Saturday Afternoon at 1:11 PM

"Listen, stop waiting and move on. You’ve had your chance."

Truth

"We are back in Malacca. We are standing in the driveway of your house and it was raining hard. You are standing at your porch where it’s sheltered and you are dry. I am standing where the rain drenched me and you cannot see me crying.

I ask, looking straight into your eyes; ‘Will you go out with me one last time before you go back to him?’"

Going.

I was snapped from my dream by the loud ‘ding dong’ of my doorbell. I turned on my bed, buried my face into the pillow and threw my blanket over my head. Maybe I dreamt that doorbell sound too. Maybe it’ll go away if I ignore it.

No such chance. I could practically imagine the door bell clearing its throat and preparing for another louder, more obnoxious call – or at least, that was what it seemed like to me.

‘DING DONG!’

‘One minute!’ I hollered, finding my voice emerging as a croak from my parched throat. I was not in the best of humour – so I purposefully took my time to spite the innocent house-caller. I inched to my bathroom and soaked my face with water, noting privately what a pile of shit I looked like in the mirror and deliberated on whether I should brush my teeth first before answering the door. Then, I wiped the last vestiges of a slumber forcefully abandoned from my eyes with my towel and threw on a practically clean shirt before dragging my butt to the tiny anteroom (yes, I call it that to make my dingy little rat-hole sound posh) that separates my bedroom from the great outdoors. On the way, I spotted my water bottle standing beside my laptop on my cluttered, overpopulated desk, and I took a deep draught from it. Mysterious afternoon house-caller can wait. Maybe I should let him ring the doorbell a third time.

‘What if it’s her?’ squeaked pathetically in my mind. I hate it when that happens. I hate it as much as I hate sleeping and dreaming impossible dreams that always leave a horrible, hollow feeling inside me when I wake up.

But that did not stop me from moving a lot faster.

‘Who is it?’ I asked while standing behind my front door in my "anteroom". I always do that unless I am expecting someone. As if it is not enough that I am simultaneously bipolar, depressed, and clinically anti-social; I have to be a paranoid pussy too.

‘Pizza,’ was the heavily Indian-accented answer that came back.

I did not order any pizza, and I do not remember ordering any in my dream either. I unbolted the door and opened it, revealing a bona fide Domino’s Pizza delivery guy in the familiar red-and-blue with a box in his hands. I felt that familiar twinge of disappointment at the back of my head that I have felt a thousand times over every time my doorbell goes off, or my phone rings, or I hear the familiar double-tone of the SMS alert. ‘What if it’s her?’ gets me every time. I’m such a sucker.

‘I did not order pizza,’ I said.

‘This is No. 15, Acharya Compound, no?’ he asked, alternatively re-examining the note taped on the pizza box and looking helplessly at me.

‘No, this is No. 5,’ I said and shut the door.

I threw myself face-down on my bed and said ‘Damn’ into the sheets. It was not the sort of ‘Damn’ people utter with passion in anger, or the sort that escape people’s lips when they are awed or surprised.

It was a dull, expressionless sort of ‘Damn’; the type people say when they feel jaded, emotionally weary, and sick – to the stomach – of life and living.

Gone.

"We are back in Malacca. We are standing in the driveway of your house and it was raining hard. You are standing at your porch where it’s sheltered and you are dry. I am standing where the rain drenched me and you cannot see me crying.

I ask, looking straight into your eyes; ‘Will you go out with me one last time before you go back to him?’

You say yes."

But that was just a dream.



Haunted,
k0k s3n w4i