The hardest thing

 





I found Kareem outside the museum, smoking furiously, a cloud of smoke whirling about him. I sidled up close.

“Hey…”

He just grunted back, still in a foul mood.

“It’s not an on-off switch for me,” I repeated my words earlier, this time, gently.

When he didn’t say anything, I continued, “I’m hoping it will be more like a dimmer control.”

He snickered at that. A half-laugh was better than a grim face, I thought.

“So, it’s not easy for you, either?”

“The hardest thing I’ll ever have to do," I said.

He turned to study my face and measure my words, a questioning look on his face. I nodded, suppressing the tears.

Without another word, he flicked the ash from his cigarette and passed it to me. I took it gratefully, inhaling a long, deep drag that hurt my lungs, before sighing out the smoke around us.


(An excerpt from a work in progress)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The last long farewell

Image
Thirty years after the pandemic swept through the country swiftly and cruelly, forcing a state of emergency on the whole of Malaysia and the evacuation of the entire population, I found myself back in Kuala Lumpur. It wasn’t the city I remembered from memory. That one had flash floods in the middle of the day after a heavy downpour, and horrible jams immediately thereafter. It had double-parkers, tailgaters, and very little sense of polite civility. That one was also warm, chaotic, colourful. The people were divided by politics and religion, but united on the streets and at dinner tables. It was imperfect, but it was home. At least for the first 25 years of my life. And now, here I was in KL. A very different KL than the one I had left in 2020. A new government, new leadership, new laws. Together with the rest of the Southeast Asian countries, it made up the Greater Indochina Confederation, a new world order after the fall of Asia during the pandemic, under the single rule of the Chin...
Read more

Opposed

Image
This morning, Sylvan and I came to the very enlightening conclusion that no girl should ever be born an Aries and no boy should ever be born a Pisces. We deduced that Aries women would be too much for any man to handle and that Pisces people are so dreamy, that only a woman could handle being one. Is that warped? But I say this with no malice or hurtful intentions to the gajillions of Aries women and Pisces men out there. How did that come about? It was over breakfast and Sylvan was saying that she believes that she will never ever ever ever marry. Don't say that, I said. Maybe the guy you're supposed to be with just haven't found you yet. We became silent after that, each pondering over our own thought bubbles. My thought bubble was that if I had never met Zane, I don't think I would ever have married. I vocalised my thought to Sylvan. I mean, some people go through life, falling in love so easily. From one relationship to another and another. And I was boyfriendless f...
Read more

The star architect of Malaya

Image
His buildings are familiar to us, and his name is, too. Yet, for a man who was instrumental in the design and construction of Malaysia’s many landmarks, little is known about Arthur Benison Hubback. At least 25 buildings in Malaysia are credited to Hubback as the architect, of which 13 — or more than half — are considered national treasures today. All of his works save two which were bombed in the war, still stand in all their glory. They may look a little weathered, a little worn, but the years have hardly diminished their beauty or magnificence, a testament to his design ingenuity. In the 19 years that he was in Malaya, Hubback designed some of the most iconic buildings of the time. The first he had a hand in was the Sultan Abdul Samad building, which was built to house the growing number of government workers then. Upon completion in 1897, the grand public edifice was hailed as one of the most beautiful buildings in the region. His prolific body of work, which includes the Masjid Ja...
Read more