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I can't believe it.

I failed the goddamn driving test.

Just kidding. I passed.
That's it. I passed. No juicy story behind it.
Oh who am I kidding. Of course there is one. Otherwise I wouldn't bother mentioning it here.

It started like this.........
I woke up at 7 am on Wednesday morning. Make that 7.10 am; I hit snooze once. Took a bath and got ready. Then I waited for my driving instructor to pick me up at 8 am.

8.09 am Switched on the tv.

8.17 am Still waiting.

8.32 am Still waiting.

8.42 am A honk sounded.

Anyways, I got onto the car. She was talking on the phone about an urgent matter. She mentioned the word URGENT. Like I cared. She's bloody late. That was until she turned to me and uttered these words: I thought your driving test was tomorrow. 24th is today. And now we're late. Sorry, it's my fault.
At that moment, I TRULY cared. My throat and lips went dry (actually, maybe it was because I was fasting). I started shaking (darn, I knew I should have put a sweater on).

" We'll try and ask whether we can postpone yours to tomorrow."

All those signs instantly subsided. Ok, so maybe they didn't have anything to do with fasting or the rain.

Less than 10 minutes away from IMMS,
" Do you have your flight ticket with you? We may need it to support our plead." She sounded like she's in court. No, of course I didn't have it with me. Who goes around carrying flight ticket in their bags? Not when the flight's still 4 days away. So we went back to my house to fetch it and headed to JPJ. She kept saying it's her fault which was good because a) she was the one who got the dates mixed up, not me and b) she's the one who was late. We met a certain En. Hairul and got my form re-printed. Turned out, my original form was cancelled because I didn't show up on time and I still had to take the test that day. But instead of number 22, I got the last turn.

Smooth. Real smooth.

By the time I waited at IMMS, I was one nervous wreck. I'd only went on that hill thingy for 3 times! And what if I'd forgotten the test roads? It's been 2 months for God's sake.
*Breathing exercise; breathe in deeply, and breathe out. Repeat 3 times.

Waited for a while. And then came my turn. Little hill, little kancil's coming. Little kancil started climbing the little hill. Then braked. Pulled the handbrake up, released brake- fuh. Then came the hard part. Recalled the steps; pulled handbrake up, hit gas, released clutch slowly until the car jerked and maintained, added more gas and pulled handbrake down. The car started going backwards.

Fuck.

I hit brake instantly. Both tyres were still in the yellow line. Ok, one more time. Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5. Little kancil's started going down the little hill merrily. Succeeded. Then I accomplished parking the car and the 3-point turn. Easy.
Went inside and sat down. Clock showed 12.33 pm. Waited for the road test. 2 JPJ officers, 2 Kancil, 32 candidates. You do the math.

waitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaited.

A woman actually brought her own cushion seat. Lol.


waitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaited.


A black Satria arrived. Out came a woman and her daughter. The daughter's driving instructor approached them. The woman said, " Eh, we could do this inside. It's really hot here." to which the man gave her an amused look and deliberately tried to soothe her that it's not that hot. Well, yeah, it just stopped raining. Waving her hands at her daughter, she said, "Mesti jaga kulit. Panas, panas. Jom masuk dalam,"

So people like that really do exist. Wow.

Enough already about weird people.

waitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaitedwaited.

Dad and Mum arrived at 4.30 pm to fetch me. The thing was, I still hadn't sat for the test. Dad offered to go through the road tests and I agreed. Big mistake. Big big mistake. He drove like how I would drive. 40 km/hour, signalled at every turn, stopped at every junction. When you're the passenger, it just made you impatient. And it made you told your dad that showing Road B was good enough and that you should return to IMMS for fear of missing your turn.

Yeah, I was bluffing. I knew there were still 6 others before me.

My dad stayed with me. By that, I really meant it. He stood next to me, talked to my driving instructor and her husband, gave advices, asked whether I could do it, gave some more advices. Suddenly I felt like I was sitting for SPM all over again. Only that he's not holding a KFC plastic bag. And I realised, it was small things like this that I would miss when I'm back in Shah Alam. Having your dad picking you up from school, asking for your parents' permissions before going out (not that I ever did that but this is just an example). Stuff like that.

Finally, at 5.59 pm, my turn came. That's ONE MINUTE TO SIX. Which meant I waited for approximately FIVE HOURS AND THIRTY MINUTES. Oh well, at least by this time there wouldn't be too many cars. That's what I thought.

That's what I thought.

"Pergi jalan B."

Thank God.

The sun bid goodbye and the moon came up. It was bloody dark making me hard to see the roads even with the headlights on (curses to our stingy government) and there were A LOT OF CARS. The traffic was horrendous. Damn, damn.

I think I did pretty well.

So now, I have my P license kept in my wallet along with my many many credit cards. Ahah! As if =P

Never will I go behind the driving wheels again.


Just kidding.

In Her Eyes

It was cloudy and chilly. The kind of weather you'd get after it'd just stopped raining. I sat outside on the plastic chair. The wind was blowing softly, the trees and grass were following it's rhythm. One of the perfect moments in life. I thought nothing could spoil it.

Until I saw her.

I was watching the leaves lying on the road. Brown, crisp, dead. Yet they're still so pretty. Someone was sweeping them. Collecting them in small piles and sweeping them into a dustpan. Then the wind would blow and the leaves would scatter all over again. Lying quietly on the road to be swept by the same person. I thought whoever assigned that task to her was a moron. Leaves grow and fall off trees. Every single day. No matter how you sweep them, they would always be there. Even so, watching her sweeping the leaves wrapped me with an odd sense of calmness. I could feel she liked doing it. That it's not merely a part of her job. It was like watching someone trying to pick up the remaining pieces of her life. One leaf to yet another leaf. It was like watching someone who made unintended mistakes in her life, and tried desperately to put it back together.

I saw her the day before. That day, I was sitting inside. And I saw her. She was going through the bin, collecting leftovers of people's lunch. She put them in a tiny see-through pink plastic bag. I only saw rice, nothing more. Would that end up being her lunch?

Another time, I saw her standing, staring outside the glass windows. She stood there for a long time. Until it made me wonder what could she possibly be watching, or thinking. I watched her emptied the dustbins, picking up any empty can she could find. Watched her cleared the dirty dishes away, watched her wiped the glass doors. I watched her cycled home, her much-prized cans tucked neatly away in the basket attached to the front of her bicycle. What could possibly, a person like her, wanted more out of her life? Were they the same as mine?

Reach for the remote control and you could see people suffering in other countries. Pick up the newspapers and read headlines on those who are being terrorised. We do both. We donate. We show our sympathies. And yet we could ignore those that are happening close to us.

It was only a woman. Dressed in an old faded-tshirt. A tracksuit that was 2 sizes too small for her. Rubber slippers. None of which I would be caught wearing even at home. But somehow, somehow, something about her touched me. Here's someone within my reach. Here's someone I could offer my hand to. Even so, I still couldn't pluck up the courage to do that. To buy her a decent meal instead of eating bin food. I didn't have the nerve to talk to her, to question her, to understand her view on life. Here's a woman who has to sacrifice her dignity, for a scrap of food.

A story of a woman who'd earned my respect.

Where Rainbow Ends

Yes! YES!

They finally got together!
By they, I meant Rosie Dunne and Alex Stewart.
By referring to them, I was talking about the characters in Where Rainbows End.
And of course, they don't really exist.
But I don't care because I was right.



That book was really trying my patience:

1. They've known each other since they're 5 years old and you knew instantly they're meant for each other. Not that they knew that.

2. They've had, not one, not two, not a couple BUT A ZILLION OF WRONG TURNS before realising that.

3. Page 489; wow, they're still NOT together. It's really annoying when you knew perfectly well they would in the end.

4. The last 3 and a quarter pages summed it all. There you go. A happy ending =)

Who cares if they're 50 years old?
Who cares if they're too stupid to realise it sooner?
It's one of the books which I would normally say, just get it over and get married already.
I know, I can be such a bitter person sometimes. If not all the time. Lol.
Still, kudos to Cecelia Ahern. It was fab.

Whenever Zatyfaty heard me sighed in my reading, she went, "They're still not married yet?"
Sighed again.
"They never will,"

I proved her wrong! Or at least, the author did. Because, they finally got together! Oh, I've mentioned that. This was just like the time before Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows copies were released and I, like the rest of HP fans, was confident Harry wouldn't die, nor would any of his friends. That fact was enough to send terrors to millions of children around the world. I didn't think there were enough beds in the hospitals. Nor were there enough psychiatrists. And J.K Rowling wouldn't be that mean anyway. Me and my obsession of Harry Potter. I so need to GROW UP. But while we're on the subject...I totally, utterly and completely detest Daniel Radcliffe. Ok, so maybe not in real life. I hate the fact that he's playing Harry Potter. Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe are two completely different person. And he sucked in the movies anyway. Because the movies themselves sucked. So I love Harry Potter but not Daniel Radcliffe. And I need to stop rambling if I don't want his publicist to sue me for harrasing him. Which I already did.

Anyway, I'm knackered. I feel knackered. Gone were the days when I could just sit in my room doing nothing but read all day. Hello to the days where I'll have to spend my free times revising. So I make it my mission to read as many books as possible before those bitter moments arrive. And spending my Dad's money on them instead of mine. As if it's not his money I'm spending there. Haha.

Oh yeah, for those who haven't read the books, I really don't advise you guys to read this post and if they say, "Why didn't she type that at the beginning of the post??", then they're completely missing the point. I know, I'm evil xD

Wow..so NOT

It's the 5th day of Raya.

Raya's pretty much over for me really. Not for them apparently. It's so not. Because I'VE BEEN FORCED TO ATTEND EVERY SINGLE FAMILY GATHERING SINCE MORNING. Oh, pardon me. It's EVER SINCE THE FIRST DAY OF RAYA.
It's not that I hate spending time with my family, especially the ones on my mum's side. But if you've been doing that FOR 5 DAYS IN A ROW, you'll eventually get sick of them. The same old faces. At every single open house. It's enough to drive me crazy.

Ok, like today. When I found out they're holding a cousin's birthday party in Boulevard this afternoon, all I thought was, "Crap. How am I gonna get out of this." Oh, did I mention I was at a cousin's open house at that time? And the thought of meeting them again that afternoon practically killed me. Anyway, so I messaged my friends, trying to form a last-minute plan to hang out together. But something came up and it was cancelled.

Crap crap crap.

It's not like anyone forced me to go but...
People were bound to ask. And I didn't want my Mum to say, "Oh, she's at home. She didn't want to come." And trust me, that's what Mum would say even if she's my dear and only one mother.
?
That answer's so not cool. Not when Gran's there.
If she said, "She's out with her friends....," then that would sound like I couldn't attend. Not because I wouldn't. That could make a lot of difference.
It's all about REPUTATION.

Anyway, I couldn't get out of that birthday party. So I went. There're kids everywhere. Like 15 of them. One look at them and I instantly got a headache. Don't get me wrong. I like kids. I might adopt one or two when I'm all grown up. But not these kids.
Thank God I brought a book with me.
So there I was, in the middle of Sugar Bun, reading Sophie Kinsella's. I got a couple of amused questions, but.. sod off. Like I care. I wanted to read that book.
They are cousins I like. And they are cousins I don't. To those I don't, ha! Dad's always saying stuff like, we're a family bla bla bla.
We only share the same blood. It's unavoidable. Other than that, they're complete strangers. Big deal. That's it Dad. It's not complicated really.

It's Rayaaaaa

Hm.
Both Rina and Ct aren't gonna be in town for Raya.
Hm hm hm.

Waaaaa, there goes my best two buddies.

It's weird aite? It's like,

From city >> kampung >> kampung

I wouldn't know. I don't have one. Or any as a matter of fact.

Cheers.

But, you know, once I finally got over that...



OMG! It's finally Raya!!



P.S: You know what's soooo annoying? Arranging tiny pineapple tarts into a BIG JAR.
Bless those tarts. Happy Raya folks!

Her name was Toru II

That's Toru-the-second. Because she really was the second Toru.

Her fur, a mixture of white and grey. She was beautiful.

Even when she's all skin and bone, she was still beautiful.

Remember, the first time I saw her?

Mum just bought her from the pet shop.

She was in a box. 3 months old. She was so small, she would fit right into my palm.

I squealed in delight. Jumping up and down.

She was a baby and she looked so pretty.

That was 3 years ago.

She's been with me since she was still a baby. From a baby to a mother.

I was so proud of her.

I didn't know how long I sat in the garden last night.

Cuddling her and persuading her to eat.

I didn't know how long I sat there and cried.

The wind was strong. And it was cold.

I wanted, if it was her last night, then..

Let her enjoyed it. Let her felt at home.

Let her felt the grass. Let her felt the wind.

For one last time.

She laid still in my arms.

She didn't even have the energy to run about. Like she used to.

I never saw any of my rabbits being so thin before. Only too fat.

But last night, she was so thin.

Did she know she was dying?

I willed her to be strong. Only until the next morning. So Dad could bring her to the vet.

But as always, she didn't listen to me.

She never listened to me.

She was one of my rabbits who lived long enough.

For me to come to know and love.

I loved her as my own daughter.

And her death,

left me heartbroken.

4 am sahur + fireworks

I couldn't sleep. I had meant to post this entry for days but, you know, was too lazy. Hehe. So here goes:

My exams had ended and I was going home that afternoon. So my housemates decided to celebrate it by waking me up for sahur, knowing fully well I never woke up for sahur before. Okayyy...nevertheless, it was fun. And nice as well since all of them acted as if they're done with their exams too =)

+ This was the day before. See, they spoiled my sleep for 2 days +

+ Kak Ai yang poyo! +

+ I always wonder, how could anyone eat rice early in the morning? Hmm.. +


+ A gnome spitting fire =] +

+ Chances were, the bus wouldn't show up at 4 am +

+ Watch it! +


+ My wand was creating fire sparks! Ah, all those years of training! +

+ See, told you she's poyo +

Nearing six, we went up to our rooms to take a bath and perform Subuh prayer. All of us were drenched in sweat and er, kindda stinked as well. Haha. After that we hung out at the lounge. Some did their revisions, some watched tv, and some, like me watched tv + did her laundry in the laundry room. Then I had to leave to catch my flight.

Now, sleeping seems like a good idea.

Jack

Waking up this morning (afternoon should be it :P), I felt, at last, I was ready for Raya. The house looked as if it had been hit by a bomb a minute before. Things were all out of their places. Things to be dusted, to be polished, to be cleaned, to be put away etc.. the usual a-couple-of-days-before-raya scene. I felt completely right at home.

It also hit me with a realisation that within the next couple of days, Mum would be nagging at me to tidy up my room. Ah. Bother. What's the point really? People won't be coming to our house to visit my bedroom. Raya is suppose to be about mengeratkan silaturrahim and all those mushy stuff right? So the tidiness of my room shouldn't be an issue. Besides, no matter how I tidied it up, it always looked as if it's been hit by a continuous earthquake. An earthquake which, FYI, only affected my room and not the other parts of the house.





Anyway, I came across Jack today.
This, people,

is Jack. It's a puppet. It's also my little sister dearest companion. At least, it used to be. I remember, someone gave it to her on her very 1st birthday. I couldn't remember who. That was 6 years ago. For some reason, my sister favoured it the most. Clinging to it practically 24/7 a day, and like most kids, she wouldn't be able to sleep without it. Even when we went travelling, my mum would make sure Jack wasn't left behind. This went on for months and since Mum had troubles pulling those two apart, especially since Jack needed regular washing, she bought my sis another similar one. A Jack whose colours weren't faded. A Jack who didn't need patching up. Another Jack. A new Jack. But it was futile, because she didn't want that new Jack. She wanted her old Jack. So the new Jack was kept on my mum's sidetable, untouched.

All of us knew who Jack was. Sometimes, we'd steal or hide it from her. Just for the sake of watching her looking for it. Or trying to shake her out of that habit. It wasn't necessary though, because after a few years, she grew out of it. How? I do not know. She just grew out of it. She didn't throw Jack away, or give it away like most of the toys Jack's age. She kept it in her toy cabinet. As for the new Jack? I don't have the slightest idea concerning it's whereabout. She never took on another plushie after that.

Tonight, I found Jack again. When I showed it to her, she immediately took it and cuddled it to sleep. Just like she used to.

It was then I realised, that we've been going through the same experience over and over again in our lives. There are things we once LOVED and TREASURED. Things which left impacts on us. Things we couldn't possibly live without. Be it 10 days, or 10 months, or even 10 years, they were things we couldn't possibly replace. As time rolled by though, we grew out of them didn't we? But they would never be forgotten. Like Jack, being stashed in a drawer. And memories, stashed in our minds.
One fine day, we would come across those memories once more. One fine day, our past will eventually catch up on us.

But what if I didn't find Jack?

Letters .Words. Sentences.

Always regret the things you did do, never the things you didn't.

I always make it a point, a line of words as a reminder. I used to say, to not repeat it, the act of the past. That single sentence, the core from with it came from. The beginning.

But now I'm confused. Now I'm starting to question. Everything has crumbled. Only to reveal the shoulds. And the shouldn'ts. The dos and don'ts. The what ifs and if onlys.

Is that the truth? Should I learn from now on, to accept it as a part of my life? The part that I once saw as myself. Start seeing. Start hearing. And stop dreaming.

I don't want to. I wouldn't.
I want to live that dream.
...yet I don't know how.
Where should I start?
What should I do?

It's a jigsaw puzzle lying on the floor. Pieces all over the place.
I couldn't solve it.