Merci’s

            Friday morning, I went back to the dry cleaner to collect my bridesmaid gown. And there it was. Hang swiftly in the air wrapped in plastic, it looked as beautiful as the day I first saw it. I still remember the day. I was driving leisurely down the Legian road, looking out the window to the serene Bali’s air. I saw the dress on a mannequin in a small boutique. It was love at first sight.

            I learned from the dressmaker that the dress was often bought by Japanese tourists. They came to Bali for a harmless holiday, found love in the magical island, and the next thing they know, they were shopping for a wedding gown. So I called it my elopement gown.

            I paid the bill, and dodging through the cruel Surabaya’s morning sun, held out the dress high. Halfway to the car I couldn’t help imagining that in a silent chapel somewhere, a restless man and a priest were waiting for me. The organ was playing the Wedding March. I was the bride, just picked my humble gown, hurrying to meet them.

            Feeling an indescribable excitement, I tried to bring back my thoughts to reality. You’re just the bridesmaid, dear.

            But, the thought of love (or is it romance?), even as only an imagination was enough to brighten our days. Don’t you think so?

For Christine: the real bride.

            Wrestling out of my clothes in my gym’s changing room, I found myself listening to a couple of university students’ conversation. They were watching the small TV placed above the lockers. Christian Sugiono’s pretty face was on the screen, advertising something we all were not paying attention to.

            “Too bad he’s marrying that girl,” one girl said.

            I couldn’t help myself, so I asked her, “Then, who should he marry?”

            “Well, I don’t know, probably Sandra Dewi?’, ‘At least, they wouldn’t have to go abroad to get married,” she answered, smiling.

            I returned her smile.

            I wanted to say that love doesn’t choose.

            But I kept my mouth shut, knowing that it’s just something she would have to learn by herself, in time.

            Like I did.

             I was sitting with a group of middle-aged women talking about the concept of beauty. I gave them a piece of paper and told them to write down 5 things that they like about their physical self. They were smiling, one of them grumbling that  after they passed 35 years old, they practically don’t have anything they like about themselves.

            The next 5 minutes I told them to write down 5 things they don’t like about themselves. No more hesitance. This time no one had any problems. Everyone was jutting down ‘thigh’, ‘tummy’, ‘hair’, ‘wrinkles’, ‘lips’, ‘neck’, and so on.

            We had a good laugh by the time everyone finished reading out their list. Then, one of my students looked me in the face, and asked me to do what they just did.

            I thought for a moment.

            I stumbled through my ‘like’ things, and sailed through my ‘dislike’ things.

            The truth is, no matter how old you are, it’s easier to say, “I hate my fat tummy”, than, “I adore my eyes”.

            This is something that happened years ago, but suddenly while having a shower, it hit me clearly like it just happened the day before. I was having dinner with some of my best friends. One of them is married and was very pregnant, and her husband, contrary to the usual tendency of best friend’s spouses, is happy to join our routine get-together.

            The dinner was wonderful, as I remembered it, but as we were closing down the night, my friend’s husband leaned on to a nearby table and greeted his acquaintance. The man was sitting with a male friend. He was older, heavy set and, well, plain looking. He was talkative and friendly. We were politely introduced, and before long we were engaged in a short conversation that left me wondering until now.

            My friend’s husband started off by complaining about his wife’s pregnancy. She was actually swollen from head to toe, and suffered form acne, a lot of acne. Worse than that, she was itching all over (at this point I started to have a pregnancy-phobia, if there is such term). The man nodded his head and soothed my friend’s husband by saying that it happened to her wife too when she had been pregnant with her first baby.

            And then, he said this.

            “Of course, when I married her, she was very slim and pretty, otherwise, I wouldn’t marry her.” He grinned widely.

            “Here…let me show you,” he produced an old picture from his wallet.

            I don’t remember the face in that picture, but it was a pretty face, and I agreed wholeheartedly with the man. What I didn’t agree and still don’t is the fact that he made it important to show us the old picture. It’s like we would think differently about him had we known he married a big pimply woman from the start.

            Thinking about it longer now, I realized that I would think differently about him had he married a big pimply woman from the start.

            Have you ever seen a couple walking down the mall, hand in hand, the female looking like a supermodel and the male looking like, well, not a model of any kind (unless he was posing for the Fortune 500 perhaps), and thinking ‘Wow! He must be very rich’, or, ’That guy is definitely something!’, or, ‘He’s lucky!’, or… well, you can think of load of things that are ‘positive’ about the guy.

            The truth is a beautiful girl ‘upgrades’ a guy’s status.

            And it makes me sad.

            And a little mad.

A single phone call away,

A thirty minutes ride,

Why are we throwing away,

All these feelings that felt so right,

If I could,

And if you would,

Maybe it should,

Be so easy like one two three,

So simple like do re mi,

So pretty like rhapsody,

So real like you and me,

So if I could,

(And maybe I should),

Surely we would,

Be good

            Saturday night, the music was deafening, I was sitting with a bunch of new friends. A guy, basically screaming to beat the music, asked me what I do for a living. I repeated the same answer I’d given to his friends earlier that night. It was almost painfully unbearable for me to answer such tedious, though normally fine, question.

            What you do for a living. Where you live. What you do in your spare time. And so on. And so on. You know the drill. You probably know the sequence too. Wouldn’t you be more interested to someone who doesn’t give a hell about what you do for a living?

            I looked with envy across the room where a pair of young lovers sat facing each other. The girl’s expression was childlike, imploring, and a little playful. The boy, whose face was facing the other direction was inaccessible for me, but he must have said something really interesting to her, or probably when you’re in love, anything’s interesting.

            How many of you actually read the introduction of a book? Most of us would jump right in to the chapters. It’s a silly wish, but I wish that’s the same thing with life.

            Did you happen to watch the talk show on couples who had a ‘special’ wedding day? A couple celebrated their wedding on a skating rink, others had their own on a locomotive, underwater, up on the sky. Crazy things people do in the name of love! (Although, I’m not sure that spending hundreds of millions for a ‘conservative’ wedding party is not even crazier!)

            Anyway, it’s valentine’s day! And anyone can be (or pretend to be) love-struck. My sister who has a special visit from a special friend was busy looking for a special place for their rendezvous. I myself was confined to spending the pink day on a friend’s wedding, a painful reminder of the partiality of romance toward non-single people.

            So, there we were, two young women putting on colors upon our faces, our mind busy deciding which dress to put on, and which shoes that fit in. Every now and then, I would steal a glance at my sister’s face, found a different kind of what Sheryl Crow’s rightfully claimed as “light in your eyes”, and wondered if I were on my way to meet a special someone too, I would probably look as radiant as she was.

            Hmm…

            Don’t you just love love?

            Listening to the radio one afternoon on my way to work, I heard an old song of Chrisye played. It was about a young man who met a young woman just outside his home and later found out that the woman lived just next to his house. He then proclaimed how his heart was taken by the woman.

            It was, as most 80’s pop songs, a little cheesy. And unlikely to happen, so to speak. I mean, what are the odds of finding the love of your life just by stepping outside your front door? But then again, I am talking in the present time. In this present world, the only people you could find outside your door were in-house maids (with their cell phones!), and occasionally cute little babies and toddlers.

            Which reminds me of the family who live on the back of our house. I don’t know their names, I don’t know how many people live there, but about two years ago, baby’s cries was heard everyday, and my family felt as if we were having a new baby. When the crying started to stop, we realized that the baby had grown. Just a few months ago, we started to hear melodies played by inexperience hands on a battery-operated toy that looks like a small piano. I can’t help remembering my toddler days when I started to appreciate the beauty of music.

            I know nothing about the family, but they bring back lots of beautiful memories. Isn’t it wonderful?

            Have you ever wondered about the people who live just beside you or behind you, separated only by bricks of wall? How do they live, what do they do, how do they spend their days? Isn’t it a little funny to think that we all live so close yet we are so apart?

            Well, with this renewed spirit of community, I am finishing this post and taking my two lazy feet for a little walk in the neighborhood. I probably won’t meet a soul, but as the saying goes, sometimes life surprises you.

        New Years always gave me mixed feelings. In the midst of people celebrating, it’s impossible not to put a happy face, but it’s also impossible not to realize that a new year meant on older me.

        I had tried to accept getting older as an inevitable natural process, therefore was meant to do nothing but good for me. However, I secretly wished at some point in my life, I would suffer a certain curious case that might make me age backward, and not forward.

        Talking about age and getting older, every Thursday afternoon, I would go to Gillian’s house, a student of mine, and while waiting for the door to be opened, I looked across and found the same sight every week.

        An old woman sitting idle on a wheelchair, facing the street, looked back at me. Sometimes, her grandchildren played behind her; more often than not, she was alone.

        An hour later, I would go out of the same house, and involuntary I would look across again and the old woman would still be sitting there, in the same spot, the same pose, still doing nothing.

        We would exchange glances again. Not long, but enough. And if eyes could really talk, hers must be talking about loneliness.

        At home, I looked at the calendar, found out that it was February already, and wondered, “Hey! Where did January go?”

        Don’t you sometimes wish you can stop time and spend a little longer on moments that truly give you joy before it slips away?

Friday night, I accompanied my dad to a wedding reception. We were picked up by a neighbor who took his 10y.o. daughter. So, the four of us made quite a curious group. I was surprised to find myself amused by the chatty little girl. With her round glasses, her legging, her plump belly and her too casual party dress, she actually reminded me of the little girl in Little Miss Sunshine.

            The party went…well, just like any other parties. The ride back home was actually more interesting. I sat at the back with the little girl, who wanted to send me a song through her cell phone. Regretfully, I told her that my cell phone was unable to do such thing (which was probably another sign for me to buy a new one!) and asked her to play the song instead so we could listen to it together.

            And so, she played the song. It was HSM3’s (High School Musical 3) soundtrack. After the song was finished, I asked her to tell me the story of the movie. Enthusiastically she told me the story of her favorite movie. If you have ever had the pleasure of listening to a below-12y.o.-teen storytelling, you would understand the difficulty of actually understanding what they’re telling you. The plot moved back and forth, the character were all mixed up, I only recalled the main female character was the head of the cheerleader team, and the main male character was the captain of the basketball team. But, she wrapped her story up in these simple sentences.

            “The point is,’ the girl looked straight to my eyes, ‘you must not give up.”

            “You must fight for your dream.”

            Then, she fell silent. Probably tired, and recalling her countless journey to the bathroom earlier that night, and the amount of food she ate, I thought it was only natural that she was tired.

            I looked out to the street. I couldn’t remember when I began to stop fighting for a dream. When I was her age, I wanted to be an astronaut. I thought it was the best job ever. Now, my recollection to that childhood dream was limited to the occasional awed glances to the sky, wondering still how it felt to see the earth from the vastness of the universe.

            Don’t you think that growing up (sometimes) sucks?

—–

            Earlier that day, my student’s mother told me that as a woman I had at least two more years before I tie the knot. We were chatting in her porch, her daughters trotting around, attended by babysitters. I looked at the scene before me, and frankly I didn’t have the urge to enter motherhood that soon. Then the mother gave me this piece of advice.

            “Don’t expect to find the perfect man. Growing old, you’ll find that your expectation was reduced bit by bit.”

            I wondered what other dreams were supposed to reduce to make life and reality fit.

—–

            Back to the back seat, I looked sideway to my chatty company. Her head was thrown backward, her thin lips were parted a little. She was fast asleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if right at that moment, she was dreaming of herself as the lead cheerleader, screaming to the audience, sending prayers and admiring glances to the main court, where the heartthrob captain was throwing the three-point throw that saved the game…