House #7

So there’s this thing that is going around Twitter on choosing your dead author quarantine house. I haven’t done any MCO postings here but I wanted to imagine this House #7 that I suggested:

House #7
Khalil Gibran
Jalaluddin Rumi
Pablo Neruda
Rabindranath Tagore
Cairil Anwar

For days of quarantine, after we have our own spaces of thoughts and rituals, we convene in the verandah.

Cairil, lighting his kretek and handing me over a stick.

I can see Gibran with his pipe, Rumi holding a glass of wine that he saluted with Neruda, and Tagore slowly sipping his chai.

We would start talking about love. The madmen in Gibran and Cairil gets a bit extreme in their intepretation but what I enjoy most is when everyone calms down as Tagore broke all arguments singing his praises of love. Fair enough. We needed entertainment and a fight over the word love is not one of it.

Neruda gets distracted easily when there’s a brush of wind or a leaf flying onto the verandah. It’s the little things that he relates to the most.

I am amazed at Rumi as he stood up during Tagore’s singing and starts twirling around, dervishly. Cairil smirked in his judgemental boyish ala James Dean face. Of course he wouldn’t be alone if Kerouac is around, but this House can only fit the six of us.

I was the only girl but with these guys, gender don’t matter. Age don’t matter. Our thoughts run fluidly out of our brains through our vocal chords – being it in melody or just pure stiff sound of verbal expression.

For days and days, we ask questions to each other and share our sides of the answers. We agreed to disagree. Whenever things get heated up, the space between us were filled with a creative energy that makes us dance, love and sing.

We drink a lot of wine, and smoke a lot of cigarettes.

We share our loaves of bread, and the food we make during our isolation from each other.

It felt like an artist residency that we didn’t have to produce a work of collaboration, but what is most important is that we shared our space, our thoughts, our food, our drinks, our time, to make our own work a tiny bit better than it already has been.

Have a better April ahead

So apparently MCO has turned me into a vain selfie-bitch. But it’s okay, you guys will not be seeing me in person for another 14 days so I know you be needing some of this Abby lovin’.

Anyway, I do wake up every morning and dress to go to work, even sprayed perfume before I clock in my work desk at 8:45am how I would do on a normal pre-lockdown working days. Nope; I don’t have a partner to please. Do it for yourself, do it for your own motivation. Ada yang suka busuk-busuk masuk kerja. Wherever work is, I want to represent the best of myself when it comes to mencari rezeki and do what I like to do.

You do you. No need to jump the gun at others. I don’t need no posters telling me how to be, and if there are any posters, I rather read and make my own. You don’t have to conform. You lead by example. Walk the Talk.

Be good and kind.