Dimana luka mengering menganga
Teruslah berjalan, berlari, bersuara
Dirimu, diriku, dirinya, semua sama
Di tengah sunyinya kegaduhan
Waktu terkunci sang Kala berhenti
Aku, kau, kita, di hadapan semesta
Ku bersujud di hadapan-Nya
Biarkanlah yang terluka
Terus terbuka
Karena di saat yang sama
Sang cahaya menerka
by: Rendila
* Terinspirasi dari kutipan Rumi:
“A scar is where the light enters you.”
(Sebuah luka adalah dimana cahaya merasukimu)
There are many hours in my lifetime.
Twenty four of them had passed by.
Twenty four years of me breathing
Twenty four years of me being alive
But how can those years pass by so quickly?
It seems only yesterday that I learned to read
It seemed only yesterday that I scribbled red lipstick all over my face
It seemed only yesterday I fell down so many times after taking off my training wheels
Walking, dancing, singing and catching eels in the rice field
Now at the dawn of the first hour of my twenty four years
I think I’m beginning to see
Amor Fati.
“Home.” To me it is such a foreign word. No. A foreign concept. To know where one belongs. To know comfort. To know the true feeling of warmth. All I know is cold. All I know is harshness. All I know is how to be exact. Too afraid of making mistakes.
“Home.” Having the word falls out of my mouth is torture. A house is a mere building made of blocks of concrete and stone. But I still feel like I don’t belong. I’m in a true literal and metaphorical sense of “out of place.”
My bed is not my home. My unwashed blanket is not my home. My car is not my home.
Where is “home?”
Could it be inside that bowl of ice cream sundae? Could it be inside someone’s embrace?
My hands can only twine itself into one another. Can home be hidden inside someone’s touch? Can home be felt inside someone’s smile?
Will this soul still stay a wanderer? Forever a nomad seeking refuge in the desert of scattered bitter sweet nostalgia.
I truly don’t know.
I need to find my way “home.”
Maybe the songs you sang yesterday reverberated in every vein in your soul
Like cyanide.
Tasteless, odorless, colorless…
Or two sides of a coin.
Flipping the one from the other every half time.
And then the curtain closes in on you
And the stage light fades…
The audience leaving one by one
The velvet cushion you’re sitting on still warm
But you sat there frozen
Gooseflesh slowly spreading from your feet to the tips of your fingers
The chords humming in your throat like half-forgotten lyrics
Like radioactive ore
In your core
The colors then swirls and turns
Synchronizing with the rhythm, beat, and harmony
Consecutively.
I am you sitting on the chair. Sitting in front of your beat up old laptop, typing away whatever that comes to your mind into this binary code making up this software which enables you to type things into your laptop. Like words that morphes into phrases, then to sentences. Like this. After you hit “Enter”, you make a paragraph.
Oh? Another paragraph then. Like this.
You are now faced with a decision to write something with substances. Like what? your conscience says. Like… things that matter, for example. Then you sit there for a while contemplating on what you should write next.
Like this.
It does occur to you that ideas do not come on cue. Arrrgghhh, your conscience groans in exasperation.
You are now frustrated. You run your fingers through your hair and then tuck some behind your ears. But if you have short hair you will just run through it. Then you look sideways, as if it will make differences when you literally change your perspective. You like puns. You erase some letters. Like th|
Then you are thirsty. You sit up and go to get a glass and pour some water into the glass. You drink some of the water. You suddenly have an idea.
You go back to sitting in front of your laptop. You then stare into the screen with a smile on your face, fingers at the ready on the laptop’s keyboard. Then you pause for a second. Your smile fades. You forgot what you were going to write down.
Fuuuuuuuck! your conscience says.
You sigh. You turn your head toward your bookshelves.
I’ll just read today.
I walked into the path unknown
A mere newborn babe
Crawling with curiosity
Blindly searching for the answers
The light at the end of the tunnel…
You stand there with open arms
O, you who have given me hope
The unsung heroes to our future
You opened many doors ahead
Wisdom
Bestowed upon us children
Carried until now
Saving my life more than once
From Ignorance
Saving my life more than once
From Stupidity
Your lessons, not once forgotten
For us children, to whom you have entrust
With the future
I cannot thank you enough
I was taught…
therefore
I have learned.
Kupandang kau sebelah mata
Karena kiri dan kanan tak tertutup bersama – sama
Linangan kesedihan
Tetesan tawaan
Berbaur menjadi nyata.
_
Tak ku pandang sebelah mata
Bila kau jalan diambang kala
Saat mentari senja bersujud diujung sana
Adanya kemungkinan kau tak nyata
Namun berakhir di nirwana.
Something’s wrong with me. That’s the first thing that pop into my head as I’m writing this. So… what’s wrong with me nowadays? The “me” that walks and talks to you might say that there’s nothing wrong but no… not really. As I stare into the bookshelves that have sat in the corner, gathering dust as I left them untouched for a while, it made me realize that there are things that I have left in the past that can be considered …unfinished.
It’s funny how certain things, certain state of a situation, certain arrangements of inanimate objects can actually represent a great deal of things happening in your life. Like the dozens of unfinished books sitting on my bookshelves, I wonder just how many things in my life that I have left unfinished. I grabbed the first two books in which I have intended to finish for quite some times, Inheritance by Christopher Paolini and Paulo Coelho’s Aleph. I decided to finish Aleph first. This is due to the need of identifying with something closer to the real world than the story about the noble dragon. Well, I will save the fantasy genre for my escape from reality later.
As I sit in my living room, listening to the 14 songs on the list that have been set on a loop for a week or so, I read the first forty pages of Paulo Coelho’ s Aleph. I started laughing since Coelho began to say that he was starting to get bored with the routine in his life and that his spirituality is basically wavering (I was identifying myself with this particular feeling). Then his “guru” friend, J., said that he needs to get out. So he did. Long story short, in the forty pages, there was a beginning of a journey of finding, generally speaking, “inner peace”. Mainly in one’s self. Then, he was comparing his experiences in his life with Chinese Bamboo. Chinese Bamboo takes five years to mature, in the first five, the plant is but a mere soot, but in the final stage it suddenly grows into several feet tall. So, that could be it. His life may feel stuck but it secretly built strong roots underneath and suddenly it will just spring up from the ground suddenly. I thought that was a really cool metaphor. (Yeah, you really have your way with life’s metaphor, Coelho. I’m jealous…) First forty pages… now I can’t wait to read the rest. In the end, I have gained my interest back. Thanks, Coelho.
Maybe that’s it, isn’t it? Maybe the reason why I have left things unfinished is because I wasn’t interested enough to continue. Just like books, I need to take it slow, I guess. Gaining back interest is like trying to convince yourself that the ocean is orange and clouds are cotton candy. It takes a great deal of will to believe. It may sound selfish and plain egotistical to say that I need to be interested in things to finish them. Well, It’s my life. I have the right to be selfish, at least in this particular area of my life. People are selfish anyway. The act of unselfishness and altruism comes with taught moral principle, so I don’t think it is natural. But, in this case, what I mean by finishing is not just getting things done and accomplishing things. What I’m trying to say is that I need to relish every single things that I’m doing in my life. I don’t think reading fast is a great accomplishment. I mean, to really understand the things you’ve read takes time. It goes to the things you do in life. Badabing, badaboom! An epiphany…
I need to build my roots seriously. I may have been ambitious. I need to get those ambition back. Who cares what others think of me. It’s me. Me. God help me… I have been blind. I have been staring at my own reflection. Unfinished books…
You can’t just live and pass by your life by merely shitting, sleeping, and eating, of course. I guess Oscar Wilde is right “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
I surrender then, o mighty writers, your words have woken the sleeping tiger.
Now let’s just hope that this cynicism won’t let me down again. I still have a long way to go.
Love
is not a mere play on words
So now…
There’s a lock in her heart
It had a key once
Now the key’s lost
Waiting to be found
Earthyhuesgirl 