A2z

18 November 2024 - Tuesday

The times I actually go out to buy newspaper must skip between years if I'm complaining about it being RM2.00 now when I remember it being RM1.20 then RM1.60. Even in the collages made that incorporate newspapers, it is usually circumstantial, laying about, the carelessly titled and carefully fonted headlines collecting debris and my fat mouth asking "Hey, can I have this?" at someone's house or at local markets that get me free stacks upon stacks. Madonna says "A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That’s why they don’t get what they want”, I cut this phrase neatly from the celebrity section of a local newspaper and collaged it on the back of a folder as motivation at the time. I’ve since lost the folder, but not the memory of this statement.

The lights in Sara's room were on even though she's out there being Malaysia's No.1 Sweetie Pie™️ in South Korea. Drey had been living on an island and brought his friend Leo to stay over with my family for the past week. I had the privilege of getting to know her. What a trance the tapestry of timing and destiny is that this Polish girl from Germany is currently housed in this small village in Johor. My conservative Indian grandmother often compliments her tattoos and I wonder if she'll be as proud and accepting to see some on my skin? Well, my friends, I know I will not live to tell that story. She's travelling the world for the next three years, just like Ki was when he came to stay with M and I earlier this year. 

If I was any younger, I would be instantly swooned and swept with the idea that whatever anyone else was doing and telling me about was a message from the universe that I was meant to receive as "Go baby, Go do that!". But that's undiagnosed tendencies speaking with a sprinkle of doubt and a garnish of CUCKOO! With time, I've come to recognise the face of my own path and water the garden. Saying Good for you and feeling it by muscle memory that what I want for myself is something only I know the depths of and can solve. Flowers don't recognise each other by specific species, only by naturist instinct of friend or food - pest or fertiliser - work against or together. This is the rear view mirror reflection I must emulate, recognise, be...Only..I'm less tree and more personnel with overdue library books in need of good songs and better stamina. Looking at the state of my studio right now thinking....If only I could duplicate myself, train someone to draw and think and be exactly like me in the workplace to get things up to speed..Maybe take fevers and migraines in my place, sieve unpleasantries on my behalf; Give me the good stuff - Just means I've developed standards for myself that I need to meet. 

1.00AM

Playing tour guide is my favourite past time, this is when I realise my revolt is because I actually have a crush on this country. "He's not good for you", "But daddy I love him!" is more like it. Exchanging conversation, experiences, thoughts on current issues, empathising, emphasising, allowing people to hangout in my studio, peeling garlic for a familial meal. This saturates my being with purpose and illuminates it with imagination. A drop of water in the ocean, dried leaf to be grind ground, to be renewed into soil for a tree that gives sap, that gives air, that gives life. Being an active participant of the bigger picture is a fundamental building block of a person coming out of their head and into their skin (read: leaving the room to shake hands and converse when distant relatives come to visit) 

20 November 2024 - Wednesday 

"Details die with time and stories change", Mahmoud Darwish writes with no intent on inspiring an aspiring serial daydreamer in her unintelligible pursuit of interventional documentation but here we are. Online shopping platforms stay making money, the post office stays making money, layers of plastic wrappers stay clinging on every package patiently awaiting my excitement. Opened a package from Jogja with care, from Raisa, with love. A talented artist and dear friend who sent me an original piece that travelled from there to here. She embossed a white archival with her own drawing and design, so skilful upon first glance that you check the cleanliness of your hands twice before handling this piece. This year has witnessed frequent trading and me, collecting my friends' artworks. I'd love to buy them all, start an archive, a wonder emporium. For now, I take pleasure in my drawing for this or that person's painting. A poem for a joke, company for a smoke. Actually, I think I'll enjoy this forever.   

21 November 2024 - Thursday

I found her dead body lying in the ditch in my house compound, wet and stiff. It had rained the night before and my cats here, they sleep outside at night. What time did she die? I didn’t know. My mother fails at holding back tears as she cleans the backyard to prepare for the burial, her movements fast and her sniffles audible over oblivious birdsong above us. I have to constantly wipe my eyes clean after hitting one too many dead roots of banana trees while shovelling. Rocket didn’t rush me or meow, she wasn’t being her usual busybody self, sniffing at everything anyone else was doing. She just lay there, a bite mark to her neck, bleeding, dead. I called so many vets within the opening hour, she was dead when we found her but we couldn’t just…take it at that. The calls were to seek clinics providing autopsies to investigate her cause of death. She is after all, the babiest latest addition to the family rescued by my father earlier this year. She is closest to my mother, staying with her through prayers, food prepping and every activity known to man. Call after call told us that either the service isn’t provided here in this district or that there was a waitlist. Stiff and sticky, quiet and gone. The honouring of her life triumphs our own selfish curiosity for causation. Ants started crawling on her eyeballs and my mother and I concluded that was that. Rocket is dead. 

I took what seemed like the cleanest shower after her burial, cutting my fingernails, thinking of her. The last time a cat in this household died was in 2020, my cat, Sani. I feel that same dull throb on the front of my forehead, a clingy ache that reminds its presence just when you feel yourself not thinking of it. I type this to create and not consume because passive blue light distraction is more than I can handle. Kimi G came home from school crying and told me that it’s hard to mourn in science class. His body soaked with heavy rain from standing over Rocket’s grave, his arms shaky and wide, wrapped around me saying this rain speeds up the process of decomposing. Every living creature didn’t ask to be born but upon existence, has to accept that this life is temporary. Except maybe Rocket who didn’t care for why or how she ended up at our house, only that there were good people and even better food, or my bank balance or physical appearances, my latest series, methods or mediums. 

I don’t know what to do today. When Sani died, I wrote a story about it as a way of coping with the loss. It’s been three years and polaroids of him are still on the back of my bedroom door and in my mind, vivid, saturated. The art series that’s splayed in front of me on my studio floor as I write this incorporates photographs of my family members and Rocket is in two of these photographs. She was the kind of kitten who was equal parts feisty, soft, always wanting to be involved in whatever the humans were up to. She would snuggle next to you for a chance at kisses then gnaw on your hands. Sleep in your arms purring and jump wide awake at the slight sound of a possible feeding time. She would sit on my mother’s Al-Qur’an while she was reciting, the torn page numbers now a momento frozen on a bookshelf where the culprit can’t be caught. Her acidic pee stain that simply won’t budge no matter the amount of washes on my favourite bag looks like an abstract painting today. I want to tell her that I see what she was going for now, and that I'm not angry at this magnificent composition. This cat I bottle fed when she was growing up and was most excited to see when I come home for the large personality that was uniquely her, the effortlessly beautiful grey tortoise shell beauty with cola coloured beans. I am smelling my bedsheets for traces of her as yet another piece of my heart lies buried in the backyard. 

23 November 2024 - Saturday

Today is the first day I woke up without crying at her memory. I can’t paint on the pieces that have her on them and am actively avoiding looking at photos of her for now. No matter what I feel, I bear in mind that I mainly live away from home which means this cat had spent a lot of her life on Earth with other members of my family who are here everyday. In this situation, it is my mother who is the primary caregiver to them. Rocket in particular was my mother’s best girlfriend. I have to be strong for my mothers’ sake. I try at rosary beads talking to god, asking for forgiveness to please give me peace and take away this sorrow and guilt upon guilt upon guilt. Sleeping is harder now this has happened. Night terrors have always been a reoccurring theme in my life, jolting awake right before R.E.M. can even begin. This is life with anxiety and self undiagnosing saying, sure, yes, I’m better and your alphabets don’t fit and anyways your pills take me out of my own body and I’m not sure that’s the point anymore. M taught me how to find peace right before sleep, to be my own form of sleepy time serenity, how I am able to channel quiet and surrender into slumber. It has worked most nights but grief was the door I opened when I first told her I loved her, fed her, bathed her and now it is my current address. Write to me here so I can read and weep.

The cats have cat houses outdoors where they sleep. Being raised as outdoor cats, this is their preferred environment. Ofcourse I take it for granted that nothing would happen to them as nothing has before. Ape learns from experience, ape doesn’t know anything but logic of experience. Since she was a kitten, nothing bad had ever occurred from this practice. Until it did. A towering looming guilt shadows my being and everything reminds me of her. Could I have avoided this? Stopped it? Cheated it? If I had come back later, or earlier. If she had slept indoors just that one night…If and if and if. Emotions are unreasonable and I cannot rid it simply because it is unnecessary. I know better but my judgement is clouded by guilt, my rationale is clouded by blame. Rocket is dead and reason is dust.

M tells me that all that I can do is be HERE for the people, pets, things & beings that require my presence. In her honour, I must try. 

Is there another option?