Before it all began, the universe told me that the greatest thing I will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return… Love takes on different roles and meanings in life and I’m grateful to the universe for blessing me with the abundance that it has…
Summer Project: #HIStory
To walk a thousand miles. To get lost. In meaning to find the meaning. Of my journey. Of purpose. Of hope and love. To intellectually lose it all to value everything for what it is and always has been. I shall return when I have passed my test. Just so that I can be myself again… Till we meet again.
Now that I’ve got three websites for different concerns I’m involved with, I’ve felt the strong need to learn WordPress content managment for personal websites and am trying things out on my personal art website: http://www.uecho.com … The website shall hopefully launch on the first of June 2015. 🙂
It was seventeen years ago when it all started. Back in Two Thousand and Four. Allow me, if you will, to gently grasp your mind and together we can jump down this rabbit hole of flashbacks and flash-forwards along a non-linear time lapse of highs and lows, scars and blows, sorrows and smiles and me sometimes being quite juvenile. iPLAY.
I’ve never had any guidance. I’m not a reader. I collect books completely judging them by their cover just so they look good on my bookshelf and I can every now and then absorb their aura to believe that I have grasped what they, in that moment, had to offer me as knowledge and further insight. I breath in light, exhale the darkness for a count to seven, close my eyes, visualize and try to manifest. iCHANNEL.
And thus it unfolds. A life untold. Too broken to hold. An eleven minute crash course in crashing of course. Year after year till no longer you fear the leather straps and the overlaps of allopathic overdose and the annual repetitive discourse. Shuffle and repeat. iLOOP.
A misdiagnosed schizophrenic wrongly assumed to be on hardcore drugs because mere hash and sipping vodka could not possibly lead to such severe levels of psychosis. Being a bipolar manic depressive is like surfing the best wave of your life one day and waking up to find yourself being smashed to smithereens on the shores of reality the next. It’s like bungee jumping with no strings attached. You live through it. You even draw power from it, if you can believe me when I say my weakness has always been my greatest strength. You smile through your tears because you know for sure, based on your self-learnt patterns that what goes down shall the very next day bounce back up in a new upward spiral that just might be higher than the day before. It’s the best rollercoaster ride you don’t want or need to get off. iTHRIVE.
So when there gets to be some boredom, in this life of nine to five. Being another worker bee in someone elses hive. I start to twitch. I call it a glitch. And turn another page in this story of mine. The bells that chimed from east to west were echoing your name. Just my loneliness perhaps I loved you just the same. My conscience and my confidant, my ego and my fears. The voice of God and the devil whispering, a blur over the years. It doesn’t take time at all for the message to violently change. I need to be bilingual I suppose, there’s no one else to blame. iHEAR.
When you can feel, in the stillness of it all, the earth spinning beneath your feet. To stand at the edge of your roof some twenty stories high, counting stars and ignoring life passing by. Being a Virgo experiencing vertigo affected by mercury retrogrades and blood moons. To lie still in the dark blue ocean beneath a star glittered sky. To look in the mirror sometimes and wonder ‘Who’s this guy?’ To give a new name every day to the same old face. To dream of one day being on Oprah with Brad to deliver mankind from everything based on systems the world never had. To feel the energy all the time of everything and everyone. To feel the glow and just not know how, why and what it is that I’ve become. iWONDER.
Playing a three person chess with the devil and God and simultaneously checkmating Me, Myself and I. To find a cave painted anti-Christ in the lines of my hand and cursing the fate of my find. Finding the Holy Grail appear before you and breakdown by touching it. Staying all night and day in bed, trying to play Jesus, like Bono says, to the lepers in your head. It’s seeing snakes crawling out of your head, inside your closet and all over your bed. To have Medusa, seduce ya. iFLIP.
To walk a thousand steps in the middle of the night. In search of experiences new, through places I knew. To leave home behind and see what I might find. To leave all love behind and find the meaning in my mind of the lights and the arrows, to find hope in all my sorrow. It’s noticing moments turn into butterflies that flap wings across the midnight skies. It’s being followed by mysterious strangers at 2 a.m. and believing that they are your ride to the future. Knocking on a friends door and seeking asylum for the night, sleeping on the floor and proceeding on the hundred-foot journey; the farthest I’ll ever go. iKNOW.
To have sleep inducing injections being punctured in your arm, waking not knowing why to find yourself in a ward. To be kept asleep for eighteen months overdosing on anti-psychotic pills morning, noon and night. To be kept numb like a vegetable whilst the rest of life moves on, from morning to dusk, and night to dawn. To be experimented upon like a lab rat; doses of this and that. Nothing really works in being a cure for the itch. It’s a permanent condition, they say, and life turned out to be a bitch. iABHOR.
Everyones in on it, its all really a game. A few new rules each time whilst the maze remains the same. There’s nobody to trust as they help your family thrust. Shove you in the ward each time, whenever spiritually you begin to grow. Pump him up with meds again, this one’s getting out of hand. He calls himself the King again, making castles in the sand. They come with chocolates and flowers, every day in the visiting hours showing their support, mending what they themselves have hurt. iFEEL.
Self-mutilation and beautiful scars, to sculpt the story in my arms. A scar a day will keep the numbness away; I know that I’m still alive. A cigarette burn and seven on my forearms to remind myself of the day. When logic failed and love really hurt, it was just a mortal lie. Earthquakes that you believe your own hand caused and leave you a mad man raptured, like a movie stuck on pause. To have the day of judgement come knocking on your door, when the knocks get louder each day it becomes harder to ignore. To believe it is the end of time and only this singular truth shall survive. I try to leave in peace. I say goodbye and want to be left alone. Being happy on a sidewalk the world really my throne. I am the Holy Grail of course and I shall get what’s destined to be mine. Take this pain and blood away from me, I know somehow I will shine. But they love me so and can’t let me go and won’t let me be myself either. They just want me to be, their version of me. iBLEED.
It’s losing sleep one day at a time. Little by little, their smiles cross the line. Of worrying glances and closed doors whispers there’s nothing I can do. Except hysterically laugh as you watch him beat me to a pulp. ‘Trust me’ you say, this is the only way. Your life-long fate seems to be sealed. An open window they paved when you were locked away, where you once believed in all that’s surreal. Even sticks and stones don’t break my bones. Trust me they have tried. There’s a fire inside me that this smile really cannot hide. Don’t expect me to turn the other cheek and act out all meek. I’m just waiting for you to turn a bit old. After all, revenge is a dish that’s best served ice cold. iHURT.
To hurt your family, one by one, in a battle that really, nobody’s won. So you owe your guilt to just smile and nod. Be a part of them smiling, a success story so proud. Despite the depression that’s behind your mask or the clouds of anger that all over shroud. iPRETEND.
It’s falling in love with moments past, and bonding friendships that forever last. To push and shove at every turn, and hope to watch it one day burn. To stand by me and tell myself if they love you as they say they won’t go away. To have your best friend die being just a lie, a game or method act. To invoke Jesus at Times Square through your art, and believe it to be a fact. It’s seeing displaced words and random pictures scattered over the globe. To connect these dots and lines together and surrender your frontal lobe. To sing along with news broadcasts and find meaning in every song, to bring down the throne in the Kingdom of Heaven and believe the day has come. To have the knowledge and still pretend to be the Talking Tree, to let them think and still believe that a crazy person is all I’ll ever be. iTRY.
Failing repeatedly becoming the mate you hate. To be an abusive partner who repeatedly removes, all threads of trust with his conniving moves. To send her to hell and bring her back. Just to do it again without cutting her slack. To love her till the end of time and be psychotically possessive to make sure she’s just mine. Just an ordinary man with no concrete plan whom she’ll love in ways that only she can. iGRIEVE.
When kids they love you like only they can. When you’re a real life hero holding their hand. They’re your kryptonite and you try as you might, to never fail. To tuck them in and promise them you won’t go mad again. iSURRENDER.
Just the jist, if you can grasp, of my last few eons of madness. Heightened levels of craziness and a bit of institutionalized sadness. I’d run away and leave it all if only my tears won’t stream; to be a random nobody in no one else’s dream. iGIVEUP.
And here I am again… all alone in the midst of Your Omniverse… waiting for You to love me the way only You can… the way only You have all along…
Here I stand, before you my beloved, to be awestruck, once again by the randomness of the script and for some scenes to be re-written…
For a paradigm shift in the story, to go from linear to non-linear, and to start once again, at the end of the first moment that has not passed since the infinium of time and space itself…
I look forward to be recycled through the infinite corridors of Your mind and come back for as long as You need me to if it helps You find out more about Yourself…
I wait for You my love, I wait for Us, I wait for Myself.
If You’re sitting comfortably in front of the silver screen, alone in the theatre, maybe, just maybe, You and I can actually start watching this film called ‘Life’ together…
there comes a time, usually after a storm like a hurricane, when you look around you and realize that there exists damage around you… objects lost, people hurt, emotionally stirred, mentally scarred… and its not a nice feeling to realize that you are the storm… the whirlwind of bipolar maniac emotions that not just once but took a toll on peoples lives twice in two months gone by. “its like you get possessed” commented one… “you’re pure evil energy…” shrouded another… “you’re the anti-thesis of a best friend…” yet another… some people laughed it off, some cried, most remained silent; listening intently as I attempted to gather the fragments of my lost mind and continuously try to make sense of the madness better known to the world as Mohammad Uzair Akram and tHIS condition…
In yet another attempt to reconcile forgotten fragments and salvage torn letters with scotch tape; I gave an old wizard a hug; apologized to a mentor and friend; called my brother and told him I actually loved him and looked forward to his return and lastly met up with a close friend for coffee who I had publicly annihilated from my reality scape for the past few months…
Ladies and gentlemen; my name is Mohammad Uzair Akram. And I AM invisibly ill. I have a condition known as being bipolar with six monthly cyclical episodes of Mania… Its not easy being Me; but its tougher to be my family and friends… I salute each and every last one of you for putting up with the madness and sadness and being in a place where the men have not stopped praying; the women haven’t stopped believing and children still wait for tomorrow…
… in l[1/0]vIng memory of Mohammad Uzair Akram …
August 29, 1979 [22:45 GMT +5] ~ April 08, 2013 [02:59:59:33 GMT +5]
UECHO 