Author’s note: To write, and to write well, has always been a dream and a love of mine. After many years of leaving my creativity in silence, I’ve picked up the pen (or rather, the keyboard), and started writing again. The writer always lives in two (sometimes more) realities, as there are moments when the fictional creation seems to be taking a life on its own, and that was how it was with this particular piece of writing, and I’m guessing that is how it will always be with everything that my pen (or keyboard) produces. But nothing is ever purely fictional – one creates, but the core personage of the ideas, themes and suggestions in a fictional writing, even one as far-fetched (and I argue, beautifully imaginative) as science fiction and fantasy, are written out of experiences. Fiction is the creator’s experiences dressed up with different names, different places and different circumstances – a mirage of what once was (or still is) real. This thought process that I’ve suggested here, by logical argument, is of course not from me, but given to me by the character Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke in the movie ‘Before Sunset’. I know not of wars, or criminal espionages or investigative activities, because I have never experienced a war, or have been associated with drug ring-lords or joined the police forces. But I know that I am constantly in tune with my inner self – my emotions, my rationality, my spirit and my thoughts. And I know love – I know of it and have been through it, and still learning it. The best of my friends, particularly those that I share book-crazes with, will be able to inform you with certainty that I would always walk past the romance section in the bookstore, and God forbid if I ever pick up something regarding romances between vampires and humans. But with the books that I’ve loved and enjoyed, the story of love is always set amidst varied elements of life – war, history, culture, family etc (Eg: books by Ken Follet such as World Without End, Pillars of the Earth and Fall of Giants, books by Wally Lamb such as I Know This Much is True and The Hour I First Believed, classics such as War and Peace, Les Miserables, Gone with the Wind, Anna Karenina etc. And who can forget the fantasy world of Middle Earth, particularly the love between Beren & Luthien, Aragon & Arwen). And I think the elements often give love within the fictional story a real sense of reality and beauty. Because when one loves, one must learn how to love within reality.
This work is still incomplete at this stage, and will be subjected to many revisions, but here is a (draft) preview:
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Quand il me prend das ses bras, il me parle tout bas, je vois la vie en rose.
The intensity of their desire for each other started off with overwhelming ecstasy and passion, and much of herself was consumed by the yearning to have him, to be near him. In anticipation of their moments in being together, which can come only in minute interludes each day due to his day-time job at his exporter-importer company, and her night-time shifts at Minerva, she would want naught else but to be held by him, to hear his voice in whispers and to feel the gentle touch of his lips on her face, her skin, for him to tenderly run his smooth fingers through her hair. Whenever she was with him, in those budding and early stages of their love for each other, how she wished for the world to stand at a still silence, so that these stolen moments will not end, as it always does with rude awakenings. However, their relationship, at many immeasurable moments, were also overwhelming heated, with cutlery, pillows, and once, a toaster, thrown at each other in the midst of loud exchanges of words that both would always later on regret, as they fall and sob into each others arms, moments after the waning of their anger towards each other, apologising profusely, kissing each other deeply and promising never to fight again, because the sorrows of being apart from each other were just too much for their hearts to bear. She was 17 and he was 21, and both were only at the beginnings of their discovery of the world and the breadth of options available. They often talk about the future, not as a distant, discordant entity separated from their here and now, but they often discussed it with a sense of togetherness; that despite of their numerous differences – cultural practices, spoken languages, disparities between their pasts – they have always believed that the future, with its incalculable variables and infinite extrapolations, will hold one thing for certain: come what may, they will face the future and work through it together. Perhaps this innocence, almost naivety, was due to their youth, but for youngsters that age, they have already experienced and survived through so much, separately and together. She lost her parents from one night of nationwide raged-filled slaughter; he lost his father to the trenches in Bastogne, not by an American bullet, but by the enveloping, all-consuming winter cold that claimed both his feet through gangrene while at the same time, losing his sanity through the cries of terror, the sights of hanging and distorted limbs, and the shadow of death constantly hovering over his soul, taking the lives of his comrades who became his brothers, but always eluding him, like a cruel, sick joke. His father eventually returned to his cottage house in the outskirts of Hamburg, the house that he built, being a trained builder by profession. He came home in a war truck with his battalion’s captain as the driver. Upon reaching his house, his captain, with one swift movement, carried him out of the truck and into a wheelchair, the device that he would be bound to for the rest of his life. His mother ran out the door and kneeled in front of the wheelchair and tightly hugged the man whom she thought was her husband, and with genuine thankfulness she praised God for his return. But he was no longer her husband. Her husband, the man that she fell in love with, shared a home, a family and a bed with, already died in Bastogne, where he lost his legs. For 10 long years, as the nation struggled to build itself again from the ruins of war, his mother struggled to once again know and love the man that she made a vow to. It was a vow. A vow. War will not change that – that was what he often read when he was going through his mother’s diaries after her passing. 10 years after Bastogne, in 1955, the year that his mother was pregnant with him, his father pushed himself out of the front door and into a neighbouring field, beneath the willow tree where his father shyly proposed to his mother at the age of 18, and he took out his Luger and shot himself in the heart. On his lap were two letters, one written for his mother and one to him, who was still unborn. His mother, upon coming home and discovering the dead body, let out a deafening shriek which vibrated throughout the field. She knew not joy after that, not even with the birth of her son, because he, this little boy that she carried within herself, nourished and raised, showed too much resemblance to the man that she yearned for. She fell into deep post-natal depression, and was never released from this chain that twisted her heart, where living felt like torture, and dying felt like the right thing to do for her son. And that was precisely what she did. At the tender age of 5, he saw his dead mother’s body swinging from the ceiling, with a white cloth across her neck. From then on, he was raised by his uncle and his wife; not unlike his lover, who was raised by her aunt. They often share this aspect of their past with each other, more so than with anyone else, because there are certain types of sadness and anguish which others can only sympathise, but nothing more. The grief of losing parents as children is such a sadness – and within their embraces and their myriad differences, they found this sadness to be common to each other, and often found strength and calmness in the understanding shared.
She remembered one particular Sunday, when they were in Langkawi Island for their first holiday together. It was almost twilight, and the beauty of that particular night outshone the day as they walked in-hand-in on the golden, warm sands, with the full moon radiating her light, holding at bay black-pitch darkness, but instead illuminating the sky with dark, almost bluish lights. The stars hung across their heads in the vast expanse, complementing the moon, and twinkling as they swirl in each others’ arms in a playful dance to an imaginary waltz. They then laid down on the sands, with the coconut trees swaying above their heads, in silence, with her head resting on his stomach. He touched her face gently, and asked her what she was thinking of. After shedding one drop of tear, she took his hand, kissed it, and mumbled about how much she misses her parents. He continued stroking her face, and softly asked her on how they passed. She gulped down the rushing ball of tears that was rising through her core and cutting through her throat, and narrated what happened to everyone in her family on 13 May 1969, the day when Malaysia went into a frenzied blood hunt, where men fell and instead became beasts as they slaughtered their own and did so on the basis of only one criteria – race. Her whole family, immediate and extended, were in a cinema which they silently surrounded with sharpened parangs, ready for their hushed and cowardly slaughter. It was only by a stroke of fortune and slight greediness that her and her aunt escaped their hunger for blood through the knife. She was begging her parents beforehand for a large bottle of orange juice, pulling on her mother’s skirt and holding on to her father’s waist, shouting and screaming until her father gave out a defeated sigh, held up his crying daughter and handed her what she wanted. She drank it all in one swift gulp. Halfway through the movie in the cinema, she was fidgeting in her seat, anxious for the bathroom. Her aunt, who was sitting beside her, brought her to the back of the cinema where the bathroom was. Not 3 minutes after they were in the ladies did they storm in and started cutting everybody’s throat. Her aunt noticed the janitor’s cupboard and saw that the door was slightly ajar. Her aunt immediately covered her young, crying mouth in attempts to hush off her voice, and carried her into the darkness of the cupboard, where they stayed for what seemed like eternity. Only when the screams and roars of spineless victory deadened down to give way to the eeriness of the passing of souls from temporality to infinity, did her aunt let both of them out of the cupboard. Immediately her aunt rushed into the cinema, and with trembling fingers and croaking wails, rocked her dead husband and son in her embrace. Her parents were beside them, laying on each other’s shoulders with warm blood trickling down, staining her father’s white shirt and her mother’s blue blouse, their eyes still wide opened, their senses capturing not the embrace of their only daughter at their ripe old age, but the image of their killer who had taken their lives at its prime. She, at 12, came walking towards her trembling aunt, and saw her parents. And at 12, she suddenly realised the realness of mortality, because she knew that her parents were no more. More tears trickled down her face throughout her narration, and he continued stroking her face gently as she talked. When she finished, she could not hold back the grief, and let out a moaning cry. He sat up, pulled her close to his chest and felt her tears soaking through his shirt. He did not know what to say, and in fact, he knew not to, because there are no words that can balm that pain, and so he just held her, tilted her head to kiss her lips, and told her, for the first time, that he loves her.
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Reality and Mirror 