stay home

i hate staying at home nowadays. there is always this sense of domestic waste and languish that pervades the house, usually precipitated by the incredibly irritating little boy, who, as usual, is taking roughly the time from lunch to dinner to finish his lunch, or with nice little chats about my education which they cannot afford, or with secret underground discussions about my sister's indian boyfriend which is a hurdle either my father has to cross, or my sister has to give up, unproductive simmering anger and tension that echoes everywhere, which is why i lock myself in my room most the time, giving in to enclosed fantasies and luxurious dreaming. sometimes i feel like i have to get out of the house all the time, and dreaming is a way to do so without being circumscribed by curfews.

men's health says that the average age where most sons hate their fathers most is seventeen. i guess i'm a slightly later bloomer since im eighteen now. i know that maybe lots of other people are facing far worse things than i am now, but still this is how i feel, so here i am languishing in self pity and lost hopes, and just looking to living each day as it passes, tomorrow.

the man is supposed to be the head of the household in a patriachal society such as ours, but more often than not it is the mother who holds the entire family together, which is why i respect my mother's female stocism more than my father's irrational anger and langurous complaints. the female is better at steeling herself to face challenges in a calm and calculated manner while dealing with her emotions, yet the male gives in to rash emotions and commit useless actions to reach their unachievable goal, which lies in the opposite direction along the road, failing which they frustrate themselves and everyone else with untold rage. maybe it's what they call andropause, but lately it's becoming more and more unbearable. i have to leave the house.

sometimes it frightens me, that i might one day become like him, and so distasteful in my own son's eye. i will not, i tell myself, but sometimes vestiges of him pop up in me, which scares me. he is mischevious and childish, which is how he won my mother over (she being childish herself), even now shocking my mother into a surprised rage, threatening the lives of a small boy standing near the stove and the woman who is stirring boiling porridge. sometimes i do things like that, not caring about the consequences, and that scares me. twenty years from now i don't want to be so childlike, i want to be someone that my son can look up to. maybe it's the scared power of the patriachy trying to immortalize a part of itself in the next, to the next generation, but i will not yield. it is confusing for a young male to not want to look up to his father, a yardstick both to measure his own masculinity as well as to grow towards, and yet having no other alternatives strong enough. when fathers disappear from their sons' lives, appearing only as a shadow of fear and shoutings, brooding silence, how is a son then able to learn, craft and grow himself so as not to inflict silent torture upon the grandsons? it is confusing. i look to my mother, and to the movies, and to the books, and to him which i looked up to five, ten years ago. i am taller than him now.

reeeeech