crack crack

“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.

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.

After injecting anesthetic on my arm, they started operating on it. I could feel something, but it felt like there was a thick barrier between my arm and their operating devices. This is what it feels like: like reading something written on a sheet of paper lying under hundreds of sheets of transparencies. I can see what’s written on that sheet of paper, but there’s a solid distance – the paper visible but untouchable to me.

Anger is something you tame down over time. The memory is there, but it doesn’t incite as much emotional response as when it was fresh. When my heart skips a beat, I can tell you exactly which beat is the one missing: it’s no other than the beat that belongs to him. Because genetics, my friends, is not merely physical.

I woke up from a dream where the logic was, every time I would click on a YouTube link, my left neck would twitch. There was something fair and deserving about it, and so I just played along with it until the certain moment where my waking awareness caught on. I woke up and I remembered I thought about Papa before I went to sleep, and I remembered that when I was in high school, I felt that my grandpa’s hand was on my shoulder the whole week following my dream of him.

Stories are formed in our heads both in waking and in sleeping. I would love to choose my waking logic as the logic that makes sense, but what if one day I found the light switch in my waking life, and woke up in a sleeping life feeling grateful that I was saved from the waking nonsense? This is not a scary thought. Perhaps this is what dying would feel like. Afterlife is just another place for the mind, if it does exist.

I woke up to Facebook. Charles Esche’s status, 4 hours ago, has attracted 23 likes, and Anita Toutikian has consistently commented on it, discussing with Charles. I decided to switch my light on – I won’t be trying to sleep again, because that will only reiterate that I can’t sleep. I decided to start writing and to not believe that it is my premenstrual syndrome that has kept me from being creative. Certainly I could have just tried to sleep, while wondering why I couldn’t sleep and blaming my hormones for it. That is just another option.

My dream of my grandpa went like this: we were on a beach, sitting around a table with beach umbrella. He wasn’t looking directly at me, he wasn’t talking to me. But somehow I knew he knew that I was his granddaughter. When I woke up, I chose to believe what the dream meant, until at one point I chose to believe another meaning. It was an easy choice to make, as though I knew both all along. I feel I can believe both now, as much as I feel I can believe neither. The warm feeling that I felt on my shoulder the whole week after that dream was interesting, just like how my left neck twitched: perhaps it was Papa trying to wake me up?

I woke up to my waking sense. The twitch somehow felt like what it felt when the Chinese doctor that was really an electro-acupuncturist applied some pulsating electrical current to my bursitis-ridden knee a few weeks ago. Now that I have integrated my waking memory to make sense of the world, I suspect that that is what the twitch was: my body pulsating its own electrical current. To heal itself perhaps, to think of it positively.

I woke up to the memory of attempting to freeze our 6 kilograms of strawberries. I went to the freezer and checked on them. They’re well on their way to gelidity, frigidity, frozenness, whichever word can or cannot express it truly. I remembered that before I went to sleep I thought of Mama and my attempt to prepare myself to be an adult orphan. Sometimes Papa lives through her for me, like when she said that we did have a vacuuming device for freezing food: Papa bought it just in case (like he did buy many other things because it looked technologically cool to do at the convenience of your own home). What will happen when Mama dies? Somehow, my attempt to feel this made a part of myself believe that there is a logic to having kids. Something lives on. Stories live on.

Although all stories are really what we choose them to be.

I woke up to Skype. For a moment there was a remaining for Daniel’s online status, and I felt some kind of joy. A few seconds later, the software finally came to its waking sense and said that Daniel just went offline. My left neck has stopped twitching.

Turbulence. Nothing new. The roughest one I’ve had so far, though. The woman sitting next to me held on tightly to her seat. She closed her eyes tightly, and mumbled something. A prayer, maybe, obviously. Or perhaps promises? Her heart beat faster, by the look of it. I thought of Kiki, her recently-developed, self-grown fear of flight and what I would tell her when we landed. Someone chuckled. There was no announcement from the pilot. A guy at the back row next to mine looked around excitedly. I could understand very well what he felt — to me it felt a bit like a fun ride on a roller coaster. I thought of how small we must have looked already from Schiphol down below. How meaningless.

Cotton-like clouds. How could they generate such violent bumps? I wondered whether that would be how my life ended — that the very plane would go down and crash. Losing its wings on the way down, perhaps. C-r-a-c-k. Then the other, c-r-a-c-k. Somehow, I was somewhat exhilarated. Kiki told me that in the process of a plane crash, an aeroplane could break in two. A usual spot would be around the wings, which, oh, right where I was sitting. How thrilling. Then it came: almost an audible thump. For a second I felt my bum flying in the air and sensed the seatbelt pulling me back down. Whoa, I exclaimed. Whoa? It didn’t seem too appropriate of a response.

The thump, however, seemed to be a thump out of the troubled zone. I looked out the window again and could only saw blue sky. The deceiving clouds were gone. Everything was suddenly calmer, like a fish out of the stormy sea taking a breath of fresh air. People mumbled their relief and a few of them giggled. The woman sitting next to me stroked her belly with the remaining last bits of her anxiety, looking lovingly at it, almost cooing. That was when I first realised she might have been pregnant.

I thought of Ola Pehrson. I met Ola during the Istanbul Biennial. We hung out with Johanna Billing and a few others, a brief introduction, a brief chat, a brief lunch and some cups of apple tea, on a brief day. He was one of the greatest person to be around, however, and I felt a nice enthusiasm growing in me to visit him in Sweden soon. I had no idea that that was never going to happen: a few short weeks after leaving Istanbul, he and his family had a car accident. A brief life. All of them, except for their youngest child, died in the accident.

I thought of my father and how he smiled in his death. What is it like on that other side? If there is an other side. I thought of that woman’s unborn baby. I thought of Dan and I thought of death. I thought of not being able to say goodbye before my death — or rather, whether it is necessary to say goodbye. After all, it’s death, and we will all have it when the time comes — it’s the only certain thing in life. If life is about experiencing after all, what difference does death make?

Living, however, is about relating as well, and that’s where death makes a difference. My plane landed smoothly in Gatwick. The next day, a stream of emails from my S-Express friends shocked me: Alexis and his girlfriend Nika were shot dead in their house in Quezon City three hours before my rough flight back to London. Until the moment I read those emails, catching up with Alexis was still a possibility lingering in the back of my mind. I didn’t even know he got together with Nika. My grieving of my father’s sudden death seemed to have clouded my knowledge of his grieving of his. That’s how long we haven’t caught up. That many things we could have updated each other with. But the news of his death wiped off the potential of ever relating again with him.

Right at this moment I could die. What would it be like for me? Immediate limbo? Or would there be a moment, or a day, or a few weeks of adjusting to the fact that time, in my body, doesn’t tick anymore? I know how it feels on our living side — to be stripped off the privilege of relating, and of experiencing life in relations with our beloved dead. That feeling of loss. This very moment, should I die, would I feel the same loss?

All events in life are actually accidents. Some events just simply happen much faster than the others. We tend to only think that an event is an accident when it happens so quickly that we cannot react properly to save ourselves from harm caused by the event. Sometimes they result in what we regard as a total failure to save ourselves: death. If only everything is neutral and death is not a bad thing, we will never recognise accidents as the special events of our lives.

I wonder about the moment when a mosquito turns from a wriggle to a flying mosquito, right at the moment when it breaks through the water’s surface tension with its almost fully developed wings to get ready to start to fly. Is the wriggle’s attitude towards that transformation in any way similar to our attitude towards death?

(Would it, like my father, smile, in the knowledge that it will soon be able to fly?)

Maybe I should write about butterflies instead. Not because the butterfly is more proper for this thought; just because it might be easier for us, mere mortals, to imagine being released out of a cocoon, being that much dependant on our body to perceive the world.

Around a week ago, my left index finger suddenly started to retrace a subtle scar on the flesh side of my left thumb.

I remember very clearly what happened. It was a hectic day and I was finishing up work just before having to run to catch a flight. I slit my thumb while cutting address labels. Bloody hell. Literally. I almost fainted – the wound was that deep.

It was 2004 and what surprised me is a re-realisation of the fact that scars, even when they heal, will always be part of your body, forever. Four years ago when it started to heal, my index finger started tracing this scar. Old habits die hard, and it can suddenly resurface. This one old habit resurfaced a few weeks ago when my index finger mindlessly decided to retrace the scar – a one-centimetre long very subtle yet very determined scar.

What surprised me even more is that even when I don’t have the story readily registered in the front rack of my mindmap, and that it had to be triggered by a reappearance, or rather a re-realisation, or a physical retracing of a scar, the memory is almost intact. Quite distant, but still, intact.

It’s still there. It’s telling me it will always be there until my body completely decays. If that’s only how long forever is.