It turns out that I really don’t quite live in ‘real’ life, do I?
So I went to a cousin’s open house yesterday. I don’t even know why I went, except for such a crushing sense of wrongness if I didn’t. So I dragged my ass off and went.
Incidentally, if you’re gonna do an open house, do it like he did – he’d prepared some main dish, but it’s a potluck that goes on ’till late’. So like the number of guests remained stable at all times, but there were always new people dropping in with new food. So you don’t have to suffer that age-old anxiety of hosts: what if we ran out of food?
Anyway, my cousin is an extreme extrovert and he has like a thousand friends, a lot of which are mutuals from other places so like everybody just kinda knows everybody. Except me, of course. Nobody knew who I was, and I didn’t know who they were, and I wasn’t interested to. I mean, not that I’m snobbish (though I may appear that way) – it’s just that after these small talks we’re not very likely to see each other again and I’m really fine just sitting here observing everything just leave me alone.
And like, just leave me alone because, in order to have small talks, you have to have a normal life. But my life…
I’m 30. (Okay, I’m not, and people give me such grief for saying I’m 30 when I’m not yet but really what difference does it make?)
Belajar lagi ke dah kerja? Yes, fuck this question the most. Fuck it fuckity it and its variations even more than that stupid bila nak kahwin? What the hell am I in this world? Because I can’t talk about being a business development executive (you know, because I don’t know what that job really means), I tried telling people yesterday that I was a teacher. Which was really stupid of me because people will inevitably ask oh mengajar dekat mana? If I was a better liar I might have been able to spin a better tale or just pretended that my program was still ongoing, but yeah… Basically I just looked like a fraud. What do you do? I’m a teacher. Oh, where do you teach? I don’t. It doesn’t fly.
Then if you don’t talk about that, what else do you talk about? Well, some people tried to sembang with me about Malaysia and I just went errrrk. I mean, though physically I’m here, I’m not really here, am I? I don’t know anything about Malaysia, not current events, not politics, not sports, not even tv shows and celebs. I probably know more about Elizabethan England than the world I’m actually living in right now.
A little later a bunch of my cousins arrived. They’re all a bit surprised to see me there, because everyone thought I was still in Lenggong. They found it incredulous that I’ve been here half a year and none of them had heard anything. And they’re like on weekends buat apa? And I’m like duduk rumah je and nobody understood what a bliss it is to just be alone and lost to the world.
Even coming to the open house – except me, nobody bloody came alone. One girl dragged her little niece just so that she didn’t come alone. My host-cousin, who happened to know Ms. Married (actually he’s met all the Misses Married, Martyr, and Ph.D), asked why I didn’t bring Ms. Married along. Then you’d have someone to talk to. I only smiled. He didn’t know how glad I was Ms. Married didn’t come.
During raya I found some tweets from Ms. Married. They’re addressed anonymously, complete with the passive-aggressive tag you-know-who-you-are, but I think they were for me. I might be completely off the mark here, but whatever, you put those public things out there and I was in a sensitive state and they hurt me. Basically, those tweets, if they were for me, were a rant by Ms. Married, an extrovert, condemning how an introvert like me would retreat into myself in the current time when I’m confused and unsure about everything. She accused me (if it was me she meant in those tweets) of not appreciating human relationship enough and that I have thrown her away.
To be fair, I guess she does have a point to some of the things she said, but for some others, I felt like she wrote those things because she could not understand how I could make different life choices from here. Like not wanting to get married. And here we run aground to my perspective that thinks that since she has fucked up her life by getting married, she wants everyone around her to marry, too, so that she isn’t the only one who is fucked. But maybe that’s just my prejudice, I don’t know.
So how did I respond to the tweets? In the classic I’ll-pretend-I-didn’t-see-them. Because what else can I do? Any attempt at talking it out would be seen as further excuses rather than explanation. And anyway she isn’t actually interested in anything that isn’t about her. Which, probably could also be said about me, but at least I’m trying to not impose myself upon others. But of course that means I haven’t been saying anything at all in the group chat, and maybe I’m a little over-sensitive but I feel like she hasn’t said anything either for a very long time when she usually would instigate a convo of some sort every 3 or 4 days. And you know what they say about relationships – they die the moment you stop talking and we certainly have stopped talking. It has been a few years since we really talked (noted somewhere on this blog), and now we have stopped talking. Period.
Am I glad that I have lost them? Despite what Ms. Married might think, no, I actually feel sorry about it. I’m glad for the peace and quiet, but I’m sorry to see a friendship of 10-odd years fizzle into inability to understand one another. We’ve always known that each of us was widely different. People used to marvel how we could even stand each other, much less be friends. Turns out, in the end, we couldn’t.
OtakMonyet 