As I entered the kitchen, Syazana was holding out a bowl with a cockroach inside, which had been dead for who knows how long.
‘Perhaps we need to buy some ubat lipas, so these lipas can gravitate towards it’, I said.
These days, animals keep me alert of the passing days and months; the orange cat at the train station I’d give my breakfast to, the ants living inside the front hood of my car and seem to find their way at the drive wheel which I try to smudge at traffic light stops, the little cats that my brother would bring back from the surau – all smelly and hungry, the big, dark, moths in the city every time I get out of the lift, and so on.
Then of course, there is drama between these little moments, I said, as I wear those silly bunny ears in Hanna’s room. I tell Hanna that I always forget things every time I wake up, even though I’ve had a rough day, or that I’ve been crying all night, or that I’ve broken up with F. I seem to be disconnected from the continuity of life, nothing intensifies, nothing is ever clarified, I reach no heights nor depths; each day everything is renewed and I am back wondering where I have left things off. Of course as the hours add up, moments seem to restore yet I am unable to simply discern. I am left with a jumble of words and images of others yet unable to find my own. Then the day folds into night and I keep on repeating the same exercise.
F says I am tiring myself out.
It is indeed a tiring business, to locate yourself in the hearts of others; to ask ‘what do I matter to you?’, ‘why do you love me?’, rather than asking yourself ‘why do you matter to me?’. I can be evasive. It is more convenient that way, latching yourself unto others, so that you do not have to deal with the complications of your own. But these days all people say to me to ask where does my heart lie, to whom does it gravitate to, and to these questions I cannot answer.
Not yet, at least.
***
P/S; Hi.