112 - The day my father dies

One thing that has never come up in my everyday ponderings is the prospect of my dad dying. I know it sounds terrible to think about my father's death, but let me just explain how my emotional system works.

I don't like watching people or hearing about people being stricken by tragedy. I don't like knowing people can feel devastated, or torn apart. Most of the time this happens, is when people get too used to taking life for granted. They take the people around them, they take the things they've got for granted, and it's only a matter of time before some unknown force takes it away, because the reality in this universe is nothing lasts forever.

Something as tragic as my father's death is undoubtedly going to affect me. I shouldn't even be allowed to blog if I thought his death wouldn't affect me, due to how disturbingly stoic and inhumane that kind of reaction would be. However, the one thing that I can reduce is the shock factor. The one thing I can control is whether I feel something has been taken away from me, or has merely been lost. I don't want to feel that God will have taken away my dad. Especially with the information I have, I shouldn't feel that way.

My dad takes drugs. My dad drinks. My dad smokes. One would normally take these facts, and say they worry about their father's health, and that would be the end of that train of thought. It would be a dark piece of information lodged in the back of their mind, and they wouldn't think of it any further because they would be afraid to think of that dreadful day. Everyone wants their parents to grow old, to watch our growth, and to live a long and prosperous life.

But being afraid to think of death is what causes that sense of surprise. Having faith in life lasting forever is what makes us overwhelmed by grief. Which brings me back to why I imagine how his death is going to go beforehand. 

I picture myself in my bedroom, at my computer, in the five-person house I will rent with the English friends I've met at university. Or perhaps I will be walking out of a lecture, and as I do so, checking my phone for any missed calls. Any way it happens, it'll probably be my mother who tells me how, where and when my father happened to die in Hong Kong. I would be surprised by the news then, but I will not feel dismayed, shaken up, or awe-stricken.

I would tell my mother when I would fly back to Hong Kong as soon as possible. I would notify my housemates of what happened, and what will happen in the next few months, and will probably shed a bucketful of tears as I do so. I would fly back on the plane, quiet the whole time. On my arrival back in Hong Kong, many days will be spent organizing and discussing with my family what will be done with my father's body, and how we will commiserate him. Nobody will really care to ask me if I want to talk about what just happened. They will just assume I do, when really I don't. It'll be annoying, but I can't and won't blame them.

A couple weeks later, his funeral will happen, and I will be there in the front row, directly in front of a portrait picture of him, with his ashes or coffin situated behind it. The suit I will wear will be the most expensive outfit I will have ever purchased. Outside, it will not be sunny that day. It won't be cloudy either. It will just be normal weather conditions, semi-sunny, semi-overcast. I won't wear a tie. My face will be blank. Maybe I'll wear sunglasses, like how my father wore sunglasses at his dad's funeral. The church would be silent, just the way I like it, besides the words of the reverend that will perform the ceremony.

Standing behind and beside me will my three half-sisters of which my father also beared, my paternal grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, and my cousins on my father's side, as well as my father's co-workers, my father's friends, and three of my best friends and my mother who I invited for my own moral support.

I might speak about my father to the people who attend that day. After all, I am his son and I am a writer. I don't know what I will say, but I don't need to start writing that any time soon.

But that's already past the important part.

The important part will have been when I stand in front of his picture and say goodbye in my heart.

And as the days go by from now until that day, whatever may change externally will be countered by some change in this image that I have constructed, promptly and appropriately. Like if it turns out that I get an apartment by myself next school year, then I suppose I don't have to tell those housemates I originally planned to live with. That's how the grief reduction program works.

This system works every time. The system prevented anxiety attacks when it came to my final high school examinations, because I prepared myself mentally for glorious success and dismal failure. The system helped me face my summer job, knowing how to balancing inner confidence and the idea that I might get fired at any point I was working. The system saved me months of depression in the last few weeks I was in Hong Kong, on the plane ride to England, and for the past four months in university when I had perfectly good reason to feel weak and lonely.

Before I came to England, I imagined myself crying every night, missing home. And I now imagine crying every night after my father dies. In doing so, I live the experience once already in my head. There will be no heartbreak anymore because I've already had it broken. It's not to say I don't care about my father anymore. I'm not saying he's dead to me. I still care about him, my mother, and all of my family and friends. But I feel that I need to be strong, and I need to take care of myself. As people sometimes say, you can't look after others until you learn to look after yourself.

That's what I'm doing. That's what I just did, today. I went through the day my father dies. I will be fine on that day. They will say, "Wow, Michael. You're handling this incredibly well. I can't even begin to figure out how you do it."

And what you have just read is my explanation in full.

50 - I feel like puking.

Two years ago, I was suffering from my second-most serious case of depression (the first being the time I nearly commited suicide). During this second-most serious case, I constantly felt dizzy, nauseated and miserable. I lacked an appetite and the urge to sleep.

I don't just mean skipping breakfast. I don't just mean I pulled off an all-nighter. I did not eat or sleep for four days straight. All I did was crap, and cry at night in my room. I really didn't know if my mood affected my appetite, or if my loss of appetite led to my depression.

But it was horrible, and I knew I had a problem even by the second day. I refused to eat anything at meals... anything. I would walk past my all-time favorite fast-food chain, McDonald's, without even stopping. I was disgusted by all food, anything from chocolate cake to scrumptious Chinese delicacies, from pork chops to chicken wings, from pancakes with bananas to spaghetti bolognese. I would drink Coke, and puke it out later. Ordinary water seemed to be the only thing I could take in, even though I never drink any water and rely on juice, soft drinks, energy drinks, tea, coffee and soup for my fluids. And as for alcohol, well, you know what alcohol does to you: it makes you puke, but even I, with a tough threshold for holding my drink, puked, and that, my friends, is an astonishingly serious symptom. It's like everything, toxic to my body or healthful for my body, didn't appeal to me. I hated eating, I didn't want to consume anything.

Shit, it's probably the sickest I've ever been.

Right now, I have a virus lying within me that's similar. I woke up today frantically reaching around for my rubbish bin so that I could vomit.

I didn't get any satisfaction, though, because I haven't eaten since Wednesday afternoon, and there's nothing in my digestive system to regurgitate. I mean, it's Friday afternoon now, and I don't have the appetite to eat anything, not even a slice of bread, a small biscuit, or a bowl of congee - basically not even boring, bland rice in a bowl of water.

The one difference, between this time and that time two years ago, is that I'm not miserable. I think things with my family, especially my mother, are going fine. I have an active, lively Facebook, MSN and blogging life when I'm not out with my friends. And damn, my friends make me so happy and they mean so much to me. A romantic life is not in the equation because I'm not desperately looking for it. And I had a week of school that was actually looking up until I was feeling too ill to go yesterday, and now, today.

And it's making me think, am I actually miserable like the last time, but I've only been hiding it these past few days? Is there something I'm denying about how I feel? Am I withholding emotions that I don't want to let out?

I just gagged.

I'm heading to the doctor now to get some medication. I still don't want to eat anything. A big, fat steak would repulse me and make me puke up my stomach.

Shucks, I just gagged again. Talk to you all later.

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Update @ 21:27: The doctor gave me five different pills to take. I have a really bad headache now in addition to the vomiting need. I just went to the bathroom, and basically let out whatever was left inside my body. I don't think there's any food matter inside me at all. I still don't have an appetite. I just feel tired. I'll be back later, I suppose, to give another update.

48 - The late-shift Pizza Hut delivery guy

A particular friend of mine wrote a blog post about a special friend she had, and I'm inclined to think that special friend is me. Following her example, I shall not give her name, or call her to tell her that I wrote about her, but she knew I was going to read it, and I know she's reading this, too.

But she touched on something that really hit me hard, that made me swallow, that made me hold my breath, and that nearly made me cry as I was reading this one paragraph.

In her entry, she said that she found me by accident, and that our friendship should all be attributed to the efforts that I put in to the relationship. She said that I am the one who has encouraged her to partake in sexless hangouts, and that without my invitations, my texts and my calls, she would be at peace with being on her own. She said that she knew I had a lot of other close friends, and she viewed that as being quite depressing. If you look at it in a pessimistic, cynical way, she is just one of a bunch, a bunch of Michael's good friends. I can empathize with that, but read the following:

I know a lot of people. I cannot describe to you bloggers just how many people I know, but a lot of people have told me that I have touched their lives, changed their perspective deeply, been kind to them, appreciate me for my honesty, my scruffy, unique looks, my wit and humor, my sage advice, my hugs, my quirkiness, my words, my actions, my thoughts, my feelings (most notably, love), and my incredibly expansive insight regarding anything and everything.

I know a lot of people, and although I cannot express to you just how many that is, here's a taste:

• I was once suspended at school for collaborative and organized theft. I would go into the changing-rooms at school and scavange for spare cash in pants pockets and bags, while my British friend was the lookout and told me if someone was approaching. We've both moved on since being partners-in-crime, and he now lives in the UK. I love staying up late in Hong Kong, talking to him while it's only the early evening for him. I love him so much. He lives quite close to another friend:
• This other friend is Japanese and he's bisexual, just like me. He's been in England for a year and a half now, and likes it when bigger guys buy him drinks and escort him to their college dorms to spend the night. I fooled around with him many, many times when we went to school together five years ago, and I share all my intimate 'gay thoughts' with him because he knows what that's like. I love him, too, and can't wait to see him again some day.
• One thing that has been interesting for me being a bisexual, is how girls just love to be my friend, but don't want to be in a relationship with me. They like how thoughtful and good with the words I am, and they like that I don't indulge myself with guns, cars, sports, games or hair products. I have a dear friend, a girl, who I used to go to. I don't keep in touch with her much, but I had a crush on her once, and she had one on me, too. Whenever we do talk, she tells me her problems at school, in her family, that she would never tell anyone else about. And it moves me to know that she can find trust in me, a shoulder to lean on, a support system and an ear to listen. I love her, as well.
• I have a gay friend in Thailand, who works as a barista in Starbucks. He's 22, and wants to keep doing part-time temp. jobs like the one he has now. I have loving feelings for him, too.
  
• I have a friend, again, a girl, again, one that I had a crush on. She dances, she loves learning about physiology and anatomy. She always is determined to work hard, to be responsible, to be content, to be accepting, to be rational. She has a father that hits her in the face when he gets angry. It's sad. But unsurprisingly, I love her, too.
• I have similar feelings for twelve people in my class. There's the girl who achieves exceedingly well, and will go to Cambridge to study medicine, skipping the first year and moving straight on to the second. The sad part is that her parents will likely get divorced when she moves there.
• There's the short, unexercised girl who has had to follow her father's 'business' around the world for her whole life, never stopping long enough for her to make any 'real' friends.
  
• There's the boy who really wants to play the guitar for the rest of his life, but can't because his parents can't afford to send him to the US. There's the guy who smokes too much, the girl that fails her exams, the twins who struggle with keeping the peace and lessening the drama amongst all these other people with issues. And guess what? I love my class, too.
  
• I have seven old-fashioned, letter-writing pen-pals in the States, Canada, Australia and China,
• around two hundred people who I've talked to on Facebook in the past year,
• a handful of the LGBT community who I've met in forums and bars,
• teenagers and kids that live in my building,
• distant cousins and my three half-sisters,
• around five hundred schoolmates in three different schools,
• the late-shift Pizza Hut delivery guy, the McDonald's crew that know my face only too well and the 7-11 staff that have served me for years,
• and I have all of you Bloggers, all of you, even my list of 'Blogs I Follow' is very lengthy for following standards, but each of you have touched my life in so many different ways, and have reminded me that the world is much bigger than just your own city, a dot on the world map,
  
• and then I have my Best Friend, the one I trust with everything, the one that loves me unconditionally, the one that I care about the most, the one that has made me laugh more than anybody else, the one who was there to console me whenever I cried, the one that saved my life and talked me out of suicide, the one that stood by me with whatever was hurled at me, the one who knows all the rest, everybody, each individual I've encountered in my life.
  

The point that I wanted to express (and have strayed away from slightly with the whole dramatic, bullet-point thing) is that friendship is hard for me, too. Friendship is something that I don't know how to do well without relying on others. Friendship is something that I don't take credit for, and all I can see for myself is this long list, this incredibly long list that still doesn't convince me that I have a natural 'talent' with friends. I feel like giving up on friendship at times, I hate being friends with people when I get really angry at them. I am not confident in my ability to make and keep friends because I still get lonely, I still feel inadequate and inept, I still find it hard to simply define the bloody word itself.

What I am confident about is that you mean a lot to me, too. But, please, don't ever, ever feel unhappy with the fact that you are one of many. I treasure you, not more than them, or less than them, I just simply treasure you a lot. I've been maintaining friendships my whole life and I am sure that in my heart, I will cherish you after we graduate, and that we will keep in touch until the day we meet again, part ways again, and repeat the cycle over and over.

I hope you can find it in yourself to smile, despite being one of a bunch. You know that's the way I am. You know friendship makes me happiest. You know that I am here to live happily - not prosperously, not for the benefit of society, not for a long time. It says something about who I am in the left-sidebar, which is what I was trying to achieve by putting it there: 'I reckon that bonding with other people is all we humans are capable of doing well, and that the world has the capacity for each and every one of us to find people who we can share our lives with. I believe my purpose in life is to inspire, to share and to be one with the world.'

Like all the rest, I love you, too, my friend. I sure hope it ain't depressing.