The Secret

For reasons that were forgotten as a natural outcome of a self-created obliterating mechanism, he decided to cease to exist at what now has become an indeterminable point in time. For executing his decision, he created a fog which blurred his senses and enabled him to avoid the fearful feelings that emerged when he saw somebody focusing attention on him or when his attention got focused to certain things. He also created a dark ravine, which had the mysterious quality of stealthily draining all the disturbing voices, images and sensations that happened to pass through to the tortured centre of mind in spite of the blurring and haloing quality of the fog. Now having done that, he engineered a new plan for his new mode of non-existent existence. This plan was the basic frame work which he had decided not to forget as all the other things were needed to be forgotten for becoming non-existent.

According to the plan, he was now to act in a way that nobody could know that he was no more existing. He had resolved to be forgotten by the people and for keeping people oblivious of his existence he had to go through the motions the way he had earlier been living. This was a difficult task as the continuation of the previous pattern of existence in absence of life necessitated a functional level of memory and presence of mind which he had resolved to forgo. However the need for hiding the secret of non-existence was such that he succeeded, without any perceptible delay, in maintaining his daily, weekly, monthly and yearly schedules. He also succeeded in remembering and utilizing the patterns of behaviors that he was supposed to display in cases of both causal happenings and unforeseen incidents.

Now the motivating force of his non-existent living was the secret that resided in his heart; the secret that was to be kept hidden for keeping on no-more-existing. Now it was the secret that woke him up in the morning and gave him power to go for his menial job. It was its force that enabled him to do the usual talking with his supervisor, to exchange insipid smiles with his colleagues, to go to the grocery market for his sisters-in-law and to administer drugs to his ailing father. The secret also made him go with his family and colleagues to picnics, parties, and weddings and energized him to condole with the friends he happened to find having any kind of looses. Sometimes however he got the feeling as if he was not doing things in the proper living-like manner and he started discerning a sense of suspicion and distrust in the eyes of some of his old friends and acquaintances. In such situations a horrible current of fear started running through his body and he found his non-existence to be in extreme danger of being revealed.

In such situations, his fog and ravine came to his help and he succeeded in soothing down himself in the right time to look normal, usual and common place. The fear however started to emerge with an ever greater frequency and intensity until a day came when he was unable to rise up from his bed because of its unnerving power. He made another great effort to shake off his fear and attempted to rise. He remained a failure. This was the time when he made a serious attempt to come out of the fear by trying to find out its cause. He however found blankness in his head and a deep and great hollowness. In this immense pain and vacuum he discovered with another wave of great horror that there had left nothing in him except an unending fear and that the remembrance of his great secret had been forgotten and lost by him.