Jeep (Sometime last year)

It was already 8 pm that interesting Thursday evening. I was on my way home waiting eagerly to catch the next jeep to pass. I stood there almost like a monument to all those who travel by public transport. Luckily, barely five minutes had passed when a jeep came roaring along the thickly asphalted road. It almost missed me, as I had been slow at waving my hand up high for the driver to see. I sat myself near the entrance where I could disembark quickly and easily. Within moments the vehicle was already packed to the hilt reminding me of the oft-quoted sardines in a can. I immediately began to swelter as the temperature began to rise. The heat of the man beside me made it even worse and my thick pants were not much help either.

Three men courageously clambered onto the rear end of the jeep. One of them hung perilously by only three fingers and seemed to be trying really hard to hold on as if his life depended on it, and in fact it did. The thought of this reminded me of the time a watermelon fell off a truck on its way to the wet market. No doubt his head would shatter in much the same way if he fell.

Amidst all these, there sat a woman, snug and comfortable, right in front of me. She stared blankly into space as her right hand slowly picked peanuts out of a greasy little brown paper bag she held in her left. The movement of her right hand as it moved up and down across her face and chest robotic and awfully eerie. In her left hand too were a bunch of flowers, orchids if memory serves, tied tightly into two bouquets. This made her look peaceful. Even more peaceful than a man I saw sleeping with his arms crossed on the MRT. She looked fazed, dazed or jaded even. Maybe even stoned. But she wasn’t because after finishing the bag of peanuts, she gracefully whisked away all the salt and crumbs that had been strewn all over her shirt and the bag on her lap.

I remember that I was once stoned but not on a substance that can be sniffed, puffed, injected or otherwise. Not on any substance that permeates the walls of the veins. Not on any substance that a dog at the airport could detect. I was stoned, or more precisely, addicted to the substance of a woman who I knew so little about. It was in a time of my life when I could still spare the exuberance of youth in exchange for a few highs.

What made her so addictive was the fact that I was never really able to fully absorb but only to taste her soft, sweet, almost naïve being once in a while. The withdrawal symptoms were massively painful, depressing even, yet the slightest hint of her bubbly aroma sent me back high into my illusion. However, as soon as she had left, I’d plunge straight back into the abyss from which I had just been plucked. It was almost torture except only to the mind. I remember how her long jet-black hair shimmered in the sunlight and how it seemed to flow like water out of her scalp and how so many men turned their heads to stare as she walked by.

But my addiction too had an end, the same way that my journey on the jeep had an end. I too had to disembark from that addiction and move on. I knew she was not for me and I was not for her. So I said to her goodbye in much the same way that I told the driver to stop, took one last long look before finally stepping off and on to pavement of the real world.