“This piece of writing has been in my draft folder for years. I initially had no plan to publish it, but here we go. I just pressed the publish button. This post was written in 2018. Just to be clear, anything of it here doesn’t represent my current life. But somehow there is a bit of a story of my life that I want to share with you through this writing. It was reflecting on how I feel about the breakup, exposing the fragile part of me which I – the writer, never reveal to anybody.”
But as part of life. I am glad that I had that fruitful experience.
—
Diary of November 2018 – Sydney, Australia
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In Indonesia, long before I consumed Alcohol as a so-called daily energy drink beverage. I once heard from a middle-aged Balinese guy who is an alcoholic. He proudly said that drinking made him happy.
“Even if society calls this a wasteful activity, for me getting true happiness from something that I enjoy is not a wasted time.”
That sober alcoholic explains the magical experience the alcohol does to him which took him on a temporary journey to heaven for about two hours before he threw up and tasted hell in his head when he woke up the next morning. But that two-hour journey experience was worth every dime of his life. At that time, I didn’t understand his way of thinking. I questioned a lot about how alcohol kept him trapped in a happiness full of illusion, procrastination, and temporary paralysis.
—
Years later, it is no longer a question.
—
The beginning of how I came to embrace that intoxicating substance started when I migrated to Australia two years ago. I didn’t land in this country as a wealthy immigrant, armed with a hefty sum of money to sustain an extravagant lifestyle from my origin country, in fact, I didn’t have one even back home; My initial goal in migrating here was to save enough money to eventually move to Germany. But as with other failed plans in life, I am still stranded here for two years later. I came here on a shoestring budget, with no prior experience in labour-intensive work whatsoever. What kept me going through all those gruelling jobs was my 29-year-old youthful spirit and my back – which was still in prime condition back in 2016.
Between the physically demanding jobs and various restrictions applied to my visa. I could barely afford even the basic necessities. I worked as a hotel cleaner who could only work for 20 hours a week, and the way I could afford alcohol was by taking the leftover beer left by guests in the rooms I cleaned after they checked out. I was supposed to return it to the hotel and log them as lost property. But let me tell you, the hotel preferred having all those bottles taken and closed their eyes pretending that those things never existed rather than having to keep them in storage along with other lost things to collect dust. Because we know that those poor bottles would never find their way back to their owners ever again unless someone “rescues” them.
—
And I will be the one rescuing them.
—
I ‘drunk walking’ across my room to lock the door and turn the lights off that night. Everything was in a blackout the moment I got back to bed to stretch my weary body across my firm mattress. The alcohol I had earlier had seemingly entered the bloodstream and started to have multiple effects on my brain and body. I felt so weary. My body had somehow lost control over its motoric coordination. I could not think straight. I kept thinking about you.
“Love.”
—
No one could help. Because there was no other presence in my house but myself.
—
Ever since we broke up three months ago, I could not escape the fact that I still think about you, even though the feeling has grown larger and larger than before. I knew this was going to happen the moment you left me. No matter how much I hoped that you would go away from my head ever since you’re gone. I would never be able to surrender the memories that we had built over the years that easily! Now and then, I woke up every day only to remember all the nasty things I had done to you, and how I had wasted my chance to get a better love story for the rest of my life by letting you slip away.
Time had made it worse. You were the other half of my soul. I never regretted the time I had wasted being with you.
I think we still complete each other, but we cannot deny that we are not enough for each other. So I’m not blaming you for leaving me behind. I felt like an unattended possession left by its owner in the middle of the empty street.
I was stranded alone.
I just feel pain. A lot of pain.
I thought drinking would make this less painful.
—
“But I was wrong.”
—
I was lying down on the bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceilings that looked nothing but darkness. This room was pitch-black at night when the blind was already closed, the only source of light coming from the shine of a car’s headlight that shone my room through the small opening of the window blinds which I opened slightly to let the air in, that creating a moving thin shaft light that appeared to move from one corner of the wall and vanished at the other end wall corner in speed.
I tried hard to gain a little control over my dizziness. But the nerves that carried the eyesight to the brain told differently. I had given enough physiological consequences to my body and life today.
My distorted vision began to stare at the ceiling again to gain little control over my dizziness from various drinks that I had the past few hours. But the nerves that carry the eyesight tell different things to the brain. It created a vision-altering effect that told the eyes to close.
“You have enough physiological consequences to your body and life today. You just need to close it now, Boy. ”
My eyes’ eyelids began to struggle to gain full consciousness, They began to close, but all of a sudden, unexpected things happened. Somehow I felt like my ears were still acknowledging the surroundings, – the crickets that were outside the windows, the cars that passed every ten seconds. And when everything started to blur out, my nose started to smell a presence.
—
Your presence.
—
I might need to surrender myself to this fucked up situation for a while. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I just needed to wait until the after-effect was over.
I needed to wait, a little bit longer
In the stillness, I caught a familiar scent—the scent that had been a part of my life for years. It was as if you were there with me.
—
Your scent.
—
In the confusion of what was happening, I initiatively moved my arms around what I thought was your waist and whispered in your ear, “I love you, my love.” I feared you might pull away because of the strong smell of alcohol on my breath, but you stayed still. I remember we never really enjoyed cuddling. But as I held you tightly, reality hit me hard when i realised that illusion had played tricks on my mind.
What I had been embracing all along that night was just a stack of pillows, a fake and a poor substitute for the warmth and presence I longed for.
I wanted to scream hard. But I know, I won’t have you back again in my arms anymore even if I scream my lungs out.
For a while, as the Balinese guy once said to me before, I will let this alcohol for the next two hours takes me on a temporary journey to heaven for now. Feeling you to be by my side in my illusion. I know it is just temporary, but it felt real when the tears started falling from my eyes while I was holding you tight, knowing I was just holding.
A stack of pillows.
—
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