Eleven in the Evening

Catatan: posting berikut bukan tulisan gue, jadi silakan menikmati aja dan diambil mangpaatnya hehehe. I'm with you girl, always :)


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Eleven in the Evening
(After reading “Paul and Jeanne”, GPD 12 September 2008)

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There is nothing unusual about tonight. It does feel a little bit warmer than the nights before. Yellow grass that carpet under her shoes might have grown an inch taller. And the earth is definitely a day older, but still, there is nothing extraordinary about it. Just another ordinary night, to be followed by another ordinary day. And she is still sitting there, just like the night before, just like the night when she first came and start sitting there two and a half years ago.

The watch in her wrist tells her that it is now eighteen minutes to eleven. It means she has less than three minutes left before she has to leave that old wooden bench. Not because she is summoned to be some place else, but because it always takes her fifteen minutes to walk from where she has been sitting down for an hour into her apartment building. And she needs to be home at eleven in the evening.

Not that she has been told to do so nor that the world will stop otherwise. She just needs to do that, to be consistent in her life. Something about her that nobody else knows about. Nobody else but me, and him from her past.

She always smiles as she peels herself off of the bench. A smile she posed as if she owed herself an exhale. From afar, I could almost see a soft pain in that smile when I first took a glimpse in that beauty, two and a half years ago. And now, the pain is all I see.

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The first time she ever saw him was not the time when they first met.

The sky was orange that day, and the wind smelled like the first rain, when it touches faces of grass in one dry day. Just the way she loved it. Her heart almost exploded ever since, carrying the words she then became very familiar with. She wanted to tell him that he reminds her of someone she has never met before. But the words never came out from her mouth. Not that day, not ever. She kept the feeling, if there was a feeling, bottled up inside. Somehow she felt that that is the only way to keep everything real.

For him, she was anything but current. She took him places beyond his imagination just by spending time together in his bedroom. They could just let another day goes by doing nothing but be together. They took each other to the bottom of their stupidity and to the top of their merits beyond one’s comprehension. And they adored one another.

“…making love not by choice but by chance, ……as long as we are nameless our body are blameless….”

That old piece from an old movie, when Brando was still in a good shape, always burst from the stereo when they were together. They played that on on purpose, but without telling each other that they did. They kept it that way with everything about them and their being together, poisonous and addictive. Just like hope is.

Tonight is no different. Ice cubes in their cocktails start to water. The sweats on their glass are dripping down and wet the coasters. They know that they are saying goodbye, to the excitement of their togetherness, to the melancholy of every time they are not. They decided that it is time to end it all, to detoxicate from their addiction to hope, to each other.

They drown themselves in the depth of kisses. They want to have that last one to last forever, exactly at eleven in the evening.

Two and a half years ago.
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Do you know why people get stuck? Just standing still in one place, not moving, not progressing. I don’t believe in what so called the comfort zone. There is no such thing. I believe people are lost. And those people spent their childhood being told that if they ever get lost, don’t go anywhere, just stay where you are, and we will find you. What they have never been told is that sometimes people also get lost on their way finding you, and you will end up never being found.

I don’t believe people just don’t want to move, choose not to progress. I believe they are just lost.

It is fifteen minutes to eleven in the evening, as I watched her walk toward our building. I keep her close in my sight without letting her know that. That I am here to keep her from getting further lost.

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It is eleven in the evening. She is coming home to that familiar warmth. The warmth that always greets her at the dine table, hugs her and forehead-kisses her while asking how her day was. It was fine, she usually addresses, and it does feel a little bit better now that I am home in this warmth, she usually thinks to herself at the same time.

He is everything she is not. He balances her, puts her at peace. He listens to her restlessness without judging her, takes on her anxiety and sadness without provoking her. He is that sort of ease she needs. Somehow, she always finds her way home to him. Not in a way a primate attracted to shiny object. Not in a way a devout finds her salvation. It is something in the middle, not as obvious, not as grand.

It is now eleven in the evening. She is home now although she’s still lost.

He knows that.

He loves her anyway.