Pergi itu lebih dari sekedar meninggalkan rumah satu kamar lebih kosong dan membawa jejak ke tempat-tempat yang lebih jauh, tapi juga
memberi ruang bagi orang-orang terdekatmu untuk menjadi lebih besar, lebih lapang.

Jadi,
semoga jarak memberi ruang, dan ruang memberi lapang.

4/
I wonder if this very corner
was reserved for people who
did not smear blood on their lips.

I thought baring was not a sin;

5/
I have to remember how my name sounds
in unfamiliar mumbles.

Perhaps I'd have caught it spoken
any other time (if any);

6/
There is something fascinating about
wall-facing seating,
no faces and sceneries, colours
intrusive.

I heard the colour orange is best-suited
for dining;

7/
Detours are tolerable when walking
is the last thing you do while you're walking.

I'd never trust maps though, nor will I ever trust
things that turn miles into mere inches;

8/
People make acquaintances
and I don't,
this time not for the usual reason, though;

9/
The better way
to make people leave, instead of burning flames,
they say,
is to leave them cold,

I thought cold would be something I'd withstand,
but they were shutting the wi-fi instead;

10/
This is the way of telling a long story:
split
into
chapters

*End of chapter 10*;

11/
A zoophilic, a pyromaniac, a masochist, a necrophiliac
and a sadist walk into a bar--
conversation and witty punchline ensue,

I wonder if a group of people telling stories and jokes on
disturbing and weird fetishism are
fetishes themselves;

12/
Serenades and midnight-sharp surprises
were not something to swoon over,

Yet another reason to never be a heartthrob;

1/
I had peed three times
in the last hour alone,

I had had so many things going over my head;

2/
With a voice like yours,
don't ever say, "thank you,
hope we'll see you again."

With a voice like mine, I reckon
it'd be okay, though.

Musik Yann Tiersen beberapa hari ini selalu terputar jadi latar. Terngiang-ngiang terus. Beberapa hari yang lalu aku tonton ulang filmnya, Amélie. Entah kenapa, akordeon Yann Tiersen terdengar terus, suaranya yang ramai bergantian dengan nyanyian sayup-sayup, "What can I do/ What can I say/ Loving you dear like I do". Akordeon yang ramai, terus bergantian dengan lirik sendu.

Hari ini aku pergi ke sebuah mall. Entah kenapa sepanjang jalan aku berpikir akan bertemu seseorang di sana. Tidak tahu siapa, tetapi seseorang yang kukenal. Jarang sekali aku berfirasat, dan aku tidak pernah terlalu percaya pula akan firasat. Tapi entah kenapa malam tadi perasaanku kuat sekali, kalau aku akan bertemu seseorang.

Di mall itu aku bertemu seorang kenalan yang kukenal beberapa tahun lalu; tidak kusapa. Aku lihat saja dia, beberapa anak tangga eskalator di depanku. Orang ini tidak kenal dekat denganku, kecuali beberapa minggu. Entah kenapa aku merasa tepat sekali bahwa orang itu yang berlintasan denganku di hari saat firasatku demikian kuat bahwa aku akan berlintasan dengan seseorang. Orang yang tidak istimewa hingga membuatku menerka (dengan pengharapan?) takdir dari kebetulan, tapi juga bukan orang yang melintas hanya selewat; ia hinggap dan terpikirkan.

Selama beberapa hari dimana lagu Yann Tiersen selalu berputar di benakku, ramai akordeon bergantian suara sayup-sayup sendu, aku tidak pernah benar-benar memutar lagunya di ponsel atau laptopku. Malam ini akhirnya aku putar saja benar-benar lagu-lagu Yann Tiersen supaya terdengar di telingaku, benar-benar di telingaku. Akordeon yang ramai. Lalu nyanyian yang sayup-sayup sendu. "Is it a crime that I'm guilty/ Guilty of loving you."



-entri pertamaku dari ponsel. 12:58.

In Sputnik Sweetheart, when Sumire got a job working for the woman she loved, she stopped writing.

She was a passionate writer. Not a particularly great one, but passionate nevertheless. It defined her; it was as important as breathing to her. Yet she stopped. It wasn't the time, wasn't the business; the words just could not come.

Why was that?
I wondered.

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."

Settling in a reconciliation just to avoid the (probably necessary) confrontation: thing I am so, so often found guilty of.

It's long past it; it's no longer relevant; but in some way the fact that I shoved all of it at some corner deep within means that no matter how much I claim myself to be 'past it' I will never thoroughly be.


Just face it, let go of the baggages, et laissez-passer ce qui s'est passé, it's no longer time to keep settling in a half-hearted reconciliation.

If there's one thing I can take from getting into what is essentially a 9 to 5 routine without much room to vary your days, it's that you gotta take whatever form of non-work stuff you can sneak into those 9 to 5 hours (and the customary 1-2hrs daily commuting time before and after).

So here is my daily cup of tea: podcast. Tried to get into it the other day when every song in my music library didn't seem to be clicking, and reaaaaallly got into it! Seriously, I wondered how the hell did I just get into podcast stuff right now and never really cared about it before. But as the cheesy idiom so cheesily put it: better late than never, huh?

I am really still getting a hang of this stuff so I'm still pretty sure I've only just discovered the tip of the mountain. But so far, those are my subscriptions, my daily dose of audio comedy / news / design bits / linguistic bits. Looooove having those thrown in my day every now and then!

For the past couple of weeks, moving about the city on mornings and evenings has been interesting. You try to muscle your way past people, who are trying to muscle their way past other people. It's like there's a rope dangling around their neck, there's a ticking clock numbering their time left; they're moving as if their lives depend on it. And when their lives depend on something, humans are inherently a predator - a mightily feral one, too.

Each time I find myself in the crowd, pushed and bumped to no ends, I am wondering to myself: just what are we contesting anyway? Just what are we turning feral for? A space earned? Some time saved? The sense that you manage to escape just in time before the rope clings around your neck tighter it starts to suffocate you?

We know it is there, the invisible rope dangling around our neck. But sometimes I get the sense that the more we run to escape it, the tighter it held onto you. Some of us thought it is a race against time, maybe it is not; after all, when we're at our own pace, it is just a rope dangling around our neck. Perhaps, we only feel the stranglehold because we're stretching it to its limits. Perhaps, it is a threat us only because we let it be.

Sastra dan fotografi sama-sama memecah-mecah aliran realita ke dalam unit-unit yang bisa disimpan. Dengan cara demikian, unit itu bisa dikuasai, dipergunakan, disusun ulang, dikembangkan. Memang, sastra tidak punya problem etis yang ada dalam fotografi, karena bahasa tak pernah betul-betul menyalin realita. Tapi persis di situlah problem utama bahasa. Ia tak pernah betul-betul menemui realita. Ia adalah sepenuhnya sistem tanda, yang tak pernah bersentuhan langsung dengan kenyataan. Fotografi mencuri, menjiplak, menyalin realita. Bahasa membangun model sendiri tentang realita, tanpa persentuhan dengan realita. Para linguis era modern telah lama memetakan bahwa tak ada kontak langsung antara kata dengan referensinya. Apapun yang diketahui melalui bahasa adalah palsu belaka. KW dari suatu ORI yang tak terjangkau.