this?

Her life wasn't that terrible. She hadn't even tried to share her problems.

Perhaps if she did she'd find people less heartless than she often portrayed them.

She disgarded the razor blade quickly as the awful thought dawned on her that if her mum came in right now, she'd be far from best pleased. 'Its moments like this that you put things into perspective'.

Sunya dabbed her eyes with a lovingly folded stack of bedclothes then fely guilty again for ruining her mum's fine laundry work.

She loved her family, didin't she? She didn't want to let them go; however much Tathata's freakish purity irritated her. However much she and mum would fight.

She'd just lost her perspective, that was all, and the results could well have been catastrophic.

She lay down, light headed.

It was as if some divine labotomist had declared this lost girl was dead already and removed her brain for some sick expreiment, leaving her to contemplate nothing but nothingness itself.

Strange how something as empty as feeling empty makes you feel so both so drained and so full inside.

She closed her eyes and scoulded herself for her stupidity.

Day was breaking, and a lonely finch chattering to no other creature in particular in the park yard touched a soft spot in her heart with its joyous song.

Perhaps things would begin to look up now. Perhaps clouds really did have silver linings. And perhaps when you're half way down, you really are half way up as well.

She was still not convinced of any express purpose in life.

Existence was a blur, and though not a very nice one, it was curious how the little things made all the difference.

It was wonderful, in some sick, twisted way that she'd come so close only to shirk back into her shell and feel at once ashamed and glad of what she had very nearly done.

'Life is precious'. She hadn't had that thought in a while, but the tuneful albeit wordless interjection of her feathered friend out back had brought it to mind.

Funny how the most important things cannot be said with words.

Mabye she'd borrow one of those weird books from her sister tommorow.

Mabye she was turning into a freak, just like her.

At least SHE didn't go around long faced all day and sob over her lack of courage to sever her own artiries all night.

Mabye she'd just drop off to sleep now exausted by the whole mental ordeal and forget about her sudden change of heart by the morning. She consoulled herself with that thought.

Somewhere inside the normal, bitchy, hot tempered, manic depressive, gutless suicidal Sunya drew comfort in the idea that tonight's jaunt into the jaws of premature death could be shrugged off and she could be reunited with her delinquent view of life once more.

But the new, angst ridden, curious, hopeful Sunya; born in the jaws of self defeat right here tonight, would have her say too. Which one would awake was anyone's guess.

But deep down, Sunya wished it would be the latter.

On to Part Three

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