A Lifetime.

That fucking riff, I swear to God.

                “Well, you’re going to have to come with me eventually,” she said, exasperated.

                “You can’t stay in your room forever, you know.”

                “I can, actually; give me enough movies and games and I’ll stay here for all eternity.”

                “People have settled for less, believe me. Attachments and what not, it makes my work harder than it should be. I swear, you people take procrastination to a whole new level.”

                She wasn’t a stranger. We’ve met a couple of times but we never spoke directly. She was always occupied with other matters at hand to actually spare me her attention. I thought of her often; much too often for a normal person at least. I kept myself happy with the thought that she had me in mind too.

                “Look,” she sighed and massaged her temple. “It’s going to be fine, it’s just a trip. Rather than stay here and do nothing, why don’t you just come with me and if you behave, we’ll at least have some fun.”

                “But I can have fun right here. I can have fun doing absolutely nothing at all. I don’t need to take some fancy trip. Go without me, you’ll be much better off without my endless whining.”

                Her expression softened and she smiled. Her hazel eyes seemed to pierce through every single defence I had, her smile was the coup de grace that completed the assault on my senses. My body screamed out a silent alarm but my mind was already swayed; she held it in a vice grip and refused to let go.

                “You know I can’t do that.”

                “B-but where will I end up?” My voice trembled as fear slithered across my body.

                “That’s entirely up to you.” She noticed the uncertainty in my voice and put her hands on my shoulders. Autumn. That was what she smelled like. “Just think of it this way. I’m the vehicle and you’re the driver. I can get you there but you’re the one that must guide me.”

                “What if I end up in the wrong place?” She laughed and the whole room seemed to brighten. “No, don’t laugh, I’m being absolutely serious!”

                “I know, I know. It’s just that I’ve been asked that question so many times, it’s become absolutely hilarious.” She sighed, grabbed a chair, sat, crossed her legs and lit a cigarette, all in a naturally swift motion. “Here’s a tip.” She blew two smoke rings in my direction and stared at them as they floated slowly towards me. “There is no wrong choice.”

                “What? Of course there is. If I take a wrong turning somewhere, I’ll end up lost and alone and angry for not stopping to ask for directions.”

                “See, that’s the problem. You can’t exactly equate something of this magnitude to everyday life. It doesn’t work that way. You’ll be fine.”

                “How can you be so sure?” She scrunched up her face and ruffled her already messy hair, as if by doing so, she could better arrange her thoughts.

                “Well, I have been doing this for quite a while now. People who are usually sure of themselves tend to get it all wrong, in this case at least. Like Alexander.”

                “Alexander?”

                “Oh, just a king I knew. I had no pleasure at all working with him. Such a bossy little bastard. My point is that it’s okay to be doubtful and unsure of yourself. It’s a surprisingly positive trait - believe me I know. I’ve met tonnes of people who are so ready to take the journey but at the end of it, they realised that they aren’t exactly in a place that they thought they should be.”

                We sat in silence for a while. I, contemplating what I should do and she… Well, she must have had a lot to think about.

                “Did I do well? What if I made a mess of everything?”

                “You did what you could,” she said.

                “But I didn’t have enough time. I wanted to do so much more. I know I could do so much more.”

                “We all think we can achieve much more. That’s just how we’re wired. At the end of the day, you get what everybody else gets.” She crushed the cigarette and tossed it out of the window. “A lifetime.”

                “Do I have a choice in this matter? Or do you already know the conclusion to this?” She laughed again and nearly fell out of her chair if she had not steadied herself in time.

                “I know nothing of the sort. That’s more of Destiny’s alley and I don’t think I like getting mixed up with his line of work. It’s all a bit too philosophical for me. As for a choice, of course you have one. We all make our own decisions, regardless.”

                “You mean I can choose to not go with you?”

                “Yes, of course. You make me sound like a tyrant.”

                “But… What will happen to me?”

                “I don’t know. There aren’t any monsters that’ll come for you - well, not that I know of. I should I ask around about that,” she mused. “You’ll spend your days alone. Wandering here and there. If you don’t know already, there isn’t much for you to actually do in your condition.”

                “Oh, okay.”

                She stood up and all of the sudden, her demeanour changed. She became more powerful, in a sense, her brows knitted and her eyes stern. I shrunk back in fear even though she did not emanate any malice.

                “The question here is will you be content that way? Can you accept living in such cowardice? Can you honestly say that you would like to live like that? I refuse to believe that you’re that sort of person but all you need to do is say yes and I’ll leave.”

                I buried my face in my hands and felt the reins to my life’s carriage spiral out of control. I was powerless and I needed to make a decision.

                “No.” I managed to croak. “No, I don’t think I want to be that way.”

                “Good.” She straightened her sleeveless black shirt and brushed a stray hair off her jeans. “Glad we worked that out. I hate being all serious and logical and menacing. What do you have to be afraid of, anyway? We all make mistakes and when that happens, it’s not the end of the world.”

                “You don’t understand.”

                “Why? Because I’m me? Fuck you for saying that. One day, everything will have to end. I’ll mop the floors, rearrange the chairs, give the windows one final shine and then I’ll turn the lights out. What do you think happens to me then? The same thing that happens to you. It might not be tomorrow, hell, it might not even be a hundred billion years from now but it will happen. You know what I’m going to do then?”

                “No.”

                “I’ll turn around, look at how far I’ve come and then I’ll leave quietly.” She grinned. “Of all the beings in creation, I understand what you’re going through the most.”

                I couldn’t explain how I felt then but it was as if a great burden was lifted from my aching shoulders. Her words comforted me somehow, through her words I managed to discern that we weren’t as different as I initially thought. Someday, everything must come to an end.

                She smiled, stood up and put the chair exactly in the place it was before.

                “You ready?”

                I nodded.

                She walked towards the door and her boots thumping on the floor served as the music to our final departure.

                “Hey, Death?”

                “Yes, love?”

                “I - I’m so scared.”

                She turned around and wrapped her hands around me. Her warmth was breathtaking. It felt like an eternity until finally, she parted. With one hand on the door, she extended the other to me.

                “Take my hand and don’t let go,” she whispered. I gripped her hand tight. “You’re ready.”

                She opened the door.

                I heard the beating of a thousand wings.

*

I had this fucking crazy dream yesterday. I can't even fucking begin to describe it. I woke up, booted the computer and thank God for my dream journal.

"I decided to go on a pilgrimage to a mosque, but it wasn’t Mecca. It seems like a Shi’a mosque and I wanted to go there because I’ve been there before. There was a girl with me, she was extremely determined to make a change within the society.

The place we went to was like a couple of floors and the dream took on a different meaning when we got to a new floor, on the first it was about the girl.

She was telling me about her work with the society and even the Muslim KKK thing and then there they were, in all their splendour. Wearing the typical KKK clothing, complete with the cone sheet only it was in red and black and gold fringed at the hem and practicing what I think was some form of martial art. We watched them and then the girl went to talk with them and became close to this little boy who couldn’t have been more than five but was already in the outfit. That made me sad.

She told me people didn’t believe that she had actually achieved some success in changing the group (For better or worse, I can’t say) but she actually did it, and she gave me terms that seemed plausible like atrophy of the society from within and so on. It was a cult but she doesn’t seem to realise that and for some reason I didn’t tell her.

She might have been pretty which might explain why I didn’t tell her to stop wasting my time and fuck off.

Then I felt as if my teeth had holes I them. My lower incisors to be exact, it felt as if below the permanent retainers, there were fucking holes. I played with this defect and fucking hell, eventually the shit fell out, with the fucking retainer and everything.

Let me make that clear. All of my fucking lower incisors fell. Out of my fucking mouth. And I was sure by then that I was in a dream because sweet mother of fucking Cheetos, if that had happened in real life, I would’ve screamed like a little pussy.

It wasn’t rotted or anything. It was white but just beneath the retainer there was this signs of wear and sharply demarcated borders of the holes and fuck, I was so calm when I should’ve panicked. Then the dream became somewhat trippy. I dreamt about the dentists that I managed to somehow meet. The dentist was on another floor and she was introducing all these new technologies. One of them was using mounds of bacteria to mould teeth.

Fuck man, I don’t even know how that shit is possible. She showed me how, basically it was having a scaffold material in the shape of teeth and guiding these… Bacteria to it using light on a specific spectrum to enhance their secretion of whatever the fuck makes teeth. But somehow the thing had problems so I returned back to the mosque.

Without fucking lower incisors. Just… Stumps of broken teeth grinding against my upper incisors.

I got to the last floor and … I just can’t believe my eyes. Beauty. The mosque. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The floors were carved with delicate patterns, there was a massive door that was covered with intricate carvings. The floor was marble yet there was a central thing that looked like wood but was actually stone and my fucking goodness, I was in so much awe. Oh God. Bhaiyya was there and I was wondering if I could take pictures and then I saw people in fucking Ihrams and what not using iPads and iPhones and shit so I just took pictures but I knew that shit can never compare to seeing it with my own eyes. And my teeth were still gone.

I suddenly remembered being at Pu Zamani’s house; not the Penang one, this was something I created out of nothing, and seeing this one book and I remember clearly the cover was blue and the letters were gold. 1993 I remember the date of the book but the title eludes me.

Inktrotter. YES. Actually I think that’s the one. And it was a gorgeous book and it would’ve played a bigger role but I woke up. What I remember is opening it and within the sleeve is this really fucking awesome gold rimmed blue paper that taught me something but fuck, I can’t remember."

Man, I really want to meet like a fucking dream analyst and fucking bombard him/her with this shit.

*

Things I Want to Desperately Do Once I'm A Doctor.

Scenario One

Come up with something so fucking outrageous, so fucking incomprehensible, so fucking dementedly far-fetched and then, with a straight face, the straightest face in all existence, say the following:

Trust me. I'm a doctor.

Scenario Two.

Patient: So, doc, I hope you have good news for me because today has been a pretty damn good day. My son just graduated, my  daughter just made her first million and my wife just became twenty years younger!

Me: THAT'S METASTATIC!

Patient: Pardon me?

Me: I meant fantastic.

Patient: Oh, okay, I thought you said... Nevermind...  Anyway, your car is in the workshop? What's wrong with it?

Me: Well, I guess you can say that it's... Terminal.

Patient: Why... Are you acting weird and using these forced terms?

Me: Oh, I don't know, maybe I'm feeling a bit... Malignant ... Today?

Patient: ... Okay, I think I'm just going to find out about my test results and leave. Am I going to be alright, doc?

Me: Holy fucking shit, you have cancer for god's sake. Do you know how hard it is to make these god damned puns?!

Scenario Three

"What, you wanna fucking go bro? You wanna take me on?"

"I would but I don't want to waste my dephosphorylation processes and waste so much Adenosine triphosphatase just so that we could engage in a good old romp."