I am Iris!

"Iris, where have you been lately?" asked a friend of mine who is at the other end of the phone. I don't have words. What I want is this conversation to be over asap. Although I ain't no soul that goes by social protocols or something but this time i somehow felt thats its good to be good. So i held on. I replied "Bas aise hi yaar. You say!" making futile attempts to throw the ball in his court. "I have told you everything about me in past one hour. What i am more interested in is to know what you have been upto lately?". Now, I can't take it any more."Hey, mum is calling for dinner. Gotta go." It's 7:30 in the evening and I realized that's a lame excuse but I just blurted it out without thinking. "So early!!!" "Well, yeah! Winters setting in, so dinner early these days. I'll catch ya later. Take care." And I hung up the phone. Held onto the dial for sometime and then let it go. After all it's just a non-living thing.

I had my dinner by 9 and got into my room by 10:30. I like it here. Just me. Noone else. My bed, which is my "spot" as Sheldon says it in the big bang theory. My laptop which has become the only constant in my life these days, without which I cannot imagine my life now, call me an addict if you want. My fav doll and the only doll I ever liked in my life, I call it Suz. And yeah my diary! My outlet, my punching bag, my best friend. Its a one sided friendship. It knows everything about me that noone knows and noone ever will. Thats why I put a lock on it.

I am not the kind of a person which shows up in the above few lines. I am chirpy, I am loud, I am fun. People love hanging out with Iris. I have a gazillion friends and some of them really close. But there is part of me which is mine just mine. Nobody else has any right over it, so far. I make friends with people, get really close. They love me, I love them. It's good till here. Then it starts getting creepy. They start getting too close, making me a part of their life, their being, their thoughts. They want them to be heard always, taken care of with their problems. Like I am a punching bag or something. It all goes wrong here, messy. At times I wanna be heard too, expect a solution to my lil problems. So I become "selfish". And then I start eluding them. And then they start taking notice of me but I have moved on.

"Iris is ruthless, she's selfish, she's bitchy and yeah! of course she's narcissistic. Don't know what she thinks of herself to be." I hear it all the time. All fault is mine. I get in touch with people, make them feel good and heard, at times so much so that I forget myself and get totally invloved in their problems, lives, situations, all this being done with honest intentions of helping them. But I guess I don't know where to draw the line. I am a person of few words. I expect people not to understand what I say but to understand what I don't. And they don't understand it. May be that's like expecting too much. And it all starts there. Expectations! They also start expecting to me be always there for them, to listen to them. When I start thinking about myself and not give them that amount of time then I become this "bitch" who is selfish, demeaning and mean!

And yes, I love myself. What's the deal in that. It's good to love yourself, who you are. Why being ashamed of what you are and what you did? It's a part of you. If you say you are not in love with yourself then probably you are cheating yourself into this illusion. You love yourself more than anyone else!

There is no problem in being alone out here as long as I know that at least I am honest to myself. But yes, it would be great to share a piece of me effortlessly, that so far is completely in my possession. Someone with whom I can talk over the phone endlessly without having track of time, with whom I don't have to think about what I am saying. Someone who understands not what I say but what I don't say. A friend!

Till then, Iris is this "self-obsessed" gal who controls the amount of the light(read people) that enters her life.