Haunting nightmare

I woke up gradually peeling myself away from the layers of nightmare I was buried beneath, I sat up as I tried to clear my head, confident that I was still alive and breathing where ghouls and ghosts don’t roam, at least, not visibly to the most of us. I don’t have nightmares very often, and when they do, the very thing that I was trying to avoid penetrating my inner heart did – fear. Silly nightmare as it was – something about my lecture theatres in my college being haunted, item-pinching ghouls in the form of wandering, semi-tangible hands – the very reason nightmares are named as it is stood erect: the fear, binding ropes of external complex emotions imposed on me held me so tight I couldn’t breathe.

My head was still immersed from that said nightmare, it felt unreal and surreal at the same time. Clock in my handphone mentioned the whereabouts of approximately 7.30pm, and when I sat out to explore downstairs of the rest of my house I realised I was left all alone – my parents were gone to Genting since morning, and when I made a phone call to my missing brother it seemed he was out as well.

Then it struck me from what a certain chef-wannabe friend told me months earlier – that whenever you sleep on your stomach, you’re bound to get nightmares. Superstition as it is or not, scientifically and logically-speaking, as the culinary arts student told me, pressure is being put on your chest, less oxygen gets to the brain, and voilà, nightmares come into existence as a way of informing you to get up.

Or so I was told. I certainly had slept on my stomach – very lazily I might add – in my heat-compressed room that it wasn’t exactly a comfortable sleep.

But I digress. I went to my laptop with the nightmare hovering over my head, checked a few things, sent pitiful MSN messages to Daniel, “T___T u got dinner at home? >.>” and getting an expected reply, then decided within 5 seconds on what I’m going to eat. Considering that the sloth in me decided that I’m not stepping anywhere out from my neighbourhood for dinner, I zoomed in exactly on the Ramly Burger stall behind my house.

There was the internal debate of whether I should drive there or hop on the number 11 bus (Chinese phrase thingy for ‘walking’), but since I figured a little cause to the environment goes a long way, I decided to walk.

I took in the long, refreshing walk, relishing the cooling air that resonated through the night. I passed by the two Chinese restaurants which I have decided against since I dreaded eating Chinese food yet again, and I reached the burger stall, still manned by the abang who has been at it for years.

After throwing out my orders to him, there was his blue portable Sanyo radio sitting atop his mini-rack of ingredients, belting out a forgettable English hit from the local radio station. A fat, burly Chinese man walked over and suspiciously fished him two RM10 notes, and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop, considering that I had nothing better to do than to observe my surroundings. Something about “2 percent” and “saya pun cari makan...” and “tak nak sos cili?” – which sounded bizarre and relatively fishy, but the one thing that stood out was that the Chinese dude’s Malay accent was so native.

The Chinese walked over to his basket of bootleg DVDs near 7-Eleven when a customer approached, and then an Indian man in his 30s dropped by from the black Waja to order his share of burgers. And in perfect English, the burger abang greeted him like he was a loyal customer, made the usual small talk but I still couldn’t help but admire his English.

I smiled to myself – the sight and sounds of all these reminded me of our complacent Malaysian life that we have conveniently taken advantage of: our burger stalls, our mamaks, our DVD peddlers, our languages, and tonight we gathered under the same sky cohesively as brothers who are there but don’t know it.

I’m not about to break into a tale of Malays, Chinese, Indians, and other minority races holding hands and dancing in circles because we have all been drilled that tale into us since we were small. I’m also not writing this because it’s sempena Hari Kemerdekaan ke-50 wtf. All I’m going to say is that I realised just now truly that I never would be an advocate of racism – I don’t know why but unlike other people I know, the usual quota imposition based on races and the usual shite don’t get to me. I’m aware of all of them yet I’m also willing to be blissfully ignorant.

I’ve always wondered – won’t life be much better if we were all the same skin colour, of the same religion? Maybe in this case we could all be parading banners of ‘FUCK DIVERSITY’, just to justify a few causes.

That nightmare that was haunting me earlier – it doesn’t haunt me anymore.