February, 2007

I spoke into his eyes… I thought you died alone; A long long time ago..

Ah penat lah. Lagu lain takde?

I thought you liked this song?

Some songs are tired. Macam aku. Aku penat.

*****

The Good Shepherd starts slowly, but I think it ended with a bang. It asks the question, at what price, patriotism? The central character in the movie, played by Matt Damon, could full well be one of the characters in the movie that won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, Das Leben der Anderen: The Lives of Others. Hannah Booth recently interviewed those jailed for various offences in the old East Germany who have read their secret Stasi files.

Jurgen Breitbarth, now 52, was spied on for the secret police by his best friend. Decades later, when they finally met again, his friend maintains that if he hadn’t been “keeping an eye on me” Breitbarth would have gone to prison a lot sooner. He said that he was protecting me, Breitbarth relates. I don’t know who his friend was trying to appease. A strong suspicion I have is that his friend is telling himself more than anyone else; as if telling yourself a million times would ever dull the knowledge inside the deepest of deep hearts, that you betrayed someone you loved. Breitbarth says he has moved on. I don’t think his friend will ever be able to, properly.

The Good Shepherd also told me another story, of cock-ups and mistakes made by the American government in the Cold War. And how, upon reflection, they choose to never learn from these mistakes. Like Vietnam before it, in a few years Iraq and Afghanistan would end up barren and impoverished, a function of mistakes made but denied, and its American legacy would lie in the slew of movies made depicting the mistakes of the past administration in the Middle East. But no lessons are to be taken from it. It will merely remain as an expression of art. Because even though they say, history is there for us to learn from, to guide us from repeating mistakes of the past; they perhaps forgot to add the caveat that history doesn’t matter, if you’re big enough to get away with it and write history yourself, any way you like it.

I saw this on Postsecret, yesterday. This reminded me of you. And some of you reading this will think… uih, aku ke ‘you’ tu? Others will think, siapa ‘you’ tu? But the one for whom it is for will say, nasib baik bukan aku. Sebab.. we never really cared much for each other anyway, kan?

55 Fiction.

Not that I followed all the rules anyway.

*****

Fifty-five words. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you .
“There, cukup?”
“Tak. Sebab tu baru forty-five.”

The road that leads down to my apartment is not very well lit. On a cold and particularly chilly night like tonight, if you look up into the sky, you could full well expect to see the a clear sky littered with various formations of the constellations. I looked up and I saw Orion’s Belt. Or at least, I think it was. It is probably the only constellation I recognise; those three dots in a straight line. I thought to myself, I have to capture this moment. What do I feel, what do I feel? What am I thinking?

Because it is these things that define moments. It’s what people ask you. What were you doing when United won the Cup in ’99? What were you thinking when you slammed into that car in front of you? When they called out your name, what did it feel like? (For the record.. for all the above the answer was nothing).

So I looked up into the sky and tried hard to think, of something, anything, that could capture this moment. I’ve always wished we could capture moments in a little bottle, to keep by our bedsides, to remind us. Like the feeling I felt that night as I tried to think of the best way to say thank you; finally deciding that the best way indeed was, to say, ‘Thank You’. Or the satisfying flight of the ball into that top left corner of the goal. Or just being there, talking, chatting, laughing.. aware that in hours things would end but not caring. If only they could be bottled like eau de parfum. Nice smells for the good stuff, right stinks for the bad. Because memories.. memories are based on a faulty camera in our minds, as Ben Gibbard says.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds trying to capture the moment with that very faulty camera. After one second I opened my eyes again because I realised I was walking down a street and I could get run over by a car. Which would have been quite a significant way to capture the moment, but not really what i had in mind. I had three posters in my left hand, of the movie Freedom Writers, because earlier that day I had thought about becoming a writer; a proper published writer, and I thought, maybe after almost eleven years, the cat is finally ready to come out of the closet, again. In my right hand I had a packet of halal hotdogs I bought at the cornershop. But for the life of me, I didn’t quite know what I was thinking.

What a waste of a moment, I finally thought.

*****

And still on thoughts, let’s play a game. Here’s a picture I got from this website. Now, finish the sentence.. with the first word that comes into your mind. I’ll tell you mine later. Maybe.