“Let’s dine-out
for lunch on Tuesday!”, a text message came in. Let’s just stay in and order
Grab food, I responded, yet so often plans changed so much faster that we can react. We were
sitting in the restaurant flipping through the menu on that very Tuesday
afternoon.
“Can you believe it has been more than 3 months since we were able to dine out, this feeling is like a bird finally freed from the cage.” It felt good. She look at me in disbelief, this pandemic has been going on and off for almost 2 years now, and each time we come out from a lockdown it just felt like a sense of relieve. I know exactly what you meant, she sigh and laugh out loud.
We both sat
and crap the nonsense where the people around come and go in waves, and this
one moment is just like the crowd never make me felt more comfortable.
Experiencing the city return to life gave me life again, too. I knew I would
feel a sense of relieve each time, I’m trying to remember how this all feels so
that if I could tell those stories that make the younger generation roll their eyes on me
when I talk about how I lived through a global pandemic and saw life around the
world come to a weird standstill. Then, I watched as it rose from the ashes
like it always does.
Being in this country feels like you’re being a part of a hopeless drama all the time, an extras in the show where you were expected to wonder around the camera all the time. I don’t want to live my life without feeling that my existence isn’t put into consideration even as a majority, I think it’s something we’re all keenly aware of living in Malaysia more than in other places – the sense of invisibility beyond yourself. It feels like we’re the somebody that doesn’t even get a pack of lunch behind the production scene.
It isn’t that I’m not grateful about my life here, it’s just that I have a closer look to what this place is each time we fall in and out of the pandemic. And I am more and more determine to get out of this country as soon as we're all done with the world chaos.