3:29 - Chapter I

I imagined when my heart stopped for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds last year, I had died. But then I came back thanks to a strong cocktail of electric shocks and adrenaline injections and a rather loud litany of, “Live, live, live, live, live!”

That had been the surgeon, by the way, who was an emotional creature. Perhaps he said that to every patient that died on his operating table as part of his gimmick, but it had done the trick in my case. I had returned, my heart was pumping blood again and my brain began reversing its shut down process.

When I came to a couple of weeks later, I realized I had lost few things (mainly the sight and hearing on my left eye and ear) and gained a couple of other things as compensation. The old folks might now call me ‘touched’. Or ‘cursed’. My mom still called me lazy and I was forever ‘Delusional Wombat’ to my dad.   

Losing the sight in my left eye was hard to take and the loss put unnecessary strain on my right eye, so I wasn’t allowed to look at computers or LED screens for too long. That meant no smartphones that could entice me into partaking in the forbidden activity and my time in front of the computer was regulated by an egg timer.

While everybody else talked with their thumbs and other digits, I had to rely on old-fashioned face-to-face speech and passing notes in the class to communicate. My parents also had the initiative of informing the school that I needed to sit at the very front of the class due to this newfound impediment. The school happily obliged.

When I died during those precious minutes, I did not see anything. No tunnel and no light at the end of that tunnel. No horned devils or a scene from hell. No people who had passed away coming back and giving me advice. No angels, not a feather. Not a thing.

But I heard music.

Housewife

Celebrating International Women's Day 2012. I read this article from The Atlantic and was filled with an urge to write. The resulting piece is as follows:

Housewife

I am a housewife, Sari said. I take care of my husband and children. I have three children. Two sons, she added after a pause, smiling.

Sari's husband was an employee of a state-owned oil corporation. They lived in a two-storey, three-bedroom house with a garage that could fit two cars. Their house was located in one of the suburban development projects outside the metropolitan and it was within easy reach of a hypermall and a wet-market. The children’s school was also close by, just fifteen minutes away. 

Look, Sari said, pointing at a photo of her children. This is Arif, the eldest. He’s in the third-grade now. And this is his brother, Arya, second grade. The little one is Alina, she’s only two. I’m enrolling her in a playgroup next year.

The Coop

They were sitting at Bu Ikawati’s roadside kiosk when the light from the single bulb above their heads went out. “Yaaah, there it goes again,” said one of the men. The others only nodded while sipping their black coffee and puffing cigarette smoke, as if saying it was to be expected.

The smell of kretek, tobacco blended with cloves, filled the air. It was a balmy, sweat-filled night that had been denied rain for weeks. Syarief wiped the back of his neck with his hands. The mosquitoes that had previously gathered around the lone bulb were now making him their target. He swatted them away, only to hit Mansyur and caused his coffee to spill. That earned him a glare, and although they were good friends no words were spoken. His tongue was as heavy as the apology that sat on it. He knew it was there but didn’t bother to let it out.

Conversations were often abandoned at a night like this. Nights where they knew with certainty that the next day would be worse. Still no rain. The rice fields were parched. The longer the drought ran, the longer the silence was. Syarief wondered how many weeks had it been since he’d last seen a hint of drizzle. The riverbed was now as dry as the asphalt road. The soil cracked, the carcasses of their livelihood hung, withered and defeated. They all needed to make do without a harvest this season and the men had been working all sorts of jobs just to survive. These jobs, like the rain, didn’t come easily. Many of his friends and neighbors had been forced to go to the capital Jakarta to scrape a living.

1000Words - Scenes

 
Scenes—Jakarta / Singapore / Ubud

Word: 1000

Summary: Exercise in short forms. Caught-in-the-act, deer-in-the-headlight, I-saw-you-watching-me-watching-you moments. Snippets of memories. Thoughts. The good, the bad, and the fugly.

*

At the MRT, a middle-aged, silver-haired man wearing blue-striped polo shirt and grey pants walked passed by. He shouldered a backpack that had one side-pocket open. From inside of that pocket, a white girls underwear peeked through the slit.

1000Words - Little Sins

Just because this piece has been sitting in my PC forever, and it needs to get out and get a life.

Little Sins

Word count: 1000

Note: I never had a conversation as remotely interesting as the one below.

She said to me one day, “He didn’t text back.”

Knowing perfectly well who ‘he’ was, I thought it was normal and within realm of possibilities. And I said so.

“No, he’s good at these things.”

What things?

“You know, like replying and stuff. Keeping in touch. Saying hi, how are you’s.”

Oh, making friends.

1000Words - The CD

A picture speaks a thousand words, they say. This is a project for me to write a thousand words about one, about anything really. Here's the first.

The CD

Word count:1000

Note: Inspired by Swinging Popsicle’s Transit.

Her favorite CD was from an obscure indie group consisting of three Japanese and an American. She bought it at an anime convention few years back, when dressing up as another character was still a part of her life, and it had accompanied her throughout the good years and the tough ones. There were twelve songs in the album: eleven were sung in Japanese and one in a crooked, yet recognizable English. She had those eleven translated and romanized so she could sing along.

(years later she would misplace the piece of paper and thus lost the meanings of the lyrics forever)