Little Estella

He didn’t want to be like those new age parents who gave hippie, tree hugging names to their kids. He was decidedly conservative, decidedly rational, decidedly carnivorous. He thought yoga is complete madness, no matter how trendy. So when Lucy became emotionally unstable, bipolar even, during her pregnancy, he blamed her expensive (and ridiculous) meditation sessions with a Tibetan guru and took it to himself to name their unborn daughter. Old Hollywood had always been fascinating to him growing up, so he considered names like Ava or Audrey or Katharine. Then he bumped into Kurt, the douchebag from college, and after exchanging fake pleasantries was introduced to a wife who looked like a porn star and a baby daughter named Ava Katharine. He was decidedly superior to Kurt, and decided that he, too, had superior daughter-naming conventions.

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“It was made out of egg whites and black sticky rice. Just that,” she said rather triumphantly, as if such things were in some way significant in Peter’s universe, and although it’s true that Peter didn’t know that fact about the cake, he didn’t care, either.

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i remember i had just arrived at the mayer hawthorne dj set thing, which i wrongly thought was gonna be a concert, and he was playing “the walk”, and these two chinese chicks, clutching drinks and dressed in cocktail dresses, were dancing and singing along to the song, and i mean singing, complete with gestures and everything, and i remember thinking how fake they seemed. it seemed as if they googled who he is a couple of weeks before, searched for his most famous song (“the walk”) and promptly memorized the fucking lyrics and choreographed the gestures. not sure why i thought that, but i think it was because they look nothing like soul music fans. i remember thinking that they were probably there to find rich angmoh guys to leech off, because mayer hawthorne (and soul music) isn’t exactly big in asia, and the dj set would probably attract the kind of crowd they were looking for, and it was held at the rabbit hole, which also attracted that particular crowd to begin with. i then scolded myself for being so mean and stereotyping, but then i finally concluded that, you know, it was most probably true, everything about the two chicks, even though i wouldn’t (and will never) know for sure. i was merely being realistic. stereotyping, yes, but realistic, you know?

I can’t attend her funeral. I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t sure when I will be, or whether I was ever going to be ready. She was her normal healthy self when I last visited home five months prior. That’s partly why I envied him: he had seen her dying moments. I, on the other hand, was supposed to come home after my exams end in March. I wasn’t there to witness her deteriorate day by day. Her skin wrinkling, her rosy cheeks fading, the life in her eyes leaving, bit by bit.

She had always been a significant part of me as a person, but ever since the move, I had gotten used to not seeing her everyday. She became an idea, a concept; she wasn’t there in front of me, but she existed in the form of memories, letters, phone calls. It didn’t really matter whether I went home in March, or April, or May, because she will still be there, waiting for me. In my mind, she is, and will forever remain, alive.

“You? You’re not my friend. Let me tell you something: I’m not here to make friends. And neither is everyone else. If you are, then maybe you shouldn’t. Four years from now, you will be there with me, inside the waiting room in the corporate of some big money multinational corporation, waiting for an interview that will decide our fates, and the person they hire will be me or you, but never both. So please, I’d rather not invest the time and effort and feelings to make this relationship work. Face it, at the end of the day, this is a war zone, and if I have to kill you so I can stay alive, then I will kill you.”

He noticed that my hairstyle had changed since the last time we met, and for conversation’s sake I asked him whether it was really true. And he said yes, that it was shorter on the sides and thicker on top, a sentence so mechanical it might have been said by a professional barber. But as we rode the elevator in silence, I was awed - amazed, really - that at a time when all everyone wanted to do was to fit in, he was comfortable with being his own weirdo self.