A perfect acquaintance

Ran into an old acquaintance during the week, at the screening of "Burma VJ".

He asked me, "Where has life brought you?"
I considered his question for a while, then asked, "In terms of work?"
Still smiling, he said, "Anything."
I gazed into the distance, at the red, velvety walls and the movie posters, thinking his question over, before I answered, "I don't know."

Only after the movie was over, and we had finished supper and parted ways, that I realized what a socially impolite answer I'd given him. Not that he minded, I think he wasn't really expecting a conventional answer to begin with. But it's funny that it took a perfect acquaintance to draw such an honest answer out of me.

The last time we'd met I was still in school, when i was still involved in all the social activism stuff. When he asked me where life had brought me, I rewound my visual tape of the past year and I kinda felt like I'd been in limbo all this while.

After that evening I had another bizarre dream.

I was sitting on a bus headed somewhere. The bus was somewhat like the old-style SBS transit bus, or the kinda bus you get in Laos, with no airconditioning, simple cushioned bench-like seats, and metal railings. The windows had been raised halfway along the shaft, and the wind was gently cruising its way in through the opening. A girl came and sat down beside me. I hardly noticed, I was still looking out of the window and daydreaming. Then, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, she casually turned and said to me, "You will fall down, and die." I turned and stared at her in disbelief. Somewhere inside me I knew she was telling the truth, but I refused to accept it. She reiterated unflinchingly, "You're going to die. You will fall to your death." She did not say when I would die, or where, but I knew she meant that very day itself. I told her to go away. She refused, and said, "It's true." I knew it was true, but perhaps if she didn't keep reminding me it would not be so. I got really angry and told her again to go away, and when she didn't move I attempted to shove her off the seat.

What really gripped me when she prophesied my death, was this overwhelming sense that I had something to do, and I had not done it yet. I don't know what the something was. It could have been a cause, or it could have been just a vague sense of unfulfillment that Ben Okri described when he wrote: "They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all they suffering they hadn't redeemed, all that they hadn't understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins."

Thanks to this perfect acquaintance. But I'm glad I ran into him again. It's not often that someone draws such an honest answer of out me. If I had asked myself that question I may not have been as honest. Most of us would probably like to think that the paths we've chosen in life have amounted to something, no?