It came for some pussy.
Yesterday night I headed to a nearby mamak. I saw a tiny ginger baby cat, slightly scrawny, but with its ears pointing out in triangles, cross the road to some motorbikes parked there.
A father and son got on one of the motorbikes. It stood behind the exhaust, curious. The father turned around, and he spotted it. He avoided it as he rolled his motorbike out. It had no sense of danger or alertness as it stood there looking curiously.
A man was about to cross the road, when he walked into it, pushing it. It fell and lay there, probably distraught. I have no idea what kind of scale would a human foot’s walking impact would be. I didn’t hear it meow.
A Proton Wira approached. I flinched and turned away! I could not bear to look. I don’t even know if the car stopped or not… but when I turned to look, I saw it lying there and it was in a different position than it was before. Not a good one.
As if fate could not get any worse, a lorry approached.
The next time I turned… I saw something out of Happy Tree Friends.
I obviously didn’t take a picture but the image was stuck in my head, like it was my brain’s wallpaper.
I wondered how the young survive by themselves. Or do they? How do they learn what danger is? How do they know how to become street smart? How do they know of impending doom?
I didn’t even hear it. I don’t know if it was in shock from being walked into.
And then I thought of children. Human children. If they start crying… they stay immobilized in that one place. Even if they were crossing the road and they dropped ice-cream… they’d probably cry there and stand in one place!
At that point I felt annoyed at adults who do that. As in, if they’re in trouble, they get immobilized. They get stuck. They don’t get out of the dangerous situation.
I felt annoyed at Hong Kong dramas. Elderly husband and wife quarrel. Husband crosses road. A van approaches. Wife sees this, runs to his body, and cries. That’s fine really but moving the body out of danger should be in the sequence somewhere!
I felt annoyed that I have friends who are silly like that. Who get themselves deeper in shit. If you have such a friend, tell him or her off.
I wonder if Death was following me. Or, in some twisted Sixth Sense way, I was Death. Well I wouldn’t mind if Death came as Angelina Jolie (no, not Jennifer Aniston). Please don’t take my dad (though, he really does bear a striking malevolent resemblance to Anthony Hopkins.) Yeah that was a Meet Joe Black reference.
The next morning, I wanted to take a cab. It was raining. I saw a gray patch on the curb, just as I was about to open the door. Took a while to realize that it was a dead rat… with all its hair gone. I would not have recognized it it not for a solitary fly on it.
I told the cabbie my destination.
“My meter is dead.” The elderly cab driver told me.
“Okay, then it’s usually RM3 anyway.”
“No, where can, RM4 lah.”
RM4? CHOI!!! That’s an unlucky number! 4 means death in Cantonese!
No thanks, I told him.
Was the elderly cabbie Death? If so… Was Death trying to cheat me? Instead of me cheating Death?
Then I remembered who else Death could’ve brushed. My paternal grandmother is in the hospital because she got another stroke. I hope she gets well. I hope she wayyy outlives her husband who passed away in the 90’s in his 80’s. I miss him. I deeply regret that his last healthy years were spent bringing me to the KFC in Central Market. He was old and he wanted something strong in flavor; his sense of taste was diminishing already.
So I walked to my RM3 destination, puddles and motorbikes whizzing by. At that point I just had this premonition of limited mortality.
I reached the station anyway. I looked at the life line of my palms, in case it would animatedly erase away like what happened to Marty McFly in Back To The Future (in the movie, it was him disappearing from a picture). What a memorable scene, that was!
The last time I felt like this, I wrote an unofficial will. The feeling is very… inspiring.
