ten

The internet at home has gone out. People are bewildered over its absence, as if their lives depended on it. So out they go hanging out longer (than usual) during dinners, during teatime. There was nothing else to do. I told everyone that my brother is getting married (or, the ceremony) in a week, yet no one seems to be surprised in the least. Thinking that I have a thesis presentation (the last of its ordeal) to do on the following day, I cannot risk going back home. What is another family event missed, after all?

I skipped attending both the lecture and tutorial for Albert Camus’s The Outsider. I feel bad now, not knowing whether anyone else had read it, or hearing interesting things about it. But classes are dull these days – everyone just wants everything to end so they can proceed to their own businesses. Apparently, Camus feigned to anyone calling him an existentialist, because he didn’t like ideologies – he felt that ideologies restrict (individual) ideas. I was about fifteen when I bought The Myth of Sissyphus. I brought it to school one day – this was before I went to MRSM – a terrible wait of two months – and it was either L or Adila scoffing at the cover – “The most important question a man faces it whether he should kill himself or not”. Something of that order. I hate scoffs – it denotes dismissal. I scoff, therefore I shun. But I do it all the same.

Reading The Outsider during spring as it merges into summer feels terribly familiar. Those long walks home under the sun, together with the heat wave, seems to put people in a position of oppression. I was going through my boxes yesterday, containing things ranging from ticket stubs, unused postcards, unsent letters, leaflets, bookmarks, postcards, magnets, the odd key chain or pen back from the usrah days (where everything is wrapped in cuteness and love – ukhwah fillah ^_^), and there I stumbled from L’s postcard dating back from 2011. She was in Gold Coast, fresh after reading The Outsider. Talking about the oppressing sun and water splashing kids. That it didn’t feel strange after all if people felt killing another. Perfectly understandable.

It was your birthday two days ago. So you noted that it has been ten years. It does call for some sort of celebration – but here lies the difficulty. Being that as I am, that is difficult to give (it would always pale in comparison, if we were to use that phrase), unworthy (or undeserving, to say the least) of your attention, I am yet unable to send anything that is worth your reading/receiving.

Sentimentality aside, we would like to mark the occasion as travelling back through the tunnel of time. So there was this particular occasion where you visited me at the hospital with your mother. I did not know who told you about it, but you were there, nevertheless, bringing a book (it was one of those Mary Higgins Clark hardcover). It was all fine until you went to the door, before leaving, remarked “I know what you did“. It might have not been the profoundest of moments – but to me, that was the moment that sealed our somewhat complex – but nevertheless genuine – friendship.