Tasted like old newspapers soaked overnight. Didn’t matter what stories they once carried. The coffee I had this morning was bitter.
Back in my twenties, I abused the term “mid-life crisis” the same way young people nowadays casually throw around words like anxiety, narcissistic personality disorder, and depression. Every heartbreak became trauma. Every sleepless night became existentialism (to be fair, that part was true during my insomniac years, the very reason this blog came into existence).
We were young and dramatic. Even sadness deserved a premium label, decorated with sophisticated words like “morose”, “melancholy”, “languid”, “wistful”, and “somber”, borrowed from some obscure underrated English literature because we wanted to feel profound.
Now I’m thirty-nine this year. Forty next year. Forty-one already waiting quietly nearby like an uninvited love story with an inevitable collapse written into its bones.
Strange thing is, I keep yearning for the softness of a woman’s skin while constantly forgetting that souls are supposed to touch too. Perhaps that has always been my flaw. Wanting warmth without knowing whether the fire was ever truly mine to begin with.
I am cold. I know. I overexplain. The opposite of fire is ice. Ice is cold. Dry ice is colder. Liquid nitrogen is cryogenic cold. This conversation could have ended three sentences ago. That is about it. I overexplain. Boring. Surprises fuel the fire burning in the pits of their bellies. But, I am predictable.
Maybe predictability is simply what remains after enough disappointments. The eagerness to try something new, to know new people belongs to the past now. Because I know disappointment is the admission fee for every unfamiliar door we dare to open.
And so the road I take every day remains the same. It has been fifteen years since I signed the tenureship letter. Pushing work became my preferred coping mechanism.
I pushed harder to avoid thinking about my failed relationship with an intern, ignoring the fact that it was the very same laboratory where we first met. Her apparition still lingers around the same bench where, one overcast evening, I read a text message from her sister warning me to stay the fuck away from her because her family was experiencing tremors from my existence, and therefore she needed to save them from some impending emotional explosion or whatever catastrophe they imagined I represented.
I pushed harder after seeing her walk down the aisle in pale purple traditional attire. The recorded kompang beats echoed through the hall speakers while the bride and groom walked in from the entrance and paused politely before two or three children performing a poorly synchronised silat dance routine. But that was okay because they were not important.
The groom should not have worn that G-Shock watch during the ceremony. It looked absurdly oversized beneath the sleeve of his baju melayu. Puffy eyes, probably sleep-deprived. Fat cheeks because bro clearly enjoyed his food a little too much. Bloated belly pressing against the sampin. Patches of stubble on his beard; he should have shaved. He looked ugly.
Meanwhile she, beneath that intricately embroidered lavender hijab, looked devastatingly beautiful. Her voice was never particularly feminine, as I always remembered. There had always been a slightly masculine roughness beneath it, a firmness that occasionally overpowered the softness in her heart. And God, that smile. That damned smile.
Her smile was the brightest there.
No.
The second brightest.
Her eldest sister’s smile burned brighter, relieved that her younger sister had finally married the man she sympathised with instead of the guy eight years older who had just watched his monthly savings evaporate into cryptocurrency fumbles.
I remember staring at the recorded video longer than I should have. The artificial flowers decorating a mirror with cursive writing spelling their names. The eldest sister holding the phone while the bride and groom walked down the aisle. That brief few-second clip of her making small talk with her mother-in-law at the dining table.
I kept wondering what they were talking about.
“Do you know I watch so many PETA videos that I’ve become vegetarian, but today is cheat day?”
Who knows.
I was never part of that conversation anyway.
Everybody looked happy.
That was probably the hardest part.
I was happy she was happy.
I pushed harder to forget all of it.
I pushed so hard that the world consumed me. I pushed people away. I pushed away opportunities to join marathons or hike hills where I could socialise and maybe find a new soulmate who might sprain her ankle while walking down the mossy trails and then accidentally grab me by the neck, leaving traces of sweet perfume, sweat, and the kind of heat lonely people mistake for destiny (or so my friend told me). I pushed away opportunities to leave all this mess behind and start life anew, but I never knew how.
Funny thing is, if the “mid-life crisis” I claimed to have in my twenties was mathematically legitimate, I should already be dead by now. “Mid-life” is supposed to be the halfway point, right?
Yet I still live. Still carrying invisible sacks filled with things I never fully spoke about.
God, meanwhile, remains silent in ways that terrify and comfort me at the same time. Because if He truly wanted me gone, I would have left long ago.
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