A Little Too Not Over You

Anne had the dream again.
        Later, she woke up to the news of his homecoming.
        Much later, she couldn't get a single thing done without thinking about the dream. About him. About who they used to be to each other and who they can be to each other, but didn't.
        She was utterly excited of seeing him again. At the same time, she was uncertain if he would ask her out again, just like old times. He seemed so changed since their last meeting. He chatted less, stopped sending her e-mails and no longer reply her calls. In these past few months, they had drifted away from each other. Would they be so far apart that it is impossible to bridge the gap? Also, something that happened during their last meeting opened up a gashing wound that Anne could never get over. He asked Her. He may not think of it that way, but the playground was special to her. Anne simply couldn't imagine anyone barging into the picture, especially not Her. She was thanking her stars she didn't get to meet them that day.
         Nevertheless, Anne couldn't help feeling that the uniqueness of the playground was ceasing, like old memories falling apart and the feelings they once held dear for each other evaporated into the atmosphere. Immediately, she felt like an idiot. An idiot who cared for someone who didn't care for her. An idiot who still live in the past. An idiot who still harbour a hope for the impossible.

Breaking Free of The Lotus spell

Anne didn't know if she really had a death wish.
        It could be the overbearing pressure of the imminent internals. It could be the backfire of her brain tailing a more than two months' suppression of stress and tension. It could even be her idle bones playing tricks on her willpower - and triumphing, it seemed.
        It came to her slowly and gently, like a mist. It wrapped itself around her gracefully enough, so that she doesn't notice how far up she was enveloped. Then, it happened - just as slowly as it had begun. She felt like a person under a spell. Her conscience was there, her limbs were working - and oh, how every nerve and muscle within her screamed at her: Wake up! Wake up! - but none of them were registered in her head. As she devoured movies after movies, procrastinating every prescious second she couldn't afford to fritter away in this ridiculous manner, all she ever wanted to do was to slap herself and say : Get your lazy butt up! However, her mind kept on whispering : Everything will be fine.
        In a way, it reminded her of the scene from Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, where Percy, Annabeth and Grover were lured into Lotus Casino - it's large glittering billboard reads : You'll never want to leave.
        So, whatever the hell was wrong with her, Anne knew it : She should put a stop to it. All these reckless behaviours had gone long enough. Tomorrow would be - as she put it - the day of purging. She needs to get all those extra carbs out of her system and all those devilish whispers out of her head. Her willpower is strong. She will do it. Nothing can thwart her. She's Anne, after all.

A Bad Day

This was my worst day since coming to India, except for the first night I landed here, under the sinking feeling of homesickness and excessive self-doubtfullness of my true purpose of being here, more than two months ago.
        The week hadn't been going on too well for me, what with the looming shadow of first internals, and the fact that I still had an eternity of studying yet to be completed, and the lecturers kept on attacking me with all those questions I had to struggle even to recall the answers, and shaking their heads and giving me that you-didn't-study-again-didn't-you-don't-you-have-any-idea-how-many-of-your-seniors-flunked-last-year-looks.
        Today was simply the last straw. I was completely broken down during physiology tutorial, where everyone seemed to be able to answer all the questions while I sat there, mute as an idiot. As expected, after giving me THAT look, the lecturer even asked me how much would I expect him to grade me because - in his exact words - I haven't taken part actively in the discussion. How could I - I almost wailed at him - when all I had got were about four to five hours per day, and an eternity of studies expected to be done, every details well memorised, and never to be forgotten, like, forever? Throw in assignments, diagrams and deadlines, it was a miracle I wasn't dead by now, much less Talk or Think.
        I was so exasperated that it was a wonder that I still had the grace to smile at him, like it was a joke, which I highly doubted. Because in his eyes laid the unspoken warning : if this insolence of mine goes on till the externals, my entire future would be flushed down the toilet.
        As if the day wasn't bad enough, I found out that he likes a girl, or allegedly so, as claimed by my friend's friend, whom was his ex-collegemate last year. Apparently, the guy whom she and her friend were so enthutiastically trying to pair up with another friends of theirs - was actually him. Will wonders never cease?
        I hate to say this, but the first thought that flashed through my mind was : will that be me?
        No, if I am the girl, why wouldn't he tell me that before we parted? But if I'm not the girl, why didn't he just go ahead with the match-up, get himself a girlfriend, or find himself a gf, and let me know once and for all, that I shouldn't harbour any hopes?
        I guess it was rather unfair and judgemental of me to think that, though. I acted just as indifferent as he was all along. In fact, I wasn't entirely sure of my feelings towards him. Are there true feelings on my side, or purely manipulation? 
        Oh well, I guess I just want someone who really likes me enough to verbalize and actionize that liking, not keeping it silence and waiting for me to make the first move. For heaven's sake, that was where the phrase knights in silver armour came from. Since Man claimed to be stronger than women, then why couldn't they show some guts in this courting affair? If they object so much to the idea of equality between genders, prove it. Seriously, do they expect the ladies to propose to them? That would be so unladylike, not to mention entirely losing the touch of romance.
        So, with the upsetting idea of both my future career and love life whirring out of my control, I could only say that life S-U-C-K-S.

What I Really Want

There were countless encounters since arriving here that Anne questioned her true purpose of being here. She looked at the shabby buildings looming across the streets, stared at the faeces strewn along the pot-holed road and the pigs gnawing at the garbage and cows wandering into coffee shops like barns, and peered into the run down ruins that looked like the remnants of World War II instead of a prestigious medical college, as they claimed. In the course of the strings of activities - whether she lost herself in the shopping spree for essential items, or purchasing the staggering amount and thickness of books, or dashing about the streets in a risky auto ride - the same doubt kept jumping out at her:
        Is this what you really want?
        She thought of her local coursemates - how they studied so intently even thought it was the first day of class, how they sat so demurely with their noses buried in books and not moving a muscle throughout the lecturers and even the hiatus in between, how they were so eager to answer every questions - and saw in them the little girl who played with medical kit instead of Barbies and wrote about being a doctor in every one of her essays. But what she didn't know was there was a price for every wish. That was why Ariel had to give up her voice for a pair of human legs and Aurora had to pricked her finger before the curse could be broken. Quid pro quo, that was how it always had been. And this time, it cost her the one most precious thing in her life - happiness.
        It wasn't all the long pages of medical jargon or burning the midnight oils which concerned her. In fact, Anne pretty much enjoyed that. But why her? She had never done anything that wasn't her own choice, so why should she start doing it now?
        Perhaps that was because she had no money, or perhaps it was the obligations she felt towards her family, and maybe part of her pride wouldn't permit her to study locally when all her friends went overseas.
But lately she had been weighing all these against her long lost happiness, and suddenly they all seemed extremely insignificant. She could be an M.D. instead of a a M.B.B.S.. She could be studying accountancy for four years in Pahang. She could even be a salesgirl who worked three jobs per day. At least she would be happy.
        Of course, everyone else had been telling her to optimistic. But being optimistic was just like a six-year-old telling her mum to buy two more daddies at the supermarket should he never come back again. It was an act to mask the agony within oneself. Optimistic or not, a person would still be unhappy.
        Anyone would had known her would thought that Anne was a straight-A and ambitious person who knew better than anyone the consequence of falling away from the straight-and-narrow. In truth, Anne wasn't that tough. All she wanted was to be free of all the rules and regulations and responsibilities and expections. She just wanted to happy.

Time-The Old Bald Cheater

Anne thought she would never come to this, but on the day she turned twenty, a single realization struck her: time flies - no, a better phrase would be time is an old bald cheater. When she first came across it in Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis, the phrase reminded her of Shakespeare's Life's Brief Candle - the remorse and fury of a dying man against every waking moments of his life. Yet, there was also something peculiar and amusing about it; something that made the phrase fell oddly in place for her today.
        She wasn't thinking about dying, but about how the past two decades had shaped her future ones and made her into someone she wasn't. She thought about all the first tastes she had of the world: her first memories was lying down in the back seat of the Toyota with a red Mickey Mouse pillow on her face and sticking her legs against the windscreen; her first favourite word was power failure because it sounded like pow and flower and she shouted it everytime the house went dark; her first dream was to own a white house in Courtyard with a swimming pool and swirling mists and the sweet scent of fresh grass. Now, she couldn't even imagine how sweet tasted to her, not in the same way.
        It was a sad fact that the more we owned of the world, the more we owed. One of them: the child within ourselves. But then, that was always the irony of life, wasn't it? We spent a lifetime searching for all sorts of achievements, - the perfect schools, the perfect grades, the perfect testimonials, the perfect resumes, the perfect job, the perfect self everyone expected you to be - only realising much later, when almost a third quarter of our life was gone, that all we have to do was look down. Yes, time was indeed an old bald cheater, and we the yesterday's fools who strut and fret our hours to the days of dusty deaths. 

The Green Mile-A Review

We each owe a death,

There are no exceptions.

But Oh Lord,

Sometimes the green mile seems so long.

These were the words spoken by a man who once witnessed the death of someone who shouldn't die-a man who now desires to die, but couldn't.
        "It was my punishment," he sighed. Those very words sent a deep pang of sorrow into Anne's heart. She felt awfully sorry that while blood was shed and bones were piled upon men's insatiable search for immortality, there were some who reached the point where they had nothing more to be gained from living.
        Speaking about death, the ubiquitous question would be:"What would we do in the face of death?". But had we ever thought of this:"What would we do if we witnessed death?". This movie cast death in a whole new light-death in the eyes of the prisoners, the executioners and the witnesses of the execution. While she found it agonizing for the prisoners to count their remaining days when death was literally just next door, Anne simply couldn't bear the thought of watching death at such a close distance-much less executing it on someone else, even if they deserved it.
        That was why she cried so hard during the execution of John Coffey. She couldn't fathom the state of mind of people who had so little left in this world that they wished for nothing but to leave. It wasn't that her strong urge of survival guided her into subconsciously projecting it onto those who had lost theirs, but the undeniable fact that life was once and forever. No matter what they believed death allegedly had to offer-an escapade from mortal sufferings or an afterlife as depicted in religious metaphors-they must also believe that everyone lived for a special reason, especially someone with a gift like John.
        In Anne's eyes, a true hero didn't need superpowers, but the courage to save the world from all its sufferings. With that belief in mind, it didn't really matter how long the green mile stretched, because every minute of our journey had been worthwhile.
        And that, Anne felt, was the true essence of immortality which everyone had been seeking all along.

Luck and Fate-A New Light

Anne once read that whether or not people believe in fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something went wrong. Do you think it's your fault-that if you'd tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?
        But for Anne, believing in fate is akin to believing in a greater force beyond human-that even after you'd tried better and worked harder, you'd still believe that something good would turn out from something bad. It isn't right to think that bad things will keep on happening, because just like good lucks, you eventually run out of bad lucks too.
        That was why Anne started to doubt herself when the news about the changes made to her university placement reached her. Idealism wasn't presented to her in the form of Kasturba Medical College, but she glinted hope in J.J.M. Medical College, and she took it, believing that fate promises her something good out of the present.
        Now, Anne began to see herself in a new way. She might not be as lucky as everyone else, but in the face of life-turning moments, luck never fail her. That was how she realised that she had been a lucky person all along.