The Last One

It's been 18 hours since you sent your last message, an exact 18 hours of idleness and insomniac waiting. There's not so much for me to do than looking at the blip at the bright phone screen. Over and over I read your one and the last sentence for me, pondering whether this vague sense of eternal separation might finally come true in due time.  After all, it conveniently came at the weekend, when there's not so much works to run for distraction.

Of course, I've been thinking of going to the office which is within walking distance. There's internet (and with no one at the office I could use all the bandwidths for my pleasure). There's supply of cheap, instant coffee, too. There are also some security officers that may provide me with some uninteresting chats about football and silly politicians' antics that I would gladly endure just to kill time. But even these would not do much I think.
In the last 18 hours I've burned my cigarettes like a wildfire. I thought maybe if I burned this much I'd have killed enough brain cell to escape from you and your silence. Maybe if I devoutly burned this cigarettes like incenses I'd appease Father Time that he would come and save me. But there wasn't Father Time. There weren't dead brain cells. If any, this only gave me a bitter, raspy voice like Tom Waits on bronchitis.

This bedroom didn't help me at all. Whenever I tried to close my eyes, your image lingers permanently in my optic nerves. And so I decided to walk outside. The moon was a yellow slit not unlike a cat's eye. The sky was clear, albeit starless, with the air that bore a faint scent of mud from the last night's heavy rain.

Come to think of it, missing you is not entirely new for me. I still remember that day when you told me you were about to go somewhere that afternoon, in the coffeeshop by the airport.

"Where will you go?"

"I don't know. I'm still deciding. Most likely, I'll go somewhere randomly. You will know by the time I come back."

"So I can't contact you whatsoever? What if something bad happen to you?"

"Of course you can try. I just can't promise I can answer your chats or calls. Maybe you will get the clue of where I am going from the pictures I post online. Maybe not. You should stop worrying all the time."

You went almost a week to an indigenous community on a mountain, beyond the east of our city, the place where the imperial sun rise always greeted by the vast sand plateau. You said you were almost made a priestess. You said you taught school lessons their children. You said that the potatoes there were the best you've ever tasted, and the afternoon serene, and the morning dew you've always met when you woke up was as cold as snow. You came home with a lot of stories, but without answering messages I sent you.

You were always like that, either not telling me anything or telling me everything; everything, the truth, and nothing but the truth. Telling lies is not your policy. Often, at times, I was left with either the pain of not knowing or the pain of sharp words of your truth; either restlessness or anguish bordering on the depression. I know this too well, yet perhaps still too weak-hearted to accept.

But your last message cut me twice. I didn't know what drove you to wrote that, and I know once you wrote that you really meant the truth, which was quite hurtful to swallow. Everything was so fine yesterday, two days ago, even last week or last month. And my attempt to inquire you the reason was futile until this very hour.

Strangely, I didn't feel like eating, too. My stomach was as aimless as my feet. 

I hauled a cab and went to the supermarket. It was nearby, thankfully the driver didn't refuse because it's too short of a distance.

It was fully roamed by people, flocking like ants near the spills of picnic basket. I was looking at the fruits when behind me came a group of adolescents. I heard one of them saying something about the pain of shopping with women and the time it takes. It seemed like the rests of the group nodded in affirmations.

Supermarket, for you, is not merely a place to buy things. It is a feast for the eyes. You could spend almost half a day in there, and you're also the one who taught me this therapy. You showed me that there's a child in us who finds her kindred spirit in candies and chocolate bars; that there's a calming happiness in the ordered placements of fresh fruits and the bright green faces of vegetables; that there's some ritualistic satisfaction in comparing the prices and qualities. Even there's a quiet joy in seeing some stuff that are actually useless to your daily life, like that bottle of extra virgin olive oil, or balsamic vinegar. Every time you touch it you can always imagine yourself, being a world class chef, babbling about fancy-but-quickly-made recipe on a cable TV show. It shows you something that you can always try, but not quite, because you cannot take the risk of wasting expensive ingredient on half-cooked, failed dishes. That ephemeral dream is the beauty of supermarket isles, yet also its charm — a hypnotic one, if I may say. I sometimes dream of this one specific scenario.

In my dream I was alone in the supermarket. Its isles gave me a task (spoken in the air, in silence that I could listen) to buy something of no specificity. I walked from one isle, grabbed onto something, thinking that this is the thing that I must buy. But it said, still in silence, that it was not that. So I went to the second isles, scanning, taking the next best thing I thought would suffice. But it was not that. And then the isles showed me a multitude of, if not an infinite, possibilities of the thing that I could try to buy. An ocean of supermarket isles laid before my eyes. Infinite. Unending. When I took the next one thing, the lamps suddenly went off, and the supermarket closed. The time was up.

Today it made me lost once again, not in the dream but in aluminum-and-concrete reality. In the end I only took a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes, never knew of what's best in there.

On the street outside the supermarket there were various food vendors. I sat on one creaky plastic cane chair while planning to make a decision. I found the food you really want to eat earlier this week. I ordered that food and ate it, even though the hunger was still nowhere. The taste was terrible. I imagined you would also said so, maybe even verbally express complaints, especially since your taste palate is much sharper than mine. I lit another cigarette and sipped what's left from the mineral water bottle when it dawned on me to look at my phone once again, trying to make sense of everything. I thought maybe I disappointed you in some way — in the sense that I am weak without you, in the sense that I am just a chunk of meat without you, and you didn't deserve this man in the form of me. Or perhaps you were trying to teach me something, that maybe in losing you I will finally find my strength. Or maybe it's that you are the wind, which can't settle in one place, always a wanderer. The time is up for me this time, and as the season changes, you will blow in the opposite corner of the world. The ephemeral dream may be over, and I have to wake up.

Under your last message is mine asking "Why?" It's still unread.