The boy who dyed in blonde!

It’s 12:49AM and I think I forgot to be human.

Hehe it’s me☺️/ Image from the author’s gallery

Prateek Kuhad is playing. “Cold/Mess.” It’s 12:49AM, which is either meaningless or exactly the kind of detail this needs to begin with, I genuinely cannot tell anymore, which is itself a symptom of something.

I found Prateek in 2019. That same year I found the desire to write. I don't know which arrived first. Some things come in pairs like that, not cause and effect, just coincidence that sits long enough to start feeling like design.

I was 16. I had bleached my hair because Zayn Malik bleached his hair, which I understood, at the time, to be sufficient justification for a chemical decision. I also had a plan. Not the vague aspirational kind teenagers keep in journals and abandon by 20.

A real one, with sequence and contingency and the particular emotional flatness of someone who has decided that wanting things clearly is safer than wanting them openly.

The plan is working. This is the part I don't know what to do with.

Somewhere in the years of making myself productive, the younger version of me reached a quiet conclusion: emotions are a liability. They blur things. They make you call people at hours when people don't want to be called.

They introduce variance into systems that run cleaner without it. So he subtracted them, methodically, the way you simplify an equation not by solving it but by eliminating the terms that complicate it.

He was 16 and he thought this was discipline. He was not wrong in the way that matters most, which is the way that gets results. He was wrong in the other way, the one you don't notice until you're almost 23 and a song is doing something unbearable in the background and your chest is full of pressure with no clinical explanation and no obvious exit.

I work the way I breathe now. Automatic. Continuous. Not from love, not from ambition, from something closer to the fear of what stops when I stop. That distinction used to seem minor. It no longer does.

The boy who bleached his hair and colour-coded his future is almost 23 and he is looking at everything he constructed and experiencing something that isn't pride and isn't disappointment.

It's closer to the feeling of arriving somewhere you planned for so long you forgot to want it, finding it exactly as described, standing inside it, waiting for the feeling that was supposed to arrive next.

It doesn't. You check again. Still nothing. You start to wonder if you left it somewhere back in the planning.

Here is the question I keep not asking directly: at what point does self-construction become self-replacement?

Because there's a version of growing up that is genuinely growth, accumulation, expansion, the self getting larger. And there's a version that is more like renovation where the contractor got too ambitious, walls removed that were apparently load-bearing, the structure still standing, functional, even admired, but missing something that doesn't show up on any inspection until you're alone at 12:49AM and a song finds the exact location of the absence and just stays there.

I am not claiming anything dramatic. I want to be precise about that. This is not that register. This is something quieter and more embarrassing: a person who optimised so thoroughly that the optimisation became the person, and is only now, too late to be theatrical about it, noticing the substitution.

Am I weak? Possibly. Afraid? Structurally, yes.

But what I'm actually sitting with tonight is something more specific than fear. I planned for the man and forgot that the boy had to survive the transition, not just functionally, but as a continuous self, with something carried forward that wasn't only ambition and the bleach damage growing out.

That boy in 2019 found Prateek Kuhad and found writing in the same year, and I think what he found, without knowing it, was a technology for feeling things at a manageable distance. Through someone else's chord progressions. Through sentences. Through the page, which holds things the chest cannot.

He was smarter than I gave him credit for. He knew he was going to need the drainage system before he'd admit he needed the flood.

The song ends. Another begins.

I don't have a conclusion. The essays I trust most don't either, they arrive at a place where the question is finally visible in full and leave it there, without resolving it into something more comfortable than it is.

So: it's almost 1AM. Something in my chest has been trying to say something for longer than I've been listening. I wrote it down instead of solving it, which is, I think, the closest I get to being human on purpose.

The bleached-hair boy would find that insufficient. He'd also, I think, understand.

🥂🥵/ Image from the author’s gallery