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I submitted my application to UKEC on a ruthlessly cold October night: first, in hopes that I could throw myself into work to alleviate the excruciating homesickness; second, I had bones to pick with Malaysia’s progress, and I was done sitting around and waiting for somebody else to do something about it…
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beware, my darling, for I am a serpent at best. the foul, slithering creature whom your tender gardens detest…
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After all, if I’m stressed out and have to be working every waking moment, it has to account for something, right? If I have to sacrifice my sleep to write reports and articles, it will eventually pay off, right?
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And it sounds ridiculous. And it sounds like a lot. That is a lot for a person to not like about themselves. But I’m not finished. In fact, there are more matches in my matchbox that keep constant my fire of inferiority, matches that I hate…
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I lie here under the Indonesian sky. It’s a plain blue, cloudless, not even the slightest wisp; as if the day’s painter had run out of white paint and couldn’t be bothered to restock. I ponder for a slight second if it is right to call this the Indonesian sky; after all, does the sky…
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In all 5 ft 6 of me, patience is a scarce resource. It is common practice for me to rush from one task to another, to always think and plan ahead of time and overwhelm myself. Bali did not welcome my impatience; it sought to teach me the opposite…
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The world spins on its own axis, regardless of the speed of the other planets in its vicinity, regardless of whether an asteroid is hurtling in its direction, regardless of how blazingly the sun decides to shine…
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you can’t love your home—no matter where it resides—if you’re selfish. that we are. if the world were listening, i would ask a singular question…
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Let’s not mince words and cut right to the chase: it’s been bad. My twentieth year on this planet has been nothing short of brutal in terms of how much I’ve been put through and all the new emotions I’ve come to learn the names of…
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I wrote a letter to myself at the end of 2020, setting down some things I hope I’ll have achieved a year from then. The sand in the hourglass has since stopped running and it’s high time I reply to that letter…
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It starts out the same way it always does. The city wakes us up with all its hustle. When you’re in New York, every day feels the same. There is no differentiation between the weekdays and the weekends…
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Here are words I left unsaid. Not because the timing was never right. Not because I felt you were the wrong person to bestow them upon. Not because I didn’t mean them wholeheartedly. Here are words I left unsaid because I didn’t know at the time…
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Turning older is by default, but growing up is a choice. I celebrate how far I have come and how much farther I can go…
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You don’t read this book for a happy ending. You read it to have a phantom slice your chest open and crush it before your watering eyes. You read it to see two perfectly fine people—and consequently yourself—fall apart. Then, you look at the blueprint, and try to fix yourself up and move on…
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To label my college experience as a bad one and store it away in my mental attic would do the thousands of tuition ringgit paid no justice; it was a less-than-satisfactory one, undoubtedly, but I walked away knowing more than when I first walked through its gates…
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Sonder comes in a fuzzy feeling, like being swaddled in the warmth of your blanket as the morning sunlight splits through layers of curtains, cut by the breeze. Often laced with gratitude, it reminds us we are all cogs in a bigger machine, pieces in a larger game…
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We’d do one round of thirty MCQs, my dad would grade it, erase the set, and have me do it all over again. We’d do this for each set for however long it took me to get a perfect score—however long it took me to understand and learn from my mistakes…
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You don’t have to be Palestinian or Muslim to help the cause, you just have to be human enough. Change isn’t a one-man show; it’s a fire that is lit by one and passed on to the rest. You just have to be willing to hold the torch…
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I looked at Her and saw myself. A projection of Her youth. A hallucination of who She had wished to become. Her hopes and dreams rest on my shoulders. Her nose and lips rest on my face.
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I know society is capable of dousing fires—we’ve been doing that for the whole of human history—but we can’t keep putting out fires only to unearth dead bodies, we have to locate the root cause of those fires, remove the cause, and save lives…
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We are all pawns in a larger, international cosmic game, every one of us simply clinging onto the hope of reaching the other end of the chessboard, climbing the squares one god forsaken step at a time. But sociopaths? They aren’t playing the same game(s) we are…
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The red packets start pouring in by the moment. It is de rigueur that I drop by every table to say hello to our fellow relatives. I do. I allow four-character wishes to escape my mouth one after the other, smile graciously as I shake their hands, and receive the heavenly red envelope…
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2020 was a year that no eight-ball saw coming. I want to be able to remember the highlights of our collective societies through a fun-to-recite poem that sings like a nursery rhyme. This is it. The apocalyptic year summed in 658 words…
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In Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up only to realize he is now living as a giant insect, his life immediately overturned without warning or foreboding. I guess these two pieces have more in common than I thought then, since my life—though not as ridiculous as that of Samsa’s—was also thwarted into an unpredictable trajectory this…
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