Black's Prologue
- Kyle Kao
- Jun 18, 2020
- 5 min read
It was so hot and humid that I could feel the blisters commence under my thin inflamed red skin. Phnom Penh was a city baking inside a giant oven, pre-heated by the utmost shots from the old scooters and the rising concrete buildings. I could feel the heatwave surging from the asphalt concrete of the sidewalk. I paced my way through the density of the haze, but somehow I felt like the street was a treadmill that was rolling right through me.
The world kept spinning around me. I couldn’t focus on anything, only the crumbling stones on the sidewalk that denoted the way ahead. My eyes were projecting forward like a gun was placed behind my head. My sweat started rolling down my sideburns and forehead just a millisecond before my clothes soaked it up. My leg started aching and cramping sharply from each footstep. My backbone is still firmly carrying the weight of the heavy backpack. The humiliating truth was cloaked inside the bag. There was the medical prescription from the therapist, the 1000 mg sleeping pills, the books about desolation and depression, my working laptop, and a few extra clothes. For more than two hours on the street, I was trying to get myself from the therapy room to my bedroom – a distance 12 km apart. I smelled the sewers nearby the street, the rats that were trolling around the corner, the traffic light at the intersection, and the tribulated eyes hurling at me. Under all of these clutters, no one would find normalcy in someone who was walking on the street, not in this city. I have made it clear with this rule that I wasn’t normal. I grew up in a society where people telepathically opinionated each other with their eyes. Those judgments had familiarized me my entire life. But now it was panning through me like a backdrop on the wall. Normal became irrelevant because I could no longer feel my thoughts. I could barely manage to have my brain functioning properly. I couldn’t even stop, knowing that my body was at the edge of collapsing.
I was so detached from the reality that I hadn’t realized how I reached the front of the university. The dormitory was located at the back of the university connected by a sky bridge. It was then that I stopped, I could feel the grief and excruciation knocking on every part of my body. My knees were shaking to my toes as I immediately hung on to the gate. I gasped with the sound of my heart beating loud. It was so loud that I wished it would stop. It amazed me to comprehend how my brain found the way back home. Sometimes, I wished that it could lead me to the edge of the rooftop and wouldn’t stop there.
It was Saturday afternoon that got the university quiet from the human noise. As I pulled myself back up and then a line from the therapy session started haunting me.
“The pain passes down through generations until someone decides to feel it.” The feeling had its way of getting to decide what was painful, but there was no reassurance if it was ever going to stop there. I felt more than pain. I felt dull, dark, quiet, and alone. I felt empty. As I stepped into the university, I could feel the bricks and walls of the structure stood tall on its ground, firmly six stories into the sky. The door was unlocked and there was no guard. I walked the hallway with my hand pushing against the wall. The bricks that were wrapped by the concrete and the layer of paint that left a grubby sandy sheet was rolling over my skin. And I could feel my relinquishment shouting out to me. There was my breath, my step, my blink, and my heartbeat, all was left out of pain. When I reached the floor that connected the building to the dormitory, I saw a way up ahead but I found no reason to go there. It was a glorious afternoon, golden, and beautiful. The light was shining through the corridor like a star at the end of a tunnel. I had walked that corridor many times to know that it was just an illusion. Instead, I kept climbing the stairs. As my aching leg stepped on the marble floor, the sound of the flapping wings passed through me in a pocket of shadow. I recognized immediately the creature of the shadow. It was a bat that routinely flew through the hall at dusk and dawn. It was so dark that I could never make sense of its physical appearance.
When I reached the rooftop, the golden sunset lavished its yellow light from the west prospect, it covered all over me with the wind blowing gently from the south. I stopped there by the entrance and then everything stopped. It seemed to me that the world I always knew, finally rested. The bat flew out into the lake of asymmetrical roofs. It freely barrel-rolled down and then shot again into the open burning sky, mocking me of the freedom I was incapable to use. Tiredly, as I sat on the floor and hugged my knees close to my chest, it flew to the sidebar close to me and hung there. I looked at the pitch black, hideous, skinny, hairless creature, while it ignored my commencement.
I had fear, nervousness, love, desire, and hatred. It was as if I had shaded my skin and deliberated from all those feelings. It was as if I stripped naked in the middle of the crowd and could not feel humiliation or fear. Every time, I only wished to cease to exist. Now that I look back, I don’t know who I was or what I was. I used to fear death and being alive in sorrow. Those were the days when life remains were tiny and meaningful with grief, enough just to keep breathing. Everything ran out of me and all I had left was emptiness.
I fixed my eyes toward the gloaming sky, I couldn’t feel if my heartbeat was steady or had gone. I drifted through the radiation of the light and then unconsciously tore myself. For the first time in a very long time, I had finally heard the moaning sound of myself crying. The wave and the rhythm. The beat of the heart and the tears that were simultaneously falling.
I would want to live a normal life, but as I looked back at all those years of trauma, pain, resentment, revenge, and madness, I couldn’t recall a single moment that normality was in my life. I looked back at those moments as if I had never experienced them before. It was painful, hurtful, and suffocating, but there was no way that I could feel it like I had gone through it. It felt like a lifetime ago. All that remained was the screaming, shouting, flashing nightmare, and the afflicting look of myself in the mirror. I thought my life was over at some point when I abused drugs, when I was an alcoholic, when I was in a deep depression and so solitary. I had always been halfway there. I always thought that life will end like a book. At some point it was cliff-hanger, at some point, it was wrapped up in a bow. But life, like pain, was never really ending. It is passed down through breath, love, and hate. It will find its way to continue living inside us until the day we die. Maybe that is how the pain ends, and maybe then, we are free. I was decapitated while the madness digested my body. I was like a small creature that only had a head left to think and to consciously feel; there was nothing more, nothing I could do to change anything.
“I’m sorry.”
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