I always leave my Rubik’s cube just a few turns and spins away from solution. I do so purely on purpose. If my cube has all its places solved and slotted correctly, I feel a sense of accomplishment. And in that, I feel that my life can be as easy to solve as it is. But, no, there’s no way life can be as easy a puzzle as the cube.

This past year was for me, in many ways, a sort of year of epiphanies and revelations. I claimed myself all the ‘ists’ that I came to know of and found myself impressed by. Like, even before I knew much about existentialism, I started calling myself an existentialist. I came to know about the absurd and now I even call myself an absurdist, but one without a solution to the absurd. I like to think that Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Kafka were all waiting for me, and the last year was when they told me of what they thought of the world.

The past year, the year of my release from the shackles that had bound me while in school, brought me face to face with TS Eliot, and he unravelled through his words to me so seamlessly the secrets that were within me, and consequently, I started detesting time. Bukowski gave me the key to my bluebird and I saw a man weep. I saw him weep just because; he later confided in me, there was nothing else he could do in the face of the world, the ungiving and unforgiving world. Then, it was Marquez who told me that inspirations give no warnings, but maybe I am one of those who hardly get inspired.

I chanced upon Magritte’s pipe and was convinced that he was the most philosophical painter, but then Foucault took me by storm and mangled all my assumptions and told me that the pipe and the ‘this is not a pipe’ legend were not related in any way. And then I sided unbelievably with Foucault. Then a cogent post on the web told me of how the painting leaves us “hanging” in the stalemate wrought by the contradiction between the image and the legend, in the end confusing me more about existence.

Hosseini, then, helped me see how one side of a bridge burned down only reaches out for the other side but never joins with it, how once a thing is done, there’s no going back. There’s no going back, Rana’s words echo and I am lost at a sea. I am not someone else and this life is not something else.

Each day, everything flits like thieves at night, roles are exchanged and all I know is I zoned out to fall asleep. I come to only in that liminal eternity, after my eyes open and I find myself laying on bed thinking about this and that. Then, I raise myself out of bed and another day undeliberately begins.

And now, all of last year’s residues settle at the bottom of the repository. All epiphanies amalgamate and what remains is the sour bile that comes up to my throat but which then I stop. And each time this disgusting feeling comes up from the pit of my stomach, where things roll, roll, and roll, I feel incapacitated. Stripped, you could say, of everything. Too much consciousness, gentlemen, is a disease. Dostoyevsky asserted for me the indifference of the world. I wanted my tea, and the world could go to hell. If that was what I really felt or if it was borne from affectation, I do not know.

Sartre taught me that introspection is a gift, and that if I am lonely when I am alone, I am in bad company. I readily accepted that; this too, whether because it sounded witty or because I really felt for it, I couldn’t tell. I have grown unfeeling and callous; I chalk it up to reading about Sartre and Dostoyevsky. But then I had called myself an existentialist, I couldn’t back down.

I don’t know their intentions, but Camus and Kierkegaard co-opted me into believing that I am a nonsense, that my existence is in vain. Sisyphus was a happier person; I envy him to my bones. He had a purpose at least, I have none. And as if rubbing into all my abrasions and bruises with the most concentrated of salts, Wilde said: “To live is a rare thing. Most of us just exist.” And now, I want to end it all.

Truth be told, I preferred dying to living. But then, the same last year was when Newsom opened up herself to me, I took her everywhere I went and she was everywhere in me. The beauty and pleasure she afforded, which I was sucked into lickety-split, shot through me and I was elated, exhilarated each time.

All that I have acquired, inadvertently or consciously, have amounted to a chunk of something I believe is too much for me. I am not old enough for all this I guess. But then, there’s no going back now. I am the same me and you are the same you and I am lost.

Still, my Rubik’s cube, in its penultimate formation, looks me in the eye and still I don’t want to put that set of algorithms in, because my life is still deranged. But I am afraid that this way, I will forget the algorithms altogether.

Duwal is an 11th grader