The Patient Sikh: Part Twenty-Nine-- Meta Me

This an excerpt from a novel in progress and a work of fiction.

So what am I supposed to do now with my life? I’m done with Sonny, but it makes me feel like I’m done with life. There is nothing else particularly good in my life. I don’t even know what to think about now that I’m not thinking about Sonny. What should I obsess about now?

I don’t feel passion for anything or anyone else in my life. I’m taking my first acting class and it’s weird. We do a lot of things besides acting. We do all these weird exercises like looking into each other’s eyes without speaking.

I think I like acting but I don’t know about acting classes. I want to write my own movies and then act in them, the script is always the problem with a bad movie. Maybe I like acting because I don’t know who I am. Maybe I want to be someone else. Can I be you?

Who are you anyways and why are you reading this? What makes you think that you can know me? Do you think it’s possible to know anyone? I’m just a character in a book, remember that. I don’t exist. But you think you do.

Why are you reading things about other people’s lives instead of living your own? That is why people read stories, isn’t it? I’m just a figment of someone’s imagination, but what are you? Aren’t you kind of the same, the figment of god’s imagination? Aren’t you all in some kind of novel or another, just a story, that someone is writing and we are all sitting around wondering what will happen next?

I’m frustrated, I’m frustrated because I think my life is going nowhere and I think this story is going nowhere. I’m tempted to tell the author to end it, right now. I don’t know who I am yet, can we wait to tell this story once I figure it out?

I thought about Sonny all of the time, what do I think about now? What do I even do to forget? Even though he is not real, he was my fictional boyfriend and I believed in him. Just like you believe in your fictional life. Life is just as unreal as this story. Life is just a dream god is having. So wake up.

What would we do if we acknowledged the unreality of our lives? That all of this is fake. In India, they call it Maya, the illusion. You have the illusion that things matter, that you matter, that all this bullshit matters that we go through every single day, but what if none of it means anything at all?

Sonny is someone just like you were once obsessed with it, isn’t he? You understand me when I tell you it hurts. You continue to read this because you understand pain. Sometimes I think the entire point of life is just to love, but what if the person you love doesn’t love you back? What’s the point then?

I hate life. I’m glad I’m not alive like you. I would not take this crap for a minute. The things people have to go through just to get by. And that is all most of you are doing, isn’t it? Getting by. I don’t know what it’s like to live a real life, but it’s hard being in just a story. I feel the pain, I can’t imagine if it was all real.

I hate to ruin all your fantasies and ideas about me, but I’m just a character in a story. I’m not the complex being that you have gotten to know. Are you the sophisticated person you think you are? Do you think you made your own personality, or do you think you were just born this way?

I know that I was made up, but what about you? Were you made up? You ever wonder why certain things happen to you? Why the storyteller is taking you in a particular direction? Life is just a story with a really bad ending, you will die.

Ha, I will never die. That’s the difference between you and me.

I didn’t want to give up Sonny, because I don’t even know what I will do next. Sure, he was a dick, but most people are. Sure, he was using me, but aren’t we all always using people for something or another?

What are you using me for? Do I make you feel better about yourself? Do you think you understand me, do I make you understand yourself better? Do you realize how ridiculous it is for us to read stories about imaginary beings in an imaginary world? It’s like we are still playing pretend like we did when we were kids.

And we are playing pretend, aren’t we? None of us are grown up, really. Life is just a game we are playing and there’s no prize at the end. And there’s no way to win.

But don’t let that get you down. Write a story about it. I hear that really helps. You see people are a lot like god, they like to create, creativity is in their nature. If I affect you in even some small way, then my non-existence has been worthwhile.

You know where I do exist? In your mind.

Do you even know where or what that is? They say a mind is a terrible thing to waste. But maybe a mind is a terrible thing to have, I hear a lot of horror stories about them. You see if I could do what I wanted, I would lose my virginity to Sonny. I would let him have what he wants from me just to make myself feel like I’m worth something.

But that’s not what my feminist author wants. She wants me to run away, so I am, against my better judgment. What would you do, if you were me, stuck in someone’s story?

Oh yeah, I forgot you are stuck in someone’s story.

My bad.

nina

If you would like to read the beginning of this novel in progress, The Patient Sikh, visit the following links in chronological order:

The Patient Sikh: Part One

The Patient Sikh: Part Two–The Wonder Years

The Patient Sikh: Part Three–Sonny

The Patient Sikh: Part Four–Song Lyrics

The Patient Sikh: Part Five–Your Song

The Patient Sikh: Part Six–Coffee Talk

The Patient Sikh: Part Seven–Chocolate Covered Love

The Patient Sikh: Part Eight–Kiss And Tell