If only it were that easy.
I know that the key to happiness is to not think too much. I attended a friend’s wedding last weekend. She was my roommate and best friend during my first year at uni. I thought we were gonna last forever. We shared the same room, and ideals. We mourned, in advance, how things would never be this wonderful between us once we graduated. Turns out, we didn’t even have to wait till graduation because we lasted all of one year. She found a guy, and formed her whole world on and around him. I was relegated to the margins and I raged. How I raged. When I got attached, I reasoned out, there was still space for you. She replied, in no uncertain terms, that he was all she needed now. Towards the end of that year when the lease on our room was nearly up, I moved out one weekend when she wasn’t around. I cleared out my side of the room and left a note on her pillow. On that page of notebook paper, in jet black ink, I expressed love, regret, and hope that someday, our paths would cross once more. I never heard from her again, until her wedding.
I sat there and watched her marry the first guy she’s truly met. How easily she let go of people and ideals for love. How wise I am to be able to see far, far beyond that, and what a poor fool I am for being able to do so.
I have to agree that of the two of us, you’re the bigger oddball. As far as oddballs go, you’re the genuine article. I may be an oddball sometimes, but it’s mostly by accident. I make myself out to sound like a bigger disaster than I really am, tending to relate my accomplishments with incredulity, betraying a belief on some level that I don’t deserve them. If you’ve had to endure the death of a dream you’ve nourished for so long, I most certainly can endure smaller, more mundane deaths. You, kiddo, have always had the knack to place the grand scheme of things into perspective for me.
(Ueno Park, Tokyo)
So I would not forget my impression of the place and people while I was there, I sent myself a postcard back home. I would say more and try to fossilise my experience better, like a blossom pressed between the pages of a passport (which had to be hastily scraped off at immigration), but Japan got under my skin in a way that would render prose clumsy and reduce it to mere verbiage. Caught me quite off guard.
“When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Exactly a week ago, 3 months of 30 driving lessons ended. A last instructor, funny, chatty, and warm, and later, the tester himself, as old and glum-faced as all the rest of them, whom I succeeded in teasing a few gentle smiles out of in the end. The morning after, I woke up, remembered the day before, beamed with the force of a hundred morning suns, and hopped ecstatically on my bed. Stopped only cos I didn’t want to break it. Broke my cupboard once for crawling into it to cry. Cupboards you can temporarily do without. Beds you cannot. Was over the moon to have passed. Have been doing nothing but drive since. Slipped behind the wheel of my best friend’s car within an hour of receiving my license. Sped five and a half hours along winding coastal two-lane Malaysian roads with a three day old license, overtaking and being overtaken by some very fast mad hatters; my very experienced mother being such a sport, never once expressing hesitation, protest or fear, never once second guessing my as yet infant judgement. Have clocked many solitary hours since; just me, the car, and the road. No music. Just the sound of the engine, and the road. Have named the car after one of my many instructors, all of whom I shall never see again and shall miss and think of from time to time because I’m a closet sentimentalist and a passionate lover of people and all goodbyes sadden me; even the most trivial kinds.
scarlet dress, o natas lux, dunhill haze, downpour, a kiss.
What is there
to look forward to
but nostalgia?
The well has already forgotten.
Its stupefied mouth gapes wide,
as if in the middle of a sentence,
speechless with the memory of a drowned moon.
— from The Last Kampung, Alfian Sa’at
