Chapter 1: Benched Beauty
Out of Space
I’m running out of space
So I’m off to outer space
Where aliens unlike humans lure
The bold and the pure
My episode begins in bed
Where past, present and future wed
When hurts, thoughts and hopes careen wild
Mixed with regrets and guilt freshly filed
I want to strip naked to my very core
Spin freely with kids in tow
Am I Eve looking for a reformed Adam?
For a change, maybe Imran, Ibrahim or Saddam?
My promised spaceship arrived, aptly an ambulance
The bewildered husband cries, shattering the silence
He who was a traitor to family and community
Knows not the change he has effected upon me
Infidelity can slide the mind to the edge of insanity
When reason can no longer provide excuses for treachery
The soul in sorrow reaches for the Heavenly realm
In sanity, veils are lifted; a new vision takes the helm
The journey to outer space
Mirrors the one in inner space
The line separating the two is as fragile as ice
When the heat’s turned up dreams melt into lies
Alysha Nassir
Bukit Cahaya Hospital
July 1998
24 December 1998
The sky had darkened and threatened to rain with thunderous growls leaping across the storm-brewing clouds. Yet the heavens were droning with more ominous sounds of a mechanical kind - those of jet plane criss-crossing in an intense military exercise.
Lying on the bench, in her red heavy cotton Indian princess cut gown Alysha stared at the slate-grey sky, convinced that the end was near. The little spat of a war between two Asian Tigers to trigger The End had begun and she would wait her own demise in the smaller scheme of things.
The first drops pelted harshly, as drizzles, but like hard smacks from pebbles dropped by passing pigeons. The feeling was not entirely unpleasant, and now, eyes wide shut, she imagined if she was to be sentenced to death by stoning, would the steady rhythmic pelting just melt away as her consciousness give away to an other-worldliness?
Alysha lay deadly still, wondering just how long it would take before the sky or bomb would fall on her, or the rain would suffocate - it was beginning to do just that, flooding her nostrils. Was it possible to die by drowning in a monsoon on a hospital park bench and would it count as suicide, she idly mused.
Her lucid thoughts were rudely interrupted by the attendant nurse Joe who joked, “Hey, Sleeping Beauty, waiting for your Prince Charming? You’d better come in before you catch your death from a cold and break his heart.”
“No, this is not how the story ends, I’m meant to lie here till the end.”
“The end of what, Alysha?”
“The end of the world.”
A pious Muslim who shared her world view he replied, “There’s enough time for that yet…though of course the signs are aplenty that we are approaching the hour of doom, Alysha…come on, you have much to live for, your children will be here soon.”
Never seen without his faded green knitted cap and always humming prayers in his spare time, Joe had the most sense of humour among the four male nurse attendants who ran errands and most importantly stood guard at the main door of Ward 7 which was kept locked except during visiting hours when they have to be most vigilant. The most foolhardy and slippery patients chose this chaotic period to run for freedom. In truth, the nurse attendants were either, aged, beer-bellied, as skinny as a broom stick and do not actually enforce security - for that, the hospital has the uniformed security forces at its beck and call to literally tie up all the loose ends, screws and nuts. However, their kindly presence did seem to have a deterrent and a calming effect on patients who frequently sought their affable companionship. Smokers forced to go cold turkey by their families often tried successfully to squeeze a cigarette or two from them.
Dripping wet, Alysha stepped indoors. Her brand new dress, a present from her sister from her pilgrimage to
Someone who would be normally called a ‘modestynik’ in
She was careening and dangerously free like a whirling dervish sucked in a multi-storey urban concrete whirlpool. The old lady who guiltily witnessed her unraveling over her son’s office affair and the sudden outpouring of old hurts directed at her, screamed futilely for the neighbours to help. As usual, at times of excruciating need, the neighbours’ fire-proof doors were padlocked tightly and were deaf to the pain of its next door inhabitants.
It was well that no mortal came to their rescue for Alysha, it was meant to be a private moment between her and a tired adversary whom she had tried in vain to love and win affection. Her energy had been depleted leading to the point when Alysha had finally challenged her respected elder to fulfill her oft-repeated wish to live on her own, a dare she knew the feisty and fiercely independent lady would never back down from. The very same day Hendon had applied for a rental flat and though Adam, in his usual sullen silent ways said nothing, he notched up yet another unspoken grudge against his wife.
Alysha who was groomed for frankness by her temperamental mom Zaynab as a weapon against her errant father, defined the naked moment of truth, as the ultimate ‘in your face’ - a symbolic act to shed all false pretenses to love this difficult woman and show the ugly hatred and hurt she had been nursing privately and openly amongst her confidantes and thus finally and hopefully purge it out of her diseased system. She had tried, really tried to understand and love this hardened, street-smart woman, stubborn and close-minded, dragging her own ten-ton bag of toxic nostalgia from an orphaned and abused childhood, a broken marriage and a lonely life with the confusing discharges of menopause thrown in. Hendon had not been prepared to lose her sole child to his marriage and bitterly mourned his loss even though he lived under the same roof as her and that the bride was the one who left the warmth and loving comfort of her parent’s home.
For 10 miserable years, Alysha had been increasingly tired of feeling hate for someone who ought to be loved and respected, exhausted at the guilt of wishing death upon her, terrified at her own evil thoughts, depleted by this obsessive hatred which is draining her own self-love and respect and that of her husband’s for he was caught in between two women he love or has it just become two women he despised for hate begets hate?
The ‘expose’ was also perhaps an unconscious symbolic reply to her dream, years ago of the wrinkled woman, Hendon, sagging breasts, dry, greying hair flowing, bursting into her bedroom while she and Adam were making love. She appeared to Alysha like a
When Alysha told Hendon of the
In truth, she craved for a spiritual sexual union, bound by love of God, with proper prayer rituals before and after and during the sexual acts as prescribed by Islam which integrates morals and spirituality into a whole life code and ethos. She felt hollow and disappointed from a spiritually mismatched partner, even though she knew that would be their greatest obstacle from the start. But her problem was she had great faith in every soul, even the worst scum of the earth - and Adam was scumilicious when Alysha met him.
Hendon, who used to clean like a woman on rampage, spilling anger and spouting bitterness would vent bile on the little bits of hair in the otherwise squeaky clean toilet. They earned her ire provoking comments like “aren’t’ you embarrassed when your father comes to use your toilet and see all that hair?” Alysha was so annoyed at the paragon of cleanliness who kept the house full of 20 stifled, stinky felines, whose tons of shed hair she was allergic to, that she burst out crying at the unfairness of the accusations. This was the same woman who on the first visit to her home had commented to her parents, “Young ladies in campus nowadays have to run after the guys, if not they would be left on the shelf.”
It was clear that the two who had such disparate experiences and gap in education would never see eye to eye on many things and there was no point arguing, “My dad too sheds pubic hair in the toilet which gets caught in the filter cap and from where we come from, no one bats an eyelid. It is a fact of life.” But she had kept her anger quiet out of respect for authority, for didn’t the Prophet say, you shouldn’t say 'Urff ' or some irate grunt-like sound to parents. She was full of more than rude four-letter grunts for parents that it was clogging her system.
“You are my dwarves, am I Snow White?” asked Alysha to staff nurse Lisa who kept pestering her about the stunt she was pulling in the rain. The warm shower was lovely, but being dressed by others wasn’t fun - it was not so nice to be a princess or a queen, she mused, returning to the comfort of her childhood fairytales. Being English-educated and raised in a convent school by a mother who was an anglophile, she had grown on a staple diet of fairy tales and books by Enid Blyton Books, Alfred Hitchcock, Carolyn Keene and other famous and less famous authors. The little Malay folklore she knew was picked up in her Malay Language classes in school with tales like the strongman Badang who acquired extraordinary powers from eating the vomit of a creature, and other silly exotic tales like Bawang Merah Bawang Putih and Batu Belah Batu Betangkup from Malay movies. She used to wonder why the widow in the latter story threw herself in the man-eating cave called just because her son ate her share of the fish roe she had been craving for, but now Alysha realised that that poor woman must have been suicidal, and was suffering from depression after the death of her husband, having to fend for her family alone. Alysha’s childhood dreams were more filled with fairies, brownies, pixies and other unseen creatures of the English folklore than the orang bunian, jin, pontianak and toyol of her Malay heritage, thankfully so, for the latter were more spine-chilling scary, being closer to home.
This other world caught up with her while she was ill, first, when she sensed its evil presence at times, trying to penetrate into her weakened mental state, trying to take possession of her over-wrought mind. Then, there was the witchdoctor or bomoh that Hendon did not waste not time summoning to cure her, for in her worldview, Alysha had been possessed by a genie or jin who was occupying their three-year-old bungalow in Johor that the young couple had bought and were having difficulties financing. The house was visited only during the weekends and sometimes more infrequently leaving it vulnerable to burglars and more ominously, vagrant spirits. Alysha, in her confused state had wandered and spent the night there, leaving her eight month-old nurseling, Danial behind and dragging her two-year old toddler Eyman with her.
When the bomoh, a small old man tried to cure her by reading some chants and squeezing some limejuice into her throat, she choked and struggled and saw instead, a towering angry giant of a jin, wearing a black stone ring. She felt like he was choking her to death and decided to surrender and was surprised that when she did, the pain stopped and the ritual ended with him asking her to take a refreshing lime and floral bath. She cheerfully did that with her children, glad that one ordeal has stopped though conscious that she was still a prisoner in a nightmare which was just beginning.
While in the hospital shower, reality suddenly intruded, as it would every now and then, that she must have “lost it”, to have thought that Malaysia was really dropping bombs on Singapore over the yet again strained relationship on matters such as water supply, railway land, status of the Malays etc…and of course, wasn’t it plain nutty to scream the world is going to end so soon, even if the time bomb was silently and surely ticking away?
Alysha had gone to the highest authority at the stunted rocket of a building at Toa Payoh for some confirmation, to help prepare the Muslim community of the impending doom. As she was in business with the Muslim Board of Singapore, she had knocked on the doors of the Grand Mufti of Singapore who looked like a slimmer and sterner version of Santa in a various shades of grey Safari suits, which were his most favoured work attire.
When she announced that Doomsday was nigh, he had kindly asked her if she was facing family problem and advised her to read a chapter of the Quran to help soothe her jangled nerves. He tried to read the surah but for the life of him couldn’t recall it. At that moment, she suddenly she saw his pristine white robe or jubah slipped and lost a tad of faith in him and wondered if he was indeed just a ‘rice bowl Mufti’ as many unsympathetically dubbed him to be. She adored him anyway.
Alysha knew that was why she was in this homely hospital anyway, to recuperate, lose these apocalyptic notions and just unwarp, though no one has said so much that she has gone mad, not once in this safe halfway house she found so alienating and threatening at first. Had she joined the ranks of the cultic apocalyptic groups who were angry and disappointed with civillisation or the lack thereof and were just waiting for The End of the Never Ending Story?
Actually, upon arrival at the modern Bukit Cahaya Hospital, which prettily means Mount Light in Malay, she thought she was sent into an alien spaceship - the emergency theater, octagonal shaped, with a life-size poster of Teletubbies attended by a Hongkong accented doctor with a triangular ET-shaped face carried on a theme already stuck in her head. This illness was causing her thoughts to flow fast and furious like super speedy bullets she can actually see them ricocheting in her brain, triggering one thought after another like in her favourite word association game.
Earlier at home, she had declared that God has had It with his Creation and the world was going to end and explode due to overwhelmingly high proportion of corrupt and adulterous male world leaders - Bill Clinton, Anwar Ibrahim and Mahathir Mohamad were all caught in some sex and political scandals. She had even explained how the sins of the forefathers, detailing those of her parents (her dad too was recently discovered to be involved in three, not one but two secret polygamous marriages, two divorced, one still married) and Adam’s parents (divorced while he was a baby) and Adam’s (who was caught holding hands in the MRT with Jannah twice one week by a friend) had cause God to allow an alien species to take over the world and which was currently sucking the life force of the little children who were to be the sacrifice. The earth and its inhabitants would be dead soon in a disaster which would leave only the last remaining men and women with true passion, vision and mission in life, people who were true to the highest ideals and were incorruptible in the face of temptations.
So, Alysha waited for her spacecraft and her friends, the most interesting people in the planet one with whom would have fun exploring the frontiers of space and time and finding at last her true soulmate, to replace the jerk of a husband whom she had convinced herself to fall in love with when she wanted to marry and have children. Her friend Rahmah, who had the most imagination will be able to conjure up the spaceship, there was no need for NASA to build its failed rockets, and as she waited she wished for some of her former boyfriends, probably jerks to in their own way, but who had true passion, vision and mission and were nonetheless true to their boring spouses. While waiting for the spacecraft, beside one of her best friends Hannah, she imagined who else would be on board this magical journey to Heaven, which was just one way of getting to this elusive destination and finding her long-lost soulmate. Was there only one true soulmate for every person? How many frogs do you have to kiss before you find your prince? Long ago she had decided the answer was ‘Once, if you are a princess, for it is a true princess’ kiss that turns frogs into princes.’ Now she’s not to sure if she is a true princess, for her prince had left her for a toad. They were not living happily ever after. Reality sure sucked. She needed to change her life script. By the way, how many partners do men and women have in heaven? How come she always gets the idea that women have one and men have many? Wither the justice, even in heaven or was that a blasphemous thought. She made a mental note to do more research and get the facts right, before jumping to conclusions.
Adam had promised her that her flying machine a.ka. ambulance would arrive soon after he and her father Nassir fetched supper of spicy, colourful Indian rojak from the 24-hour restaurant. She had walloped the colourful balls, savouring every spicy prawn flour ball, soybean cake, jelly-like cuttlefish, and gritty liver with her tired and surprised neighbour who had returned from her midnight factory shift work. She ate with gusto when manic, her senses finely awakened to her surroundings, able to record the moments almost in minute photographic detail. Her children Danial, barely 1 and Eyman, 4 had gone asleep, Hendon, was crying in her room, mom who had arrived was sitting nervously with Sarah her best friend, pondering about the night’s melodrama. Sarah had been especially frightened when Alysha said that there was something evil in her and she should really strive to be a better person. It was true, she saw the darkness and light as clear as night and day when in this sensitised state, awakened to the below-the-surface realities of things.
Zaynab since her calm yet concerned arrival had received a cold shoulder. Alysha had somehow envisioned her and Hendon as a two-headed snake who made her life hell in more ways than one. Alysha spied a cockroach scrambling up the wall, confirming her suspicion that as much as Hendon tried to keep the cramped flat clean, it was as filthy as the mind of its dominant occupant, who focused on the bad side of things when it comes to the people she disliked. Alysha’s mind was unspooling interesting ad lines like Nike’s ‘Just do It’, ‘No Fear’, a mixture of English and Malay proverbs like Don’t Throw the Baby with the Bath Water and Awas, Ular Kepala Dua….she was chasing rabbits and the Mad Hatter like Alice in Wonderland.
When Alysha saw the attendants in white uniform, bringing a wheelchair, she cried and had a fleeting thought that she should have escaped by jumping off the corridor and fly like she often do in her dreams - now that was her closest shave to a coroner’s misadventure or suicide verdict. Wouldn’t it have shattered her family? She bawled all the way in the ambulance, terrified that her husband was conspiring with the men in white with the aliens who were taking over the world, provoking fresh tears from her guilt-ridden husband.
At the emergency room, past 2 a.m. a screensaver on a computer by some science fiction writer said “I do not fear computers but I fear a world without computers”…something like that, and a TV screen showed a head scan of what Alysha though looked like an alien’s head and she desperately pointed at her husband. “These people are aliens, and they want my head!”
She looked for an escape route and pulled Adam to the toilet and begged him to switch to her side. Alysha saw her reflection at the mirror. Could three sleepless nights reduce her to this wreck? Something evil was turning her into a monster, her skin was blackening, spotting, disintegrating, and now she sense her husband is some part of a conspiracy. He assured her and led her to her bed where the uniquely beautiful female ‘alien’ doctor and a few Filipino male nurses held her down and shut her screams and protests with a tranquilizer, giving her crashed system, a much needed complete shut down.
Actually, ‘the aliens’ and everyone else have been really quite sweet and kept the plain truth from her, letting the reality sink in slowly in bits and pieces. Not counting the time when Hendon said to her “Alysha, kau dah gila (you've gone mad)!” after hours of non-stop talk, offering a grand theory connecting the past, cause and effect, present and future of every personal, family, state and world problem. Everyone had been quite polite, not the least her husband, the cause of her altered state of consciousness to escape the pain of adultery and loss of the ideal of romantic love.
Yet madness had no meaning to her at the moment, she was still lost in this strange new world where life and death has taken a completely different light - it was as if she had an eye and brain transplant, her sight and mind had changed irreversibly by a quantum leap when something within snapped and she saw beyond the borders of sanity. Life, Alysha, would never be the same again.
In one excited moment, she had called her new consciousness, ‘Nirvana’ excitedly calling her sister who had recently migrated to Perth telling her that she had reached that elusive state, finally, truly understood the meaning of life completely as if a crucial piece of a puzzle had fall into place. And she did not even have to leave her bed nor sit under a bodhi tree nor meditate in a cubby cave in Jabbar Nur like Muhammad. Her quest to understand her suffering had brought her to enlightenment - all it took was intense contemplation over one sleepless night about why her husband strayed and why evil and pain existed in this world. She did not blame Adam entirely, she had judged herself and found her herself guilty on some accounts. It was the longest night of her life, one that sent her to the depths of hell and to the highs of heaven and in a crazed moment, she felt a surge of power to divine into the future and blasphemously called herself a minor ‘prophetess’. Finally, she understood what it was like to do an Isra’ Mi’raj without the buraq, the winged horse with only the power of imagination. She even recalled visiting earth when it was barren of life, just beginning, a babe then, but by today’s reckoning an ancient dame.
Was her highly imaginative and stressed-up mind finally gone bonkers? Could it be a coincidence that she has always had a morbid fascination by the most lunatic of characters in novels and movies and a week before going completely nuts wondered out loud to her closest friend, Sarah what it would be like to be mad for the sheer hell of it? Hendon had wondered aloud what movies and novels the bookworm was snuggling up to before going nuts, for some insane ideas must have penetrated into her brain. Actually she would be mortified to know it was Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, ironically on loan by Adam’s lover, his office colleague, Jannah. Alysha never went beyond the first chapter or two while the main character was falling down the sky with a brolly, she didn’t like his confusing style, as for movies, she was watching a sci-fi portrayal of her favourite novel The Abyss. Needless to say, Alysha was an X-files junkie and loved mysteries and explorations beyond the ordinary realm.
The Malays have a saying that translates literally, “Your mouth is salty,” whenever you say a statement which may just come true and for Muslims, the power of wishful words can carry as much weight as a du’a or an invocation. Alysha had herself noted this power of words and would discover that her words while manic prove even more salty. Aware that she had crossed the unseen hairline, she had congratulated herself for crossing the borders of sanity and coming back sane and whole again, or so she prayed, and totted it up as an invaluable experience, especially in her profession.
Alysha suddenly recalled her dear former boss, an earnest wide-eyed editor at a yuppie magazine, who spoke and rolled his eyes just like the neigbourhood mamak stall man, “Alysha, why are you quitting to work from home? Before long, your mum-in-law will drive you mad.”
His words too were like a soothsayer’s, for after 10 years beginning with pre-marital tension which escalated with every day of living under the same roof, unspoken and unresolved domestic conflicts and much repressed anger turned inwards had manifested itself into depression, thankfully, of the bipolar kind which alternates between extreme poles of unbelievable euphoria, second only to blinding love, and sickening suffocating depths of depression.
She would soon decide that between the devil and the deep blue sea, she’d embrace the embarrassing and unpredictable monster of mania anytime, depression being right down toxic and darn draining to the soul while the former is just the opposite, suffusing a spiritual glow into mundane and even ordinarily sinful things. When manic, even a ride on a double decker SBS Superbus had a surreal quality of travelling through time, as past and present Singapore mingling side by side whiz by lulled by piped in elevator music. Hallucinating, the line between dream and reality excitingly faded. It was harder to tell at times whether she was dead or alive, or in between, in alam barzakh where the dead awaits for the Day of Judgement, or whether she was already in heaven, so ecstatic and contented as a Cheshire Cat licking her cream was she.
“Comb your hair and try and get some sleep. It’ll be an hour and a half at least before tea break, said nurse Lisa gently.
She had one moment earlier on the first day she was admitted with Sasha, both of them were apparently high and she can’t quite recall how it happen or why it did but when Sasha wanted to kiss her, she suggested she did it on her lips. So that was the first time she, a grown woman kissed a grown woman on the lips. They then trotted off to the bathroom to compare breast sizes and wash each other’s hair, giggling irrepressibly like two schoolgirls. Sudden giggling fits over her private jokes would be a feature of her illness much to the annoyance of others who don’t get it and the amusement of her friends and strangers alike who are able to see the lighter and poignant side of things.
The girlish kiss reminded her of the time when she was in an all-girls government school and frequently had crushes on girls and wondered if that made her a lesbian. “Dear Diary,” she wrote, “I don’t think I’m one. It’s just that I don’t have the opportunity to meet real guys and the girls I’m admiring from afar are the ‘boyish’ ones - this must be just practising for the real thing. I think it comes with being in an all girls environment. Where are we going to let out this natural growing up tendencies to adore, admire others?”
Yet another spaced out encounter which occurred like she had been doing this sort of charismatic healing since God knows when. A lady she across her bed she can hardly converse with, a duck and a hen, as they say, for the Madam spoke little English and Alysha little Mandarin. But clearly Madam, a fragile ageing Chinese beauty with greening tattooed eyebrows suffered from blinding migraine and complained of problems with her hubby.
When he came to visit her that night, Alysha in all seriousness and calmness took their hands and joined them together and focused her thoughts to lovingly reconcile two beautiful couple she knew truly loved one another. Then she placed her hands over Madams eyes and head and massaged them, something Alysha never liked doing even for her own husband.
Whether out of politeness or the gratefulness for the care or the placebo effect, Madam was much happy with the results and kept thanking Alysha for days. The doctor explained to Alysha, that entertaining for a moment that she has somehow acquired some special powers to heal, was characteristic of mania, that is having ‘delusions of grandeur’.
What a grand term for a grand feeling - she thought Anthony Robbins may approve of her awakening the giant within. Not that she found the book worth-reading, titles, photos, essences captured on the cover sometimes suffices for her, especially when the first few pages of the book confirm that the jacket is better than the body.
Thus one of the standard questions to rate her mania was, “So, do you still think you have special powers, or you have something special to do?” Alysha found this the most annoying of all tests of her mental state and wished that the psychiatrists had devised more sophisticated tools or at least show more interest in her as a patient - help her understand why she came to low point in her life and get her out of it, preferably without dope.
Damn the drugs and the visits to the doctors. Once she missed a visit and inevitably carried on taking that zombie-making drug Haloparidol which made her so stiff and low like never before; or maybe she was just catatonic from the trauma, she swore she will never ever be a caricature of a depressed person ever who cannot even summon enough energy to brush her teeth, eat and worse, play with her beloved children. OK, so she was depressed, but she can’t help feeling the drugs worsened the symptoms. She had tried to recover at Sarah’s house to minimise the stress of living with Hendon, who was taking care of her precious baby, abruptly weaned off breast milk due to the circumstances.
The separation pained her but she was in no position to care for the baby, even Eyman who was putting up together with Adam at Sarah’s executive HDB apartment in Woodland’s was being neglected. While all the adults worked, the children, Eyman and Sarah’s three kids were being taken care by Sittah the maid, and she simply wallowed in depression in the room, unable to get out of the bed, thinking scary, sad, anxious thoughts about the past, present and future.
It was an Alysha that she had never knew existed and it terrified her, this new paralysis, this zombie-like existence which was not helped by the fact that Adam showed no remorse, nor offered much comfort although he assured the relationship was over. Their financial woes were unsettled - with her not working and bringing an income to finance the housing mortgage of the Johor house, the bills were snowballing. But she was feeling strangely disembodied by her problems and was not relating them to anyone in particular, even to Sarah who was busy working till the wee hours of the night like all the adults in the home, save Sittah. Her mother had returned to Perth to be with her younger sister Diyanah who had just delivered a premature baby boy. Her dad decided to be by her side, staying with his sister and taking up a part time teaching position to bolster his modest income from his pension. Her parents were undergoing a rocky patch in their marriage themselves, following the discovery of the bombshell in the shape of a sexy not so innocent Indonesian thing, her sister’s age.
In everyone’s busyness and in her depression, no one noticed that she missed her doctor’s appointment and she kept popping the little green pills which she suspect was making her dazed and sleepy and stiff. She slept, teetered and tottered, trapped in the apartment for a couple of months like a mummy in shock. When she finally realised it was time to see the doctor, he insisted that she be hospitalised for the second time so that he could monitor her response to the new drug - Prozac, in case she swung from depression, to mania again. Which she promptly did with great relief on Christmas Eve.
Well, it’s not for nothing it’s called bi-polar mood disorder, this thing she’s afflicted with. For someone who was on the surface a calm and moderate personality, she’s now an officially moody person. Hopefully, it’s just a temporary aberration brought about by these recent stressful life events. Who wants a reputation as a stark naked raving lunatic for life? Labels are scary. They are sticky, foggy, ill-fitting, misleading…please let them be temporary. Just leave her simply Alysha - was, is, will be.
