An annual affair
During the last night in Taiping, I thought about how I'd been in that room, in that same spot and on the same foam mattress, since I was born. Everything about my surroundings was almost exactly the same as it had been since forever. The furniture, the way things were arranged, the clocks, the bedspreads, the curtains...you could tell everything belonged to an older generation. The furniture. Everything was the same but I was different, honestly, I'd never felt so lost.
Somehow the years spent there just started flashing through my mind. When I was a mere toddler, the toilet and room doors were green, my grandparents had them repainted since. In primary school, taking badminton rackets from my aunt's room next door and playing in the room...my aunt is now married and has moved out for good. During the secondary school years, where for the first time I started feeling that I missed my friends when I was in Malaysia. The post-secondary school years where I felt I was living in so many worlds I didn't know which one to grow attached to.
I remember, during the last night in Taiping, I had dropped my earring on the floor and I could not find it. My whole family stopped whatever they were doing and helped me search for it. I'd given up myself...but everyone was still very much into it. My grandfather brought out the broom, and everyone else was on the floor and feeling with their hands. That's when I thought to myself, that my family is only together in Taiping and it's never complete without my grandparents. It's only in Taiping where I don't have that resentment in me to be with my "whole" family.
The funny part is, everyone had stopped searching, and I was just thinking about things that had happened since November and whatever I had said in the paragraph above..but I must have looked really sad because everyone started searching all over again, thinking that I was sad because of the missing earring.
---
The morning I left Taiping, I remember feeling the same way I've felt since the day I started being able to feel - the fearful anticipation of being saudade.
Saudade. A deep longing or yearning for something that does not exist or is unattainable; an emptiness, like someone or something should be there in a particular moment but is missing, and this absence is felt by the individual.
Despite this feeling in me, I know I've always walked around acting like nothing is wrong. I eat like I usually do, I pack my bag, I smile at my grandmother whom I love, I nod at everything my grandparents tell me about life. I wondered if perhaps everyone was feeling unexplainable inside, yet walked around like everything was okay. Because the only thing worse than not being okay is someone else knowing you're not okay. Someone for whom you wanted to be the best you could be, someone whom you wanted to protect from all the ways you're feeling... But God only knows that inside me I'm not okay. I don't understand why I have to leave. Yet I know that this is just how my world spins. I accept that. Isn't that the one thing that makes all the difference? Acceptance? I look like I bounce back quickly from this emptiness that eats away at anything it can get its hands on. I put on this front because what else could I do.
