Why Would I Write

  • Horror

    I’m not a fan of horror movies or video games. I could never understand why people would willingly spend money to shit themselves indulging in such media. I don’t remember where the fear started from. But all I know is that every time, without fail, after watching a horror movie, I would have the most irrational fears using the bathroom at night. I would do my best not to close my eyes. Whenever I use the bathroom sink to wash my face, I’ll try to keep one eye open at a time, lest I blink and see another face in the mirror looking at me. Washing my hair at night also becomes a bitch.

    The last horror movie I watched in the cinema was the remake of It. I jumped in my seat quite a number of times. Most of my friends said that it wasn’t scary at all. I don’t get it. The drain scene was the stuff of nightmares. And the part where the clown comes out of the wall projection. Who thinks of such things?

    I remember there was a time when I could watch horror movies without any consequence. I think I probably scarred myself for life when I watched the original Ju On home alone in the evening. By the time the movie was done, the sky outside was dark and I hadn’t switched any of the lights on. I was pretty creeped out.

    I’m just as scared watching movies on a small screen. I remember I had to watch the last few scenes of Dead Silence in a resized window on my PC desktop because I couldn’t handle it full-screen. I even turned the volume down.

    I tried playing F.E.A.R. to overcome my fear (heh) of scary video games. I only managed to play it for an hour before I gave up. I’m not a fan of jump scares. The game was full of it. It was even worse because I controlled the character and had to walk into my own jump scares.

    I can handle horror that builds up into a climax. I don’t mind gruesome or gory. I don’t mind psychological horror. I’m mostly scared by scary looking ghosts and old ladies. Watching the first Insidious movie was enough for me. I don’t intend on watching any of the other films in the franchise.

    You know what I like? Comedy. I’ll willingly pay money to have a good laugh. So much more worth it than scaring myself.

    I already have some irrational fears – like walking next to power boxes (for some reason I’m always afraid that they’ll blow up for no reason and kill me) and power line poles in Thailand (why don’t they fix that shit? isn’t anybody else scared by the constant buzzing sounds you hear walking next to them?). I’m also terribly afraid of cockroaches. I don’t need to introduce more things in my life to scare myself.

    I used to swim in the evening after work. Sometimes late at night, even though the pool lights were already turned off. Until one day I started imagining ghost ladies appearing and holding my head underwater to drown me. Now I don’t swim in the dark anymore.

    I’m glad Dota 2 isn’t scary at all. It’s a fun and great way to end the night. Despite losing more than winning, I still enjoy the game very much.

  • Eighteen

    “Come on!” yelled Sobia. “What does it say?”

    “Yeah!” said Farez. “Tell us!”

    It was my eighteenth birthday and I had just blown the candles out on my birthday cake. Fortunately I didn’t get saliva all over the cake this year. For the past few years, my friends have been calling me ‘The Spitter’ for that very reason. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had made sure I swallowed all my saliva before attempting to blow the candles this time. However, this year my friends didn’t really care about the cake. They were more interested in my final words.

    They would have appeared somewhere on my body, but I had no idea where they were yet. As far as I could tell the words didn’t appear on my face or my arms, if not my friends would have seen them already. Oh dear, I hope it wasn’t on my ass. That would be a pain to read.

    I was the youngest of my friends in the group. All my friends had their last words appear on them last year. Most of them had typical last words like, “Goodbye world.” and similar variations. Some of them had more amusing ones like, “I told you so.” Which led us to speculate how they would be leaving this world. As for me, I had no clue yet.

    “Come on guys, can we just enjoy this cake? I didn’t spit on it for once!” I said trying to change the topic.

    “Don’t leave us hanging! We’ve waited all year for this!”

    “Fine, let’s finish the cake and then I’ll go check it out.”

    Tanzeel was ahead of me. He grabbed the knife from my hands and started dividing the cake for all of us.

    I sat down there, waiting for the cake to be served to everybody before I started eating my own piece. It was a silent occasion and nobody hesitated to wolf down their helping of the delicious chocolate-flavored dessert.

    “For fuck’s sake, guys! Are you serious? Did you guys attend my birthday party only to find out what I’ll say before I croak?”

    “Yes,” Farez replied sheepishly.

    “You guys are assholes.”

    “Come on, we’re done with the cake, now go find out what your last words are!”

    “Did you know birthday parties are a celebration of life? Not a ritual to find out what someone is going to say before they die?”

    Nobody listened to me. They just stared at me, waiting for me to get out of my seat to look for my last words.

    I grumbled and got up and headed to the bathroom. A couple of them followed me to the door. I could hear them from the outside talking among themselves. “What do you think it’s going to say?”

    “I bet it won’t be as epic as yours, Sobia.”

    “What if it’s something sad?”

    “Oh shit, I never thought of that.”

    I put their voices out of my head as I removed my shirt. There was nothing on my body. Craning my neck around, I checked out my reflection. Nope, there was nothing on my back. Hmph. I guess I’ll have to check my lower body. I took off my shoes and my pants. I noticed some letters trailing out under my boxers. It was on my thigh. Not too bad I guess, it would be easy to keep concealed. I pitied those people who had messages on their foreheads. Nobody understood how these last words appeared or where they appeared. It was just an accepted fact of life. We all just learned to deal with it.

    I pulled one leg of my boxers up to reveal the full message. Oh fuck. Is this some sort of joke? I stumbled backwards and fell to the floor on my ass.

    I heard banging on the toilet door. “What’s up man? Don’t leave us hanging!”

    I took another look at the message on my thigh. I rubbed at it, to make sure that it wasn’t some sort of marker pen joke. The words remained, as clear as day.

    “What are your last words? Do you need help in there?”

    I tuned out their voices again as I sat on the floor, pondering my last words. No, this can’t be real. Why the hell would I say such a thing? I remained speechless. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell my friends what my last words were. Nobody could know. I broke down and cried.

    “Are you alright? What’s wrong? If you don’t reply, we’re coming in!” yelled Farez.

    I couldn’t reply. My friends kicked the door in and found me on the ground, a whimpering mess.

    “Holy fuck, Zoraiz. What the hell are your last words going to be?”

    I didn’t reply. They inspected my body and saw the words on my thigh, still revealed for all to see.

    “There is no God but God, Muhammad is His messenger.”

    Writing Prompt from Reddit: When a person turns eighteen, their last words appear somewhere on their body. Yours frighten you intensely.

  • How’s it going?

    When white people say “How’s it going?” they don’t really care about your day. It’s just a greeting.

    This was a note that I saved on my phone in June last year. I realized that when I was traveling a lot for work and everybody would say that to me. Initially, I’d respond by telling them how it was going. “Oh, I’ve been very busy.” “Oh, life’s alright.” and so on. It took me to realize that it was just a greeting and people didn’t care about how my life was going. I thought that was pretty funny because nobody does that here in Malaysia. In my experience, if people ask you how’s it going, they want to know how things are going with you.

    Not many people in the remainder book industry that I met were smokers. The handful who smoked, I got along with pretty well, sharing cigarettes and conversation out in the cold weather after meals. Not sure if that helped with lowering the prices for the books we purchased, but I’d like to think so! Smoking gave me time alone which was good. It was nice to take a break every now and then, especially when you were traveling with the same people for a month straight. I cherished the breaks I had. It allowed me to recharge. Dr. Pepper in one hand, cigarette in another.

    Driving a car in the UK was also a fun experience. For the first few days, I was worried about my car stalling whenever I had to stop. Eventually, that fear went away and operating a manual car became second nature. Except when it came to roundabouts. Man, I clenched my butt cheeks every time we arrived at one. Fortunately, we did a lot of night driving so traffic wasn’t a big issue. I used Google maps to navigate, so I never got lost getting anywhere. I was definitely a much slower driver than my boss then, but I guess it was expected – I don’t even speed when I’m in KL.

    No idea when I’ll drive again in the UK, but for now I’m content with KL’s roads. Especially for the next week, when all the immigrants go back to their hometowns for Chinese New Year. Kek. I’m probably going to lose money gambling, but sitting around a table with friends is worth the entrance fee.

    Isn’t it great living in Malaysia? We get way more public holidays than we deserve – but I’m not complaining about it.