Letter

Here I am, sitting on a white comfortable couch in TCC Parklane with no other customers in the place except 5 other waiter/waiteress with a manager…Seems like I am immersed in a lap of luxury and a great deal of indulgence. In contrary to that, the small circular glass that was filled to the brim with ice water carrying a twinge of lemon with it just a while ago had stayed empty for close to half an hour. It does make me feel like an invisible figure, just sitting alone at a corner of the café, unaffected by any typhoon or tornado that had just took place outside this café, leaving behind nothing but twisted lampposts, overturned vehicles of all sorts, uprooted trees and a hundred thousand people who were just, when my cup was full with ice water, smiling happily, strolling along the streets on this lazy afternoon, pleased with the way their lives had turned out and yet in a tragic twirl of fate, finding themselves as helpless and dejected as myself, looking into the café and into the dark expressionless eyes of mine as I returned a cynical smile, either as a way of welcoming them into my part of this world or to inject an extra dose of sarcasm of being on the inside instead of the outside, I was unsure.

I guess one of the waiters got the message. With that giant jug of chilled sky juice decorated by a generous amount of sliced lemons that had sink to the bottom like an anchor into the ocean, my empty cup was once again filled to the brim, rejuvenated. With a word of appreciation, my attention was turned back to Mr Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, a successor to my last literature meal, which also turned out to be Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. A delightful book which draws you into it so effortlessly as you find yourself walking helplessly into the edge of the world, looking for that small pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The ending did send me spinning like I was caught in the epicenter of a whirlwind, bringing me so high above the clouds where the unfinished giant ferris wheel that sits silently near the bay and the skyscrapers all look only like tiny specks of dust on a giant white sheet of paper, but yet, I never feel so lonely and clueless as before, as if I was the only fool who had been silly enough to take a slide down that deep old well that stretched to the dark unknown, borrowing its way straight down to the earth’s core. Subconsciously, I had picked up the next of his book and embarked on my next journey to that faraway land. A village hidden from the ways of the world and so secluded that you could never find on any map. A place hidden so deep in the tropical forests of the unknown, in search of that pot of gold, resting at the end of the rainbow. Someone had mentioned during a time of his life that ‘Curiosity kills the cat’. If it is so, then I have nothing to fear for I have nine lives. Even so, so drawn in it am I that every time I am murdered by the hands of curiosity, I would eventually find myself making that same journey to that unknown village, till the day I lay down, exhausted but glad, as I close my eyes for the last time with a smile on that weary face and nine pots of gold beside me. I seek to believe that Mr Murakami must have purposefully and selflessly spent a fair deal of his time writing those books not for the countless who had been fortunate to have read it but for me, for in his books, I see myself so many times and in so many ways. I had never realized that I was a man with so many faces. The man knows me well.

Nevertheless, I was stuck by the sudden impulse to write a letter to myself halfway through ‘Norwegian Wood’. After reading the part where Naoko had finally found the ability and courage to write a long-due letter to Watanabe, I was inspired and driven by an unsatisfied desire to write a letter to myself and so here I am, finding myself typing effortlessly as these strange thoughts and feelings engulfed my entire soul and flow instinctively into my fingers, as I pen it all down and put it into these very words.

I do realize that all this would seems strange to many but then again, like the countless who had been fortunate to read the books of Murakami, the ones he had written for me, this was a letter to myself and it was all that matters.

Until recently, I had been living in my world of darkness, a place I had called home for the past 2 months. A place so deep down and dark that I could light a candle and watch it blow itself out. A place where it doesn’t matter which day and what time it was as the Mondays feels like Tuesdays and the Tuesdays like a Thursday. The skies were never lighted as if that sunny yolk in the sky had collaborated with the suicidal candle flame and deserted all of us, and more rightly all of me. Until recently.

But even with the mind pulling all kinds of tricks out from the bag, I do know that I could be an ass, which I beg to differ and seek to avoid. A certain girl had caught my eye recently. ‘Caught my eye’ not as in ‘Oh my god, she is hot and I think we could do good together’ but as in ‘This girl looks really sweet and it would be nice if we could be friends.’ Working in a hip part of a neighbourhood, I did not have to embark on an epic journey or take extreme measures to drop by. Even though I had been there for a couple of times, we had never been granted the opportunity of a conversation. Always looking reserved and quiet, her silence and smile enticed me and captured my attention. Nevertheless, to be fair, I was unsure of these subtle feelings that had slowly crept into the void of emptiness. Apart from the loneliness that had consumed my entire existence, it does not help to mention that this particular her does bear some similarities with my previous her in the sense that they were both petite, had a sweet smile that set the butterflies free in my heart and looks as likeable, loveable and vulnerable as I could recall the first time I set my eyes on. That was and still is the image of both of the HERs in my heart. Incidentally, this new her was the one who started getting us talking. Had I let the opportunity slipped by the four seasons, with winter passing to summer, spring and autumn, only to find myself back in winter, opening my eyes to the nine pots of gold lying beside me in this far remote village of the unknown in the deeply-stretched regions of the forests. With mixed feelings of what I had felt for her, of whether it was really her that had captured my attention or a reminiscence of the old her. Of whether I was truly capable of leaving the memories of my past in a safe old box, locked away in a small corner of my heart, if not only for the sake of memories but gratitude that I had once loved and been loved so wholeheartedly. With that cloud of uncertainty and unwillingness to be unfair or an ass, would I have let the summer passed by so helplessly, through the seasons of spring, autumn and then unknowingly, as the chill winds knocked on the village door and the snowflakes pour down shamelessly on the white untainted landscape, I was back in winter. With nine pots of gold and no one to share, am I able to wait for the next rainbow to appear and return the pots of gold to the rightful owner, and await the return of that sweet, lovable, likable and vulnerable summer breeze?