extracted from the nights.

Outside the window, a frosty fog is descending upon the night, and dimming all streetlights by its feathery palm. The only sound heard is an indistinct mingling of echoes from cozy living rooms of distant houses. 

May 2012 has gone over half of its lifetime, with the rain a loyal company along the way. It will, very soon, cease to exist. Only time, flowing with all its compassionate smoothness, can rock the cradle of space as peacefulness creeps through the closed eyelids of a hypnotized sleeper. Time had indulged her in a dull ignorance of repeating occurrences, until there came a point when none of the diurnal differences can be addressed, named, picked out, remolded into clues, any valuable clue suggesting the truths lying helplessly within this single moment. 

In her sleep, she finds herself, like a devout pilgrim, clambering against the full flow of time, over the steep slope, back to the mosque of old memories, body scratched, hands bleeding after several attempts to cling to the rocks, heart trenched by an overflow of sacred sentiments. Yet her slipping feet fail to comply with her wishes, her eyesight proves a mischievous liar giving her only illusions, cruel illusions of the good old days that she knows could neither be relived nor reached. What good old days?, in chaos her conscience shouts, What are they but bogus remnants of moments? There is no turning point, no salvation, no edge to cling to on this seemingly significant pilgrimage. The past is but a symbol of one’s existence, like how God is a symbol of authority to which human submits. Outside their scope of significance, both simply have no authentic reality. 

But there is always a point, even within vagueness, a fast-fading spot of light at the end of the tunnel that resembles hope for the despair, knowledge for the illiterate, liberation for the restrained, or pardon for sinners. It is a point of immense consolation that man forever chases after, despite their not knowing its true shape, its face, its meaning or its origin. Albeit rationality tells her not to, she desperately stretches her fingers towards the source of light, tracing God in the bygones. Once she is on the move, the wind blowing past the face, she often wonders where else is there to go, if she is not to be here, rushing with all her might. And instinctively she gets hold of the same answer each and every time, without exception, or exclusion, or even a slight variation between such answers, affirming that she must walk on this desolate road, alone, sorrowful, deprived of a trustworthy companion; acquaintances there once were, but people are changeable, provisional, like clouds drifting towards the horizon and vanish, have you never a chance to see  their faces, beloving as they perhaps used to be, again. The point, nevertheless, stays within your sight, even if it is a point on the horizon, seen but not to be touched.


Is man not a sad and desperate creature?
Among the mixed catch she grasped, the most resentful is always the nightmarish image of the old desiccated chrysalis: a fat worm born to greatness, but withholding only meanness and mediocrity. She always has a hard time forgiving all the hurts and sufferings endowed upon herself, particularly the repulsive cruelty of the chrysalis. If such vulgarity is the coverage for something else, as she was informed, something ugly, something ingrained in men’s degradation, it would be all the more unforgivable. She wishes the chrysalis somber retribution; she wishes it unbearable pains; she wishes it a tragic death. The only vestige of humanity left is her immobility in executing any actual punishment. Such is the extent of her hatred, of a mental scar in one’s character, probably dormant when its holder is occupied but certainly stinging worse in leisure nights. A classic adolescent syndrome, her cynicism is so deep-rooted it is almost impossible to dislodge, even until, she thought, much later in life.

Through these many nights, however, she also learns. Crawling in the plays and  replays of torrents movies, embracing stories that harbor human passions, touching worn pages from which departs man’s struggle to advance morality, she gradually fathoms the importance of the simple yet graceful act of letting go. Jesus Christ had borne all sins of human in exchange for the-higher-God’s tolerance of human and their own self-forgiveness. The God-sent John Coffey would suffer the clashing of ‘pieces of glass in his head’ as the bad, like a chronic disease, prevails the planet. How does she love them in return if she keeps on upholding plans of vengeance for each single injustice? She could not forgive easily, for she seeks not relief, but forgiveness itself. Like the erudite, the dejected, the captive, or the guilty, who are all seekers of their ultimate truths, the forgiver goes also on the route to no definite ends, the pursuit of which may cost a lifetime. However, in the most positive of beliefs, all reasons lead to the wideness of the ocean that, with the sky soaked in a newly born azure shade and the morning sun rising in magnificent halo, remains infinite.

But what does it all even mean?
As soon as the first rays of light crack their ways through the velvety curtains,
as mild as the movements in which light invades the kingdom of daunting darkness,
as fast as an eye-blink to avoid the sight of the reign-er of days,
and away with grief and grudges maybe,
May will be gone already.

a short phase of nervous breakdown.

Extremely exhausted by three consecutive mind-draining reading sections, I collapsed on the bed with a large part of my consciousness taking refuge in somnolent state. In the midst of darkness, there was a curving route of thought that I remember strolling along with much ease, not even bothered about commanding a vestige of resistance. “What I have just done might well be useful much or less,” I thought, “to attain this goal, to help me arrive at the appointed station unscratched.” But … where are you going, again?” I stumbled over a rock into a deep lake. “What ideals are you chasing after, again?” the sentence emerged from a dim and distant piece of memory. The seemingly harmless question uttered by a familiar personage once had crushed me to tears, yet I never learned to build up a defense mechanism against. I murmured intelligible words about whether or not I knew the exact answers, and sank down gradually. However, preferred not to be drowned by this suffocating pressure of dark waters, I stubbornly turn back to the favorite topic of brooding: fear of failure seemed to have become such an imminent threat. “But you haven’t failed, you silly, what is the point of being all time-profligate by mulling over things that linger in the course of the unknown future?” The serpentine trap of dejection opened its wide mouth again. Presence of things that linger, things in between, in the middle, things yet to have happened, or stay unfinished, like this, always happens to immerse me in an ominous sense of melancholia. I picked up the phone and, soberly deprived of the intention to reserve equanimity and vulgarly hungry to define myself through bold assertions, rashly texted:

Between the two scenarios of succeeding and failing is a pitch-black void, standing within which man can’t help but thinking that either way he never really knows where he is heading, to heaven or hell, and feeling unbelievably sad. I never remember how I felt during that trying period of taking university exams, after every extra Physics class, or Math training, at noon and night when I am completely alone. I just know that I was a disturbing mess and wanted to die so bad.

then hit Send to the first number on the list, finger-crossed in the hope that the victim could not make out the connection between ‘man’ and ‘me’, or the hidden string between the past-tense desire and my present depression. He could not, for he replied with empty encouraging words.