if the world ends today (and i’m still not over you)
DISCLAIMER: Everything in this story are false dreams and false fantasies. Because if the world truly ends today — if the sun rises from the west and the heart-sinking sound of the trumpet bellows all throughout the streets, I’d be crying. I’d be holding my mother and my brother and we’d drive to my grandparents’ house. My grandmother will be praying, and praying, and praying, kneeling on her worn-out sajadah with her hands cupped together, clasped between the fabric of her mukena, and maybe then I’ll truly pray like how she taught me instead of having a one-on girl talk with God like I do five times a day, and you wouldn’t even cross my mind.
But in this story, if the world ends today, I’d hold my mother and my brother, and then I’d walk over to your house.
It isn’t even that far, but I never liked walking there and you know that. The road is riddled with potholes and trash and the scorching heat of the sun; I’d have to pass a cemetery and four main roads where sidewalks and zebra crosses seem like they were never invented. I used to joke that I’d have to fight for my life four times just to see you, and your mum, and your dogs. (But not your dad. I never liked your dad. You never really saw mine, either.)
If the world is ending and I walked over to your house, you’d be at church, clasping the little tin can pocket shrine I made you for Christmas and sitting between your brother and mother, a speckle in the rows of desperate believers. You wouldn’t be anywhere else. But in this story, if the world is ending and I walked over to your house, you’d be at home sitting on the sidewalk with your dogs, watching the rest of your faceless neighbours load their suitcases and slam the trunk of their car to drive away into a kind of Jakartan traffic that might as well be hell already. But my parents didn’t pack up and neither did yours. I’d sit there, on the broken black-and-white sidewalk, and look up at the loops and tangles of electric lines as the sky turns red like water to blood, and the angels’ invisible trumpet would keep on bellowing, and the stars might shudder and fall apart to fall towards earth, bursting aflame into a ball of fury — but my eyes would be on you.
Your eyes, your jaw, the wild lion’s mane of your hair and the way it falls off to your shoulders — just your shoulders, never really past it. Sometimes I’d watch it grow and think that this time you’ll try to let it be, but you never did. You never let us be, either. You’ll just shake away my hand and my cheek off your shoulders and your arms, your arms, those gorgeous fucking arms of yours as if we truly are the sinners that we are. And I am. And you sort of are.
But in this story, the world ends today, and you let my hand stay inside yours. You might even squeeze it, once or twice, fingers slotted perfectly between the valleys of mine like we were the pieces of your IKEA table that we had to build on our own. And you’d tell me about how, when this is all over and we were two intertwined bloodied flesh under the rubble of your house, that we’d go our separate ways, two Gods and a heaven apart. But you’ve always known I never really believed in all that — not the way I was supposed to, anyway. And you know that I’d fight for my life on four crossroads and motor-bikers from hell just to get to you. And you know the end of the world won’t begin to stop me.
