Less Strings Attached

One more year and I’ll be thirty, yet I still ditch people from my life every now and then. Popular wisdom says that at this age one should deal with confrontation by being docile, calm, and gentle. I embrace the idea and put it into practice, all right—let the bear with the sore head growl. Unbeknownst to them, as I walk away, I have already ended all connections with them. From that moment, they no longer exist. They are unimportant, insignificant, like specks of dust scattered across the universe.

On social media, it takes only a single click to remove their account from my friend list. Pathetic as it may sound, I cut ties in the real world just as easily. It has crossed my mind that my puny body, once on the deathbed, may not be accompanied by many people because of that.

Malaysia has a population of approximately thirty million. That’s thirty million antics to deal with. Sorting them into groups with whom I feel comfortable—taking into account differences in skin colour, culture, faith, sexual orientation, age, profession, political views, hobbies, and more—would leave me with only a handful. A fragile handful.

A handful of people, forming a network as weak as cotton strings criss-crossed between pins pricked into a softboard like the ones seen in movies. One pin holds a photo of one man, the string connects him to another, the lines sketching the possibilities of interaction: a passing glance, a silent judgment, a small talk, a casual conversation, a pretentious laugh, an argument. The string stretches, snaps, and just like that—they become strangers once again.

I am the grey pin over there, positioned at the far corner, separated from others by wide gaps on all sides, silently observing in solitude and peace. That tangled ball of cotton strings in the middle no longer matters to me.