You’ll never get the right answer if you kept on asking the wrong question, they say.

True.

It’s a bit like what Lewis Carrol has written in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland–on a scene where Alice, who got lost, bumped into a Cheshire cat.

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ asked Alice.
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.’
‘I don’t know where–so long as I get somewhere.’
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

—

There’s no such thing as an answer to why things don’t work well, or why life has to change directions every once and a while—simply because ‘why’ is not the right question to ask.

Writer Natalie Goldberg has managed to put the idea beautifully: “…(because) life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.”

Interesting to see how Natalie put the phrase “fall in love” together with ‘death, lose a leg, and drop a jar of applesauce‘.  These are the things that keep your life away from being orderly. And came to think about it, falling in love does feel like dropping a jar of applesauce. You don’t really know why it happens. Probably you tripped. You were being a bit careless. Or somehow, the jar just… slipped.

And—ah! Another thing that keeps your life away from being orderly: surprises!

Yes, of course, it will be great if you stumbled upon pleasant surprises. However, what if we’re talking about the kind of surprises where you finally find out the truth about something someone has been hiding from you for some times? The kind of surprise that stings your very eyes?

__

But then again, that’s life! Full of surprises. And some are unpleasant ones. You just have to deal with it.

As I’ve said earlier (on November, I guess?), I have no regrets.

Because how soon is too soon? Time span is not an absolute concept. You can have forever compressed into a 2-minute memory-playback. Really, you can’t ask for more. And an end is merely a beginning of something new. Of something else.

Anything.

Gina: “Absence makes… ”

Nino Quincampoix: ” …the heart grow fonder.”

– a conversation between Gina and Nino in my favorite movie of all time, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain –

It’s December 22, 2008. Two more days to holidays. Fifty five more hours to the end of a masquerade. The air-con has been turned off. Chocolate cakes and a red ribbon. Stuffed animal and a white cash box. Toraja coffee beans in a transparent jar. Outside, the world is painted in purple and gray. The rain is about to fall.

It’s me. Signing off.

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*)Gambar dipinjam dari sini dan dari sini.