Eid Mubarak and State of Mind

Aidilfitri this year was thickly coated in phlegm, dried boogers and a temperature of 39.5 Celsius. Not forgetting staying at home alone during 1, 2 and 3^rd day of the Raya because Union Guy had to go to work. Am I done with my festive whining? Hell, no. I called my friends (real and not the imaginary ones) who told me that they will be stuck in KL during Raya because of work and hoped that we could do some Eid rituals at my home only to listen to “Alamak, Gee, dapat jugak aku balik kampung, ni tengah on the way ni!”. I tried to blink away my tears. Unfortunately it didn’t work because there isn’t any. There goes my attempt at making this piece a melodramatic shit. I took out my thick blanket and parked myself on the sofa the rest of the day either sleeping, dreaming or letting the idiot box entertained me. When loneliness seemed a bit too much, I made prank calls to Union Guy until he himself found me superbly annoying or walked outside, enjoying the emptiness of the street in front of my house or the silence of the neighborhood. Wow, didn’t I wish for a world where I was the only living being around, a fantasy replicate from Stephen King’s The Stand‘s prologue? Loneliness is a state of mind, I told myself. Only then, it was a literal manifestation that I don’t need to philosophize the existence of loneliness.

When I finally get to go back to my hometown (Kuala Kangsar & Ipoh) on Friday with a semi running nose and an undignified craving for rendang and lemang, I was still unbelievably cranky and sober. It lasted until Monday, the day I went back to KL. I still couldn’t find the thing that could make me go Wow! or Wah! Until Union Guy asked me if I want to make any last stops before continuing our journey. I then asked him to stop at Novel Hut, a small used book shop somewhere near Jaya Jusco Kinta City. The last time I made my purchase there was in 1997, after I took my SPM result and it was in Yik Foong Complex in the old days. I would be buying my Pratchett stuff and Mortimer’s Rumpole series from the shop back then. Union Guy did some serious book digging and recovered a shabby copy of General Franco’ biography. “Interested?” He asked. He understands my fascination with dictators very well. They are smart and evil at the same time and in a very peculiar way, win my respect to some extent. I dropped some Banana Yoshimoto and Anita Desai‘s stuff that I was holding. I took the book to the counter, paid for it and start flipping through the pages on my way to the car. The change of mood was somehow fast and bizarre. I read the book out loud to Union Guy throughout the journey, only to stop for drinks or to discuss the paragraph that I just read. I reached home feeling a lot better with the biography read halfway through, on my lap. I don’t know whether the book made me happy (which will sound awfully strange) or the gesture of reading it and sharing the content with my hubby throughout the journey affects my mood. All I know, loneliness and contentment is not merely a state of mind. It’s a choice.