I gazed absent-mindedly through the window of the car. I was resting a few good minutes after painstakingly reading Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You throughout the darkness of the road with the illumination of my Nokia 5230 backlight, which I occasionally had to tap on whenever it’s dimming out. And to top that was the ever constantly shaking car speeding through bumpers and uneven rood surface; making way past the unfamiliar, empty streets of the Kuala Lumpur suburbs.
Oh well. It’s dark outside. The trees, hills, streetlights and some other cars moved along. This after-gloom of reading something emotional captivated my senses and emotions as well. It made me feel lonesome, in not a very good way.
And as were the many a night before of the same atmosphere and heartbreak effectively created by my reading, my mind flowed effortlessly to think of the current life I’m living. My pathetic, lifeless life. The words of the book floated from the pages, surrounding me with a mist of vivid motions and movements. Encapsulating me into a world with only me, my emotions and the drama. I began to reflect my life as an image of the book.
It has been exactly seven weeks since I enrolled my Master’s degree. Which so to speak, didn’t turned quite that well, yet.
Every single day I lived through just another day to get by. I was too lazy to live. No motivations, no exact objectives to achieve. I wake up every day with no apparent reason, just to live another day so that the day after, I would also live another day for the day afterwards and so that every day afterwards I can whine about all the days that have passed and tell how boring my life had been. And the cycle goes on. Perhaps, just perhaps, this cycle would stop the day I found myself again. Or worse, it would only stop the day I lost my life.
I was tipsy, dreamy, and angry. I was lonely and sad. I concluded that my life has been a big bad joke. Or maybe a very bad mistake. Or maybe a disappointment. Or maybe just a deception. Or maybe all of them. I felt like a ghost, with that sort of immediate insignificance. Shadowy, unseen. Soulless. A passerby of the mortal world. An outside witness. Or maybe like an animal, alive but lowly.
I go out with my friends. Chilling out, telling hilarious jokes. Teasing each other with mouthful curses. Yet I couldn’t seem to participate full heartedly in every occasion. Like my presence is just a matter of number. Between us, there are tiny pieces of closeness and comfort falling off one by one, each by every wrong word spoken, or rather, by every word not spoken, and by every thought contradictory to the others’.
We drifted apart, away from each other. From being a shelter of comfort zone, we are colliding each other not deliberately; sparking conflicts in between. We are strangers again. Being careful with every talk and walk; not to offend. Somehow, we don’t understand each other anymore. Or maybe they don’t understand me, or I don’t understand them. Because we’ve changed a lot, that what we have with us are only some faded memories, and the distance between the memories and the present is a long break of self discovery and the tearing away of one’s self boundaries.
I thought about all the good times. All the camps, feasts, vacations, fieldworks. The memories we are together in. The laughs, the jokes. I felt shockingly sad.
Everything didn’t seem like it was important anymore. The euphoria, the food, the courses I’m taking, the love yet to be found. The books I’m reading and I’ve read. The people that I know, and knew. The festivities, celebrations, anniversaries and convocations. My bed. My clothes. To put it in a nutshell, I feel drifted away from life itself.
With no money to live on, or a certain place to call home, life is just lived half alive. I learned to not cry because it won’t resolve anything. And more importantly, I’m not sad. I’m just bored.
I’ve just figured out that my living here has no foothold. No anchor. There is just no strong factor to keep going. Listlessly, I’ve been thinking that I should do something. Busying myself with anything, so that I would have some reason to live. But I am too lazy to move. Too comfortable to budge.
I accounted my selfless self for this sense of insignificance. I blamed my uncertainties in decision making for the lifeless life I’m living.
But my mind keeps telling me that I’m afraid to face life and its consequences, that I took the decision not to be alive at all. To the point that I denied everything good there is about life. I’m afraid of dealing with the pain, that I decided life is not important. I was securing myself against the misery and sorrow. The fear of losing. The fear of failure.
I have no things to attain, and no things that I can let go. I am jealous of other people, but did nothing to achieve glory. I was trapped within this phobia of letting something that I hold dear most go. I was too appreciative to things that are too small to have implication to my life.
I dreamt of many nightmares every night. Some people that I loved caught in accidents. I dreamt of flood, of blood, of death. I was scared and miserable. I was missing somebody but I don’t know whom. I was hoping to be saved by someone but I don’t know who will. I tried to tell somebody about all that I felt but nobody will understand.
I smiled coyly to people clashing my path. Or maybe sometimes it’s an actual smile. Or nodded vaguely with an inaudible monosyllable greeting. I hoped to be looked as invisible as possible, transparent from their bare eyes. I have nothing that I want from people. I have given up on human’s relationship. I was betrayed.
Somehow it feels like my time is up. I have no business living among them. I need escapism from these superficialities and fakeness; and just run from it all. And start anew at somewhere else. I am tired of thinking what to wear, how my hair looks, how my body smells, what do they think of me? I couldn’t just announce casually to the people “God, this is me. Stop imposing your values on me!” with a poker face.
Then again, I believe that it’s not them I’m dreading of. It’s me. Just me. Just I know that I could not carry on anymore. Some parts of me are already dead.
Life is just a series of forgivable mistakes, after all. And I have forgiven everybody but myself. I hated myself all along. I had never forgiven all my mistakes. I am guilty.
I closed the book for good. I have finished reading every page. We are still in the car; I began to see some other lights from other vehicles in front. My thoughts vanished in a split second. Without knowing what to expect, I closed my eyes. And I saw a face. An answer. Oh, please forgive me. Please forgive me. And I cried.
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