to live.

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?