FREE-FALLING

I stood under the scorching sun. She lay under the red earth.

The Minister said thank you for coming. A relative of hers said please forgive her. (She and her ex-boyfriend once borrowed my favourite book and ruined it. I told her it was fine by me..but it wasn't really fine by me until that day, when she lay there beneath the white lilies.)

Another friend who was also there asked me how I were. I said I were fine. Then I asked her how she was. She too said she was fine. We both lied.

I told V that I didn't have that many friends I was truly comfortable with, and I couldn't believe I had to lose one of them like this.

V didn't answer. She stood there clutching her umbrella, and I looked at her still face and felt ashamed of my own weakened knees, my trembling heart.

"I'm tired of teaching-menicing", she said the last time we met, pronouncing 'teaching' in perfect English, and 'me-ni-cing' in perfect Indonesian. "I want to be a research assistant, or a lecturer like you." I had laughed when I heard that, because a 'lecturer like me' spent most of the day doing the teaching-menicing she had grown tired of.

I was reminded of that, and many other occassions spent with her. I couldn't tell what was wrong with me, what went wrong with the plan to keep my cool. Oh and of course I had planned to be as strong as V. I had planned not to cry. I couldn't tell what was wrong with anything and everything.

In between my swallowed sobs, all I could tell was this: keeping your cool ain't the easiest thing to do -- when you are watching people putting a part of you deep under the red earth.