What Remains After Fire

There are years in a man’s life when everything burns brightly enough to convince him -- only him -- that he is alive.

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 nearby -- not quietly, actually. It has been making noise for a while now. 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. I know this. I have always known this. But predictability is the last shelter left when you have run out of places to hide.

Maybe predictability is simply what calcifies 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 a woman who once worked in the same laboratory, never quite making peace with the fact that it was the very same place where we first met. There was a version of that bench that belonged to us -- coffee rings on the laminate, mornings that arrived before everyone else, a particular quality of silence between two people who had not yet learned to disappoint each other. 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. Sleep-deprived, or perhaps just the weight of knowing what comes after the ceremony. 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. The relief in it was almost architectural -- the kind that holds up a face from the inside. Her younger sister had finally, mercifully, married the man she sympathised with. Not the guy eight years older who had just watched his life savings evaporate into cryptocurrency fumbles.

The artificial flowers decorated a mirror with cursive writing spelling their names. One of those names had the privilege of returning to itself, even when the world tried to turn it around. The mirror offered everyone in front of it a second version of themselves, but nobody was interested. The bride and groom had entered, and the room had tilted towards them. Her eldest sister held the phone while they walked down the aisle. Then, 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.

“Sedap kan udang ni, mama?”

“This shrimp is dang good, right, Mama?”

“Pedas sangat ke ayam ni?”

“This chicken’s spicy, isn’t it?”

“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 want to be very clear about that.

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, pressing her bosom against my chest, leaving traces of sweet perfume, that warm, faintly musky scent of sweat rising from the hollow of a neck, the kind that bypasses the brain entirely and goes straight for something older and less reasonable, and the kind of longing that lonely people -- and I know this with some expertise -- mistake for destiny. 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 breathe.Still carrying invisible sacks filled with things I have no language for, or perhaps things I have too many words for, which amounts to the same silence.

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.

The Weight of a Foot

Memories, once vivid, have faded like the colours of kain batik left too long under the sun. I can barely summon Father’s face -- his scent of Benson & Hedges, the subtle shift of weight when he walked until one side of his slippers’ sole was pressed thinner than the other -- I cannot recall which foot.

Mother is getting older. My sister has a husband whose demeanour eerily copies 98.32% of my late Father. The workplace is getting toxic. Adulthood is like an uphill battle. I feel like I am losing my step and letting myself roll down the hill into wherever my unfortunate life avalanche brings me.

Aimless Wanderer

An aimless wanderer since young, swayed anywhere by the winds of fate. Contemplating his whereabouts like a stranded seafarer beaten by harsh sea. Gazing at a faraway land beyond the horizon where the mother gave birth to him. And the waves remind him that the beach will never look the same again.

He grows old. His mother gets older today.

Early Morning Drizzle

3:00 o’clock in the morning, a light drizzle showers the warm tarmac. It lasts a bit longer than a man’s urinating. A cool breeze momentarily lifts the window curtain where I sit facing the computer. I think about many things in life—reminiscing about younger days, imagining the uncertain future. A tense feeling lingers in my chest, pregnant with words left unsaid, like a cloud heavy with rain that never falls.

Good night.

Missing Him

November 2010 was cold when Father left us. Dinner was quiet. We couldn’t care less what was blaring from the television. We wandered through the faculty of memory, mentally playing Father’s demeanour like movie snippets, in random fragments of a timeline. I sometimes projected imaginary holograms of him standing, sitting, pacing the house, speaking near me with the sharp Benson & Hedges scent in his breath during my everyday activities. His apparition lingered around us for months after he departed this mortal world. November 2018 is perhaps warmer — literally and figuratively — compared to that same month in 2010.

Father’s younger brother died last night. He was laid to rest this morning, in the cold ground of Teluk Pasu, after the cousins siphoned milky tea water out of the dug grave. Perhaps the morning rain will never feel as right again for his widow and the children he left behind.

Suddenly, I miss Father.

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Original post was published on my Facebook wall at 14th November 2018. Father died this day eight years ago. How time flies.

Life of My Own

Father left us some money in his life insurance policy. I remember one morning when a man with a thick peppered moustache, another younger man probably in his early thirties without a moustache, and two quiet ladies much younger sat in our living room. Just tea, no cakes, and a cheque laid flat on the coffee table. I don’t remember what the two insurance men were talking about, but I remember feeling embarrassed when I stood up and pinched one corner of the cheque while the moustached man, who did most of the talking, held the other end. Mother stood beside me, smiling, before the second man without the moustache showered the living room with flashes of light from his camera. It wasn’t the posing that embarrassed me, but the presence of the two ladies—because I had forgotten to wear underwear beneath my track trousers.

Before that, we had cattle cheeks, tongues, tendons, and some real beef stuffed in the kitchen freezer from the previous Eid-ul-Adha celebration. Father had given me two decapitated cattle heads and forced me to extract as much meat as possible from the carcasses with a knife so dull it couldn’t even slice a cake, just days before he left us. That struck me deeply, almost spiritual—an odd thought that God had planned all this beautifully, and amin to that. That was the first time I tasted the best beef cheeks, tendons, and tongues in my life. It would have tasted better if Father had been there at the quiet dining table. Still, it was alright, because cattle cheek meat, truth be told, tastes like ordinary beef.

Long before that, someone I knew from the blogosphere generously deposited RM500 into my bank account to help us survive after Father’s demise, before I found a decent job. I am still thankful to her today. We never met in real life, yet it was so kind of her to show such generosity to a stranger. She eventually stopped blogging for reasons I don’t know. She just disappeared—perhaps now sitting on some apartment balcony in Hong Kong, eating egg tarts with a pot of green tea by her side. I remember her kindness well, and I know she wanted me to do the same for others. I try to, though I must admit, I get annoyed by people knocking on my car window during traffic jams asking for a ringgit or two.

All these memories came back after I read the news of a man misappropriating public donations channelled into his bank account—funds he initially claimed were for the well-being of his two orphaned nieces, whose parents died in a car collision. Blindfolded by greed, he siphoned off a large portion elsewhere, and that betrayal sparked public outrage.

While netizens hit their keyboards in anger, I stood under the shower long enough that reflection became inevitable. As I said, Father left us some money. We talked about it as a family, and I compromised—I agreed to let Mother handle it all. I could find a job, build my own wealth, and never have to worry about her with that eighty thousand ringgit in her hands. Later, Mother insisted I should buy a new car, which led to two weeks of silence between us because I preferred to keep the old 1991 Perodua Kancil. Eventually, I compromised again; I bought a new car, which put a smile on her face. Mother then persuaded Sister to do the same, and she, too, bought one. Mother gave us enough money for the down payments, all deducted from the inheritance.

Years have passed, and things are not turning out the way I wanted. I hate it whenever somebody—related or not—interferes with my financial planning. The son wants to save, but the mother says, “spend.” The grandfather insists the house should be demolished and rebuilt in concrete. The uncle taps the wooden wall and reminds me it will collapse one day if I don’t act. The aunts ask, “have you found your soulmate yet?” All of this aggravates me, and it boils down to my parsimonious nature—a trait inherited from nobody in the family. I’ve grown a little rebellious lately, showing more disagreement than approval, avoiding certain people, and even turning down a family vacation plan to Indonesia. Mother now understands that her son is carving out a life of his own.

Remnant of Yesterdays

Parts of the Dungun coastline are slowly being pushed inland by the ferocious sea as the days go by. The waves take pieces away, leaving only fragments behind. Spinifex grass is hardly seen nowadays—the thorny vegetation that looks like a sea urchin, which once detached, would roll along the sandy dunes for children to chase. Their laughter used to alarm nearby crabs, who scurried sideways into their holes, waiting until the footsteps faded behind the rough roar of waves surging towards sodden footprints.

In December, the sea draws its full power from the moon and grows short-tempered, always charging against the land in full force, destroying everything within reach. The severely damaged seaside road along Teluk Lipat beach once stood as shameful evidence of the land’s—and humanity’s—defeat in the worst war of nature in modern Dungun history. Children could no longer chase spinifex grass or disturb the crabs’ daily business.

The local authority has since placed concrete structures, supposedly to mend the destruction. But the sea has a mind of its own; its future cannot be foretold. After many Decembers, it has only grown better at adapting, while the concrete breakers merely shoo the waves to other places. What remains are the remnants of yesterday: the shortened beaches of Sura Tengah and its neighbour, Sura Hujung, the latter standing as the doorway to the realm of elves and the jungle spirit of eerie Bukit Bauk.

Recently, on a July afternoon, I stopped by Sura Tengah beach. I looked at the calm sea and spoke with it in silence, wondering how long this beauty would last—how long before I could one day bring along my missus, in her sheer cotton t-shirt and kain batik jawa, to share the view.