This is a posting that has absolutely no interest to anyone. It’s just me letting go…It’s a habit I acquired since, gee, the 4th or 5th form. Whenever I have something bothering me, I doodle. I used to doodle everywhere…exercise books, pieces of paper, novels I was reading at the time, in between newspaper and magazine lines, columns and paragraphs.
In fact if I had been as dedicated to studying as I was at doodling, I’d be quite a corporate chappie at the moment looking towards a respectable retirement instead of facing total financial ruin – the result of a thoughtless past.
Not that I had a particularly disturbed youth. It was actually fantastic. Ah…so now I have discovered why I doodle – to escape serious work!
Of course now, with the age of technology, the PC and Microsoft Word have been the preferred doodling tools. And with my discovery of blogging, it’s become another means to let go steam. Soon it’ll be podcasting. Not bad for a 52 year old toad eh when those my age don’t even have a personal email account.
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I again dreamt of June (not her real name of course). Once in a couple of months, I dream of her. It’s been happening for years.
It’s such an old story. It must be 26 years – from the time I came back for work in ’80, and a couple of years after I burnt her letters and mailed the ashes back to her. It was a stupid and juvenile thing to do, done out of frustration at not receiving any replies to my letters. We had been corresponding quite nicely…then she stopped replying my letters.
I still remember her last letter. She said that ‘kalau ada jodoh, we’ll be together”. That was the last.
So in May of ‘80, when I came back after 7 years, I visited her parents. Her mother was quite happy to see me, and told me that she will arrange for dinner and cook my favourite siput sedut mask chili padi and that she’ll tell June. She gave me June’s work number for me to call. I didn’t call June, and as the day approached, I called her Mum to cancel the dinner. It was out of shame.
Then in September ’80 I got married. Then she got married and that’s the end of that.
We did meet after I settled back here. Once at the funeral of her granny, another time we bumped into each other at The Pub, Shangrila Hotel, one time I went to her house to meet with she and her husband in PJ, but I can’t remember the purpose of the visit, once in 1994 at their office when I went to arrange for an interview with her brother for a story I was writing (I was in The Sun then), and the last time it was at a kenduri for her father who passed away while performing his pilgrimage in Mecca about 3 years ago.
Oh there was one time I saw her near the Bangkok Bank building in 1983 and I think she saw me too…but the coward that I was and still am, turned into a lane.
I don’t visit her mother anymore, even during Raya for fear of bumping into her. I used to, but it always gave me anxiety. So I’ve stopped.
My many attempts at avoidance is a because of great shame. The times when we did come across each other, filled me with unease.
Two marriages and three kids later, I’m still ‘hung up’ about her….if that’s the right word to describe my frequent dreams of her.
I suppose subconsciously it’s a nagging feeling of ‘what could have been’. We were childhood friends and distantly related through marriage rather than by DNA. Our families were once pretty close. My Mum adored her had always wished that I would be betrothed to her. Which I think just about every family member knew and certainly her family too.
In 1974, I left for England and in 1980, out of the blue we begun corresponding. But after 3 or 4 months she stopped without rhyme nor reason. So when a cousin was returning home for the holidays, I asked him that if he should meet her, to ask why she stopped replying my letters.
When he came back to London he told me June heard that my Mum had told someone she hoped whoever I ended up with would be much younger than I. So according to my cousin, June felt slighted as she was (and is) two months older.
If my Mum had indeed said such a thing, it would be in the context of comparing her age with my Dad’s; they’re 10 years apart. My Mum adored June. Loved her like an own daughter, so it wouldn’t have been aimed at June. She was probably speaking generally if indeed she had said it.
Anyway…it’s a long story. June and I are both 52 now. She’s probably wrinkled and as for me, I am fat and ugly as an old toad.
Just two days ago, she came into my dream again which became quite weird because the next day, I received a Skype message from her namesake, but who was a complete stranger and her husband appeared in a newspaper report.
I would like to have a chance to apologise for my juvenile behaviour in burning the letters and mailing the ashes back to her. But the tragedy would be if she does not remember what I did. And a bigger tragedy for me would be that if she had never received the ashes! And I would have been suffering this anguish and shame all this while for nothing!
It would also be comical and testimony to a life of major foul-ups.
And the other thing is, we’ve never gone out. We’ve never sat across from each other and talked. Never. So what is it that I’m uptight about?
I think also most Malaysians are quite disappointed with Pak Lah for his stand on Shahrir. Was there a 'party line' for Shahrir to toe?