Advait did not write to see his name in print or to settle scores. He wrote because the world had so much to offer and he needed to share it back with the world. For him, a blank page was a window to the myraid hues of the world. He captured the mundane, the way a stranger’s hand trembled while reaching for a bus handle, the forced laughters at the celebrity parties, or the heavy, unsaid weight that sits between two people who have run out of things to say. He was observing life and being a witness, but some people around him felt that he was becoming a mirror they never asked him to look into.
Initialliy they were whispers, eventually they transformed into ripples and soon turned into waves. It started when his cousin, who stopped visiting after Advait wrote a piece about the quiet resentment that simmers in a house where love has been replaced by habit. "Why are you telling everyone our business?" she had hissed over the phone. Advait sat there, holding the receiver in a daze. He had not even been thinking of her and neither he was aware of the ongoings in their home. He had simply watched a flickering streetlamp and thought about things that are burnt out but still forced to stay upright.
Advait's close companion accused him of stalking because Advait penned a story about the secret guilt of a man hiding a debt. "If you wanted to judge me, you could have done it to my face," the friend texted, before blocking him. Advait stared at his screen, his heart thumping against his ribs. He was not aware nor he had any inkling that his friend was in debt. He had just observed the way a man at the bank looked at his balance and felt a sudden, sharp pang of anxiety.
Countless such incidents hit Advait hard and he steadily created a isolated cocoon around him which became his comfort zone. He started staying indoors, afraid that if he looked too closely at a neighbor’s garden or a passerby’s tired eyes, he would accidentally "steal" a piece of their reality. He began to feel like a freak of nature, a peeping tom who did not even need to peek through windows to know what was happening behind them. The frustration began to boil over into a cold, biting irritation. He would pace his room, throwing his pen down in a fit of rage, questioning his own sanity.
"Have I developed some sort of curse?" he wondered. "Am I a psychic? Or am I just a predator who doesn't realize he's hunting?"
He tried to reason with the silence of his room. He looked at his stack of journals, feeling a sudden urge to burn them all. He asked himself if he was truly a monster, if his "sharp eye" was actually a weapon he was wielding unconsciously. But then, in the middle of the night, a chilling thought struck him, it was harder to swallow than the idea of having superpowers.
Maybe he was not special at all. Maybe he was not seeing their lives specifically. Maybe he was just touching a nerve that belonged to everyone. He realized that when people saw themselves in his words, it was not because he was a spy, but it was because they were finally seeing their own secrets written in plain English, and the exposure terrified them. They called it stalking because "truth" was too harsh to face.
Advait picked up his pen again, his fingers shaking slightly. He looked out the window at the city lights, thousands of lives flickering in the dark, each one convinced of its own unique tragedy. He realized he was at the crossroads. He could stop writing and find peace in the silence, or he could keep going and accept that he would always be the villain in someone else’s story just because he could notice the stitches in the fabric of their reality.
As he placed the tip of the pen on a fresh page. The ink seeped into the paper, a small blue dot growing larger, like an eye opening for the first time. He thought about the man he had seen earlier today, the one who was standing by the bridge, looking not at the water, but at his own hands. Advait’s chest tightened. He knew that feeling. He knew what that man was thinking, even if he did not know his name.
He began to write. He did not know if he was a healer or a bearer of bad news, but he knew he could not stop. The door to his room was locked, but the world was still pouring in through the crevices.
Advait intently looked at his fingers holding the very ink pen that people mistook for a weapon. He realized that no matter how much he retreated into the shadows, the world would always find its reflection in his notebook, turning his empathy into an intrusion and his observation into a crime. As the first sentence took shape, he wondered who would be the first person to call him a liar tomorrow.
He was trapped in a cage of his own making, where every honest line he scratched onto the page built a wall between him and the people he cared for, leaving him to wonder if he should go blind to find peace or keep seeing and stay lonely. He took a deep breath, his hand hovering over the fresh, white sheet, numbed by the terrifying realization that his greatest gift was his reason of isolation - a haunting, permanent state of THE WRITER'S DILEMMA.
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