For Malaysians in the UK.

It is hard to describe to people who have never been to Malaysia how it is to live in our country. The charm in old run-down coffee shops. Our language that is an affectionate blend of cultures. Gatherings with old friends at decrepit burger stalls by the roadside flanked by cybercafes with tinted windows. The way we all come together for an all-important badminton match. The vibrance. This is what you're leaving behind when you leave in the search for greener pastures.

In a couple of years, we're going to graduate. It's scary. As the weeks at university drag into months and eventually into years, it seems there are people out there who are already more accomplished than we will ever be. The people who already know what they're going to do with their lives. We all probably know one or two of them. The presidents of the societies and the insane people who win all the prizes and do all the work on time. The people with the perfect grades and perfect teeth and perfect knowledge of all the possible interview questions. They have the next ten years all mapped out. Woofuckinghoo, I applaud your persistence.

But for the rest of us, we're still somewhat caught in a multitude of options, one more mediocre than the next. There is a sentiment I sense creeping into our collective consciousness, as we struggle with our deadlines, that London is where we ought to be. A utopia of career prospects. But do you really want to live in London? Do you? To work in some formidable glass building in Canary Wharf. Where clocks everywhere remind you of the meetings you're late for and all the time zones separating you and all you know. Quaint coffee shops you have no time to sit down at. Breathing in the stale air of the London Underground where people are power walking in every direction you look, so that even if you are existentially lonely, it is impossible to be physically lonely. I cannot go on living in the UK knowing that I will not be going home the same day I complete my degree. It saps the fight out of me. London makes me sick.

Or you could always move back to Malaysia and work in a cubicle where you trade your mental health and early adulthood for pennies. Doesn't sound like much of a plan but it's the best one most of us have. By the time you repay your study loans, there really isn't much left of your life for anything else. You are no longer young, no longer allowed to take risks, not allowed to fail crazily, because you have too much at stake and too little time. You blend into a work culture that retards initiative in a million different ways so that, little by little, you are reduced to one of them.

Take your pick. I only hope, years from now, as we move to London and move away from London and wished we had or had not moved to London, that we are still fundamentally the person we want to be.

Questions.

Let us be honest. Brutally honest. We're not going to live forever. The people we know and love are not going to be around forever. As I write this, adolescence is slipping away. Soon, it will be gone, just like childhood and the teenage years have slunk away, so tangible and fresh in our memories, but really, just out of reach. It's funny, how we were all once young and thought we were invincible. And maybe we were, in the little bell jars we lived and suffocated in. But those days are over, painfully over. Before I realise that there is a bigger chunk of my life to look back on than to look forward to, I have a few questions.

Is there anything you can do about people you miss? You meet people you take for granted. Until the day those circumstances that have brought you together, be it school, geography or sports, ends. You're not going to leave these people behind, not in the negative sense of the word. But there is a separation there. The regularity you speak with them dwindles. You see them online and you want to send them a message, but you falter. Some of these people will just fade away into the scenery, and that's ok. But others, you're not so ready to let go. Happiness brings people together, but nothing bonds people like suffering. When you're all broken the same way, you learn to read between each others words and into the silences. We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I'd say that was how I felt with those people, a feeling of family, and, to me, it's worth missing.

What do you dream about? Let's talk about your aspirations. Do you dream about the future and what it promises? Do you dream about a life of comfort and happiness you don't have to try so hard for, or are your dreams the same as waking life, with the same people and the same goals others have set for you? Do you even know the difference anymore? Or are your dreams so impossible and fragile that it cripples you sometimes? What do you do when you realise that your ambitions will amount to no more than a composition in your primary school exercise book? We are our own hardest critics, and it is often easy to forget to be gentle with ourselves.

What is the best way to be happy? Do we settle or do we push? The years inch by and suddenly this becomes a trick question. The immense sense of possibility we had as children has evaporated, leaving a bad aftertaste under our tongues. We have impossibly high standards that we will never live up to. We are overshadowed by our own past successes. Where does that leave us then?

I carry the past on my shoulders and cradle the future in my arms. That is my flaw. I need to revive that sadomasochistic relationship with the present that is my brand of happiness. Then, hopefully, things will start falling into place.

A bulletproof coffin.

Over the years, I have become very good at denial. I am not the rash person I was before. I can't tell if I'm a better person for it. Recklessness felt alive. Now I feel very little for anything. There are very few things I can find it in myself to hate, love or fight for. What I do feel, I keep to myself, concealed under an inscrutable expression I have perfected. I see things, but I refuse to let myself react.

Emotions are pointless. They are futile attempts of our minds to come to grips with reality. They cloud judgement. If there is one emotion I am still as woefully subject to, it's anger. It is the one emotion I allow myself to indulge in. My anger used to be a by-product of my passions. Now it stems from self-loathing. When it happens these days, I do not hit things nearly as much any more. Instead, it is a quiet, seething rage that bubbles barely beneath the calm, civil exterior I try so hard to put together. I've been taught that, harnessed right, it is a very useful emotion. However, to be angry all the time is exhausting. It strips your needs to the bare minimum, but there is only so much self-abuse you can take before you crack.

A lot of times, I look at my life from above, and I swear I do not know what to feel.

I'd like to say that I have nothing. It would make the anger more righteous, more bearable. But it isn't true. I have everything, but I am nothing.

I don't know.

I've learnt that these three words may be the closest I can come to telling the truth. I don't know why I'm down sometimes. I don't know what triggers the sharp downward plunges in my mood. I'm fine for days at a time, and then, bam, that feeling, that opposite of happiness but not quite sadness. Sometimes it is a pea that balloons up in my face as the day drags by. I know what's coming when the skin breaks and it washes over me. Sometimes I'm happy and I turn around, and it hits me like a yellow school bus and I find I can't breathe properly. These are almost as bad. Maybe it's the idleness. Sitting down and chatting and having fun. Maybe I don't want to have fun because having fun makes me feel guilty. I can make sense of this guilt, but I don't want to. Because it whispers to me how much of a failure I am in all but the most insignificant of ways.

I'm tired of eating burnt rice. I'm sick of eating cold leftover rice on winter nights. So I cook pasta. But I want to eat rice. I like how this short paragraph speaks volumes about my life.

My life is about as exciting as my cooking. Day after day, I dance lightly around the elephant in the room, careful not to rouse it. It is so much easier to not feel, to just be. But I'm afraid to lose myself in this person I'm not for long periods at a time, because I am isolating the human part of myself in this little dark chamber in the folds of my mind and every day I do not take it out for a walk, it decays a little. I decay a little.

I tried running today and my ankle flared up again. Maybe it is enough to exist. To not overexert and overachieve and fuss over every minute detail. To go on, never more than one day at a time, and enjoy the scenery. Then maybe, I wouldn't attach all my expectations, all the important little bits of who I am, to a person I am not sure I can be.

Aaah. Again, this foul stench of guilt.

Chugging along.

I want my passions to hit me like the death of someone I love. To make me sad and angry and acutely aware that I'm alive and breathing. To transform me the way death has a knack for changing people. To allow me reason to rage at the world, to defiantly tear myself to shreds marching against a greater power.

I have also resigned myself to the fact that I will never find them, these great passions I speak of. They exist, on a different plane, because mine is one far too barren for them to flourish. They are from a lost period in my life. That's what I say to myself, at any rate. I will live a respectable life, get my respectable job and die a respectable death. Which, when you pause to think about it, isn't too bad. At least I get to have a decent house in a decent neighbourhood. Hur-fucking-ray. Nice car. Evenings glued to the TV. Weekends off. Exactly the kind of life every other person has lived a thousand times over. 

I will not have made a difference. Crunching numbers in some claustrophobic cubicle in a bank office isn't making a difference. My death would be as inconsequential as my life had been. There would be a nice service in a beautiful white crematorium with polished marble floors, and then people would go back to their lives, until they end up in the same damn crematorium again, except this time it's a one-way trip. And outside this vicious cycle, nothing would have changed. 

You would probably know this feeling as well. It would be selfish, snobbish and presumptuous of me to say that no one else would understand. As much as it would be untrue, this declaration would not make me any more human than you are. Somewhere deep down in yourself, you must have contemplated this situation seriously, at some point in your life, except not everyone gets answers. That's fine. Everyone else is handling it just fine. It's just me with the blank stares when people talk about enjoying life.

I am working very hard these days. I flit from one task to another, I set things in motion and I don't stop to let my mind do things to me. I run like a well-oiled machine. My bank would love me.

I think I've been mistaking relief for happiness.

I can't be around people any more. My attention span is too short for that. I can't do team sports, I can't socialise, heck, sometimes I struggle to even keep a conversation going. My heart isn't in it. My mind shuts down. My eyes go blank. People ask me why I'm sad. I say I'm not, but I'm such a bad liar anyway that it doesn't matter. So I jog. It clears my mind. Or at least the pounding in the head fills it up with something else. Something mindless, something that doesn't require mental effort. And it drains me physically too, so I am safe from myself for at least a few hours afterwards. But as the weather turns colder, soon it will be impossible to jog, so even this is about to be taken away from me. Another reason for me to hate the cold weather, not that I need any.

I am very frustrated with where I am in life right now. I am frustrated with the lack of depth. I am a vegetable responding to external stimuli. I live in a bubble where everything I do is detached from the world. This must be how it feels to live as a zoo exhibit. I wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and I feel like everything that I do in between doesn't matter, not really. I study economics because I find it interesting, and I can see myself using it in my career in future, but it doesn't excite me. And it seems like nothing does anymore. My ephemeral bouts of happiness are merely moments of relief. I cannot figure out what it is that I'm not doing, or not doing right. I need passion to anchor me to life, and I have no idea where to start looking.

So tell me, what is it that makes you happy? Because it's not working for me. I talk about the future and my career, but who am I to talk about the future when I do not live in the present? On really bad days I just walk around like a zombie. On good days I get away with being irrationally bubbly and conversational. But most days I'm just another negligible student/soldier marching along with no idea what he's doing in life.

回憶我和你留著汗水喝著汽水在操場邊

Where do I begin? Warwick is everything I'd ever hoped for and more. The scenery is obscenely picturesque. The lights at night are beautiful. The people are great, and I've made friends. Truckloads and truckloads of them. The first two weeks were a whirlwind of booze and parties, and they've kept me occupied and happy. But in their aftermath, I wonder.

Some days, I am content to go about my business alone and most nights, I immerse myself in loud music and excited chatter about trivial matters I never remember afterwards, perfectly happy so. I go running in the afternoons. I bask in my new-found freedom. Being self-sufficient is more a liberation than a responsibility. But some nights, some nights, I am sad. My vicious resistance to weakness is forgotten. The irrational euphoria gets tiresome. I stop caring for being interesting. Some nights, making small talk with these people I have only superficial knowledge of is exhausting.

To be fair, these people have interesting personalities. In future, I will get closer to some of them and things can only get better, but frankly, at this point, I can write you a whole book of poetry on why closer will never be good enough.

Tonight, I sat alone on a bench outside the arts centre. The cold air and the soothing night sounds brought my senses into focus. The solitude is a relief. For a long time, I sat there brooding, breathing white mist into the air in front of me and observing the pattern of the lights on the rooftops. I wondered if sadness was a real emotion. Is it the opposite of happiness, or the lack of it, much like cold is an absence of heat? And I cannot help but think, maybe I would trade all these, the beautiful lights, the intricate brickwork, the immaculately trimmed trees, for a late-night laugh with old friends, about old times, in a run-down Chinese coffee shop.

But of course I wouldn't. I am too much of a realist for that.