crack crack

It was late in the day, the plaza was empty. No classes. The canteen was closed, and we were sitting in front of it, just the two of us, watching the horizon. Sunset. You told me you wanted a girlfriend. I told you I wanted a boyfriend. A bit of a discussion that I don’t remember, and we decided to have a relationship. We sealed it with a high five. I went home, you went home.

The rest of the day and night I bit my fingernails, worrying about the relationship. I felt owned. I tried to evaluate that feeling. It’s nice to belong, but for the most part I didn’t like it. The next day, when I saw you again at the canteen with your friends, you introduced me to your friends as your girlfriend. But I said I wanted to break up. You agreed. And since then, you became my ex-boyfriend. And that became the shortest relationship I’ve ever had. It was quite nice.

I allowed you to introduce me as your ex-girlfriend to your friends since then, not without reluctance, but quietly I knew you felt proud of it so I gracefully shared that pride with you.

“Dunia, dunia,” Papa used to sing and sigh out with a smile. I grew up hearing this: the world, the world. Such is the world. He left it with a smile. I remember telling him in his comatose, it’s okay, Pa, Zeno’s just arrived in Jakarta. There might be a delay with his continuing flight, but he’ll be here anytime soon.

It was right then that his heartbeat rate started to descend, his whole being started to wither, the life-support system that has been holding him for three full days made no difference anymore. Zeno was coming, he could let go now. The impact of the accident was too much for him, even for his stoic super-strength. If he was younger, I once thought, but no, he wasn’t younger. I wouldn’t have wished for him to survive, knowing how much he would have been suffering if he did. Wishing such would have been too selfish of me. I remember what he told me a few months earlier: my legs, Tin, are not listening to me anymore. For someone so much in control like him, I felt sad.

No one could have predicted the accident. I’ve just arrived back in Melbourne after giving a talk of my life, one that he saluted me for from continents away, getting ready for a meeting when Edo’s SMS came in. The rest was a blur of constant hesitating movements, a fluke push from Andrew, who guided me and saw me off to the airport, a fluke encounter with Kristi in the airport, being accompanied all the way in the flight to Denpasar, her sitting next to me. Endless nights of waiting in the ICU, so many thoughts, so many emotions. Edo hugging me. Your hands are always so warm, Tin, like Papa’s, my mother told me at one point while we were walking in the hospital’s corridor hand in hand. All a blur.

So I told him, it’s okay Pa, you can go. It’s okay. I’m okay, I will be okay. Everything will be okay.

Once he was gone, the only thing I could feel was gratefulness. I whispered it endlessly. Thank you, Pa. Thank you, Pa. I can’t even remember whether I was crying. I felt so lucky to have known this guy, to have been his daughter when he was alive. He loved me, and I know I will never feel that love from anyone else.

You’re strange, Orlow told me later. Your father’s just passed away, and you feel grateful. But that was honestly what I felt. I couldn’t have a different father, I couldn’t have a different life, I couldn’t have a different parting with him. I wouldn’t, either. I was grateful for all that he has done for me – in my presence and in my absence. A few minutes later, in my absence, in my mother’s presence looking at him lovingly, Papa’s mouth formed a smile.

Dear system 1,

I would hereby like to let you know that I am aware of you.

Please stop trying to convince me of things inconceivable, because being mindful of you I can distinguish you from the life I live. Furthermore, there is no point trying to pretend to be intuition, waves of thoughts transferred through air from faraway existence – or worse still, premonition, my goodness – because I have honestly got you by your tail. In no time, I will slap you down onto the floor, smear you with superglue and affix you onto my mind’s eye. Because that is simply where you belong: in control. Not in my ear.

Looking forward to seeing you behave yourself. May you sleep well tonight.

System 2

Something hit and I had to take a distance from myself today. I saw so many jumbled emotions there, like if a firework had strings attached to each of its tiny explosions, each of its other ends tied to its source. It’s not that dramatic, but for the purpose of this entry it should be. And for the first few hours it was, until I pulled each tangled string gently and said to each of them, it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. And so on. Softly like a fluffy lapin jeune, then I could feed myself again, a variant of cold soba with miso something. Lactobacillus Acidophilus.

The differences between anger, disappointment and sadness are not that subtle, I found. There are definite lines between them, and those lines are not thin. The lines themselves, though, come in gradation of colours, like the rainbow. A liminal rainbow, so to say. I went through all my saved, colour-coded history searching for each moment of anger, each one of disappointment and each of sadness. The archive was quite dusty, but it was intact. I didn’t cry. No, I did, actually. Eventually.

One of the reasons I write is to remember. Whether or not my memory ends up subjective is a completely different problem. When I said the archive was intact, it might be objectivity: my memory is in fact inaccessible to anyone including me. What remains are just stories. Stories I believe, and I regard as what truly happened. All of us shed skins, it happens so naturally, and it’s painless.

So which ones were anger, which ones disappointment, which sadness? When I tried to classify them like Darwin did on his butterfly farms, I found myself smiling. The wind has apparently blown all the dust out of Oz and I’m finally writing again. I could see anger, I could see disappointment, I could see sadness. With you, what I knew, what I believed, what remains is solely sadness.

It’s a deeper kind of sadness, the one that’s a bit cream-ish in colour, like the very core of an atom, dissipated. I wish I could read this to you, eye to eye, with nothing in between, not even writings. Not even rainbows not even butterflies not even Darwin no matter how beautiful. But that is only the shape of years to come, when unpredictability meets with stochastic chance, the loveliest twin I’ve never known I had. So I can only thank you, for whatever grief it takes, four weeks of sorrow, forty days of silence – it is wise of us to take our time – each a breath of fresh air.

I don’t know
how I can be
not a work in progress.
Unflinching rock
breaking waves
and shouts indifference.
For I am water
and as such
will always flow.

Life is a grand, complex accident happening in extreme extreme slow motion. We manoeuvre as best we can in the meanwhile, but death is eventual.

Time, as Cummings has written, is what keeps everything from happening all at once. My time, however, keeps everything happening all at once. All the time, I try incessantly to keep everything from happening all at once, but I’m not time; and my time keeps me from doing it – not even once.

So. Time, as Cummings has written, a few times already, is what keeps everything from happening all at once. Time and again everything keeps happening all at once though, so I don’t know. I suppose only time will tell. And only time can tell. Not Cummings.

My next birthday is so significant. It is, as Dale’s physician has said, the end of the body that I was born with, and the beginning of the body that I’ve earned. That is why it is so significant. So significant I’d love to celebrate it in my birthday suit.