I had not seen your face nor heard your name in months of Sundays. Neither had I kept tabs on how you’ve been doing ever since the last time you slid into my DMs on Facebook and we had that last row, shouting at and grabbing each other by the hair figuratively.

Until a while ago, when I saw a friend’s photo with you on Instagram during my nightly pre-bedtime browsing routine.  It opened floodgates of emotions. I got blindsided, like a deer in headlights—frozen.

The most adult-y move to make at a situation of such sort is maybe, keep scrolling past it or put my phone down and stay off it in case I did something imbecilic impulsively. Rather, my dumbass fervently tapped on said photo and clicked on your profile within .5 seconds. (I hate myself.)



“Being thankful for what we have and forgiving those who had hurt us—are the keys to happiness,” was the closing statement for today’s episode of some motivational talkshow I saw this morning, which got me ruminating about it for a good couple of minutes.

Talking about burying hatchets and mending fences, judging from the DMs and emails you kept sending on my birthdays, you appeared to think that I have put the whole predicament behind me and been cool about the idea of a reconciliation. I’ve tried to make peace with the past, true, but if I ever want anything from you, it is to not come sliding into my life ever again. 

Bold of you to assume I’d give a failed relationship another shot—at the expense of my new-found happiness and inner peace. You have shattered my trust and genuine love for a best friend, stomped on the shards, then burned them in my face. 

Even when you came around saying everything was caused by peer pressure and you never meant to throw me under the bus, I still could not give you back the trust I once did.

I am sorry for blowing up and lashing out at you the first time we got back in touch (and other times I ever hurt your feelings during the course of our friendship). A wave of micro emotions washed over me and the next thing I know, wrathful words began pouring out of my chest like they wouldn’t stop. It took away the chip on my shoulder, it felt liberating.

Concisely, what I aim by typing this at fluffing 12 o’clock at night is that, I want to unchain myself. I want to free myself. Free myself from the burden that is my own bitterness. I am willing to wipe the slate clean, forget our problems and start afresh. 


We can never change the fact that you were one puzzle piece that completed my high school life anyway. We don’t know when that someday is as we run into each other again by chance, and if I will stare into void like I never meet you or casually greet you like an old friend. That’s never out of question. 

But now, first things first, I’m letting bygones be bygones. I’m letting this tightness in my chest loose. 

brunafogacci.tumblr.com

Being dumb and docile obedient children that we were, we fell in with it and headed out straight off with cash in my grasp. The shop was normally could be reached within ten minutes by walking, a bit of a problem was, significant rainfall had fallen and deluged the shortest paths that lead to it. 

There’s another route by the busy and bustling street, but that required us to walk quite a distance around the block. And idle kids like us would rather walk down quiet alleys with no potential of human activity or anything of the sort, while dipping our legs in ankle-deep floodwater. Yeah.

The last thing we needed was soaking our shoes, so we took them off along with the socks, and grabbed them in our hands before wading through the flood. It’s reaching half way up our calves in certain areas and the more the depth, the more turbid it got. (Thinking about the great lengths we took for a bunch of scallions.) 

It was dusk. The sun already dropped below the horizon, daylight almost gone. The sky was purplish with hints of sunset orange, slowly turning into deep blue. 

After walking through the narrow, darkened and flooded passageways for what I swear was like an entire hour, we came out into an open field—its two sides facing the main street.

We had to turn left and walk for a minute or two to get to the shop which was on the left. As we cut across the field and turned the corner, I noticed several blue wall tents had been set up. They must belong to a group of traveling carnival, I thought. 

The barren land was oft rented for traveling carnivals, mini concerts, local festivals and such. The carnies would rest in them during the day before kicking off the show when the night falls. 

Fahriza and I were too busy watching our steps in the murky water to pay the slightest attention to our surroundings—especially with the lack of proper light. There was a quite long complete silence between us, only the sound of water being churned up as we both dragged our legs through. 

At one point, she prodded my arm as though trying to get my attention. That made me shift my head right away from below to her eyes, puzzled. She looked terrified and upset, which kind of baffled me. (I genuinely thought a random object that got swept away by the flood touched her legs and she mistook it for a snake.)

Subsequently, her eyes darted to the side as if she tried to alarm me about something horribly odd going before us. I turned away too, figuring out what had humpered her. 

Far on our right side, about 65 feet away, spotted was a dude in his mid 20’s. I think, 25 or 26. He’s got a tan and short hair, just normal-looking guy. But something was off. He was crouching, peeking out through the gap between edge of the tent’s wall and the ground. 

His position is difficult to describe verbally, and too bad, I have zero drawing skills to show it visually. I just hope you get the mental image. When I saw him, he was staring back at us, wide-eyed, all smile. For a smile the came from a stranger, it was not casual and friendly at all. If anything, it was very creepy and unsettling.

The next thing I did was what I repent over the most. Confused of what the heck he was doing in such a strange position (on top of it being in the midst of a flood), I stared down, down until my eyes fell upon this thing that still haunts and gives me nightmares to this day. Curiosity does kill the cat.

Guess what that was? 

A bloody genital, his fully-erect peen. 

My poor eight-year-old eyes! Instead of running for our lives, or doing practically anything to get away from there, we stopped dead in tracks. Eyes on stalks. 

It took every ounce of strength I had not to freak out and scream my head off. But sure my frightened face did look far from calm, of which the man took notice. He broke into a nasty, villainous, contented smile. And now, it makes me want to throw up. 

I suppose one of the side effects of immense shock is that recollections that follow the event get blurred out or obliterated at all. (Or maybe, I’m just not doing very good in the field of memorizing stuff.) Since everything that happened afterward has slipped my mind, I don’t even remember how we managed to carry on. But if my memory isn’t that faulty, as night fell we got what we needed that were scallions, and made a quick detour back through a different, smaller pathway. (I could see us both running like hell like being chased down the jungle by wild animals.) I am glad we played many kinds of physical games during lunch breaks that compelled us to go as far away from school as possible that I knew those hidden places and getaway passages. They came in handy during times like this.

When we saw our mothers, no one said a word about the strange man. Both of us just kept our lips sealed and let it slide like nothing happened. If it happened to me as an adult, I would shrug it off as an exhibitionist weirdo searching for some attention. But in the eyes of little kids, elementary students who knew absolutely nothing about human’s private parts besides what they were being told in biography classes, it was a horrifying and traumatizing experience. Not sure if Fahriza told hers, but I didn’t tell my mum until recently as someone above the legal age. Her response was as normal as one any other adults would give. It was not big deal. She even told me that she, too, had similar childhood experience to that.

It isn’t that we live in a non women-friendly town, but the neighborhood where my schools are located was rather crappy I’d say. (Yeah, I went to both elementary and middle school in this same area. Both schools are across each other, being parted only by the ole main street.) I was told by a friend from 7th grade that our classmate was also a target of sexual harrassment that occured on her way home. 

It’s another day afterschool—past 5 PM. She, my friend who told me this story, and several other kids who lived near each other were walking from school to a fourth that roughly took 15 minutes on foot to reach. There’s no public transportation taking that route, so they needed to get to the intersection then ride one home from that spot. 

They crossed a large bridge, still nearby. Here, while they’re lining after the other on the sidewalk, some passed by riding a motorbike and his hand presumptuously came in contact (by this, I’m not sure if it touched or grabbed) with her breast. She and everyone who witnessed it was beyond frantic, of course, but all were helpless as he’s gone as fast as the wind blew. Iirc, someone else has also recounted that she had an encounter with a weirdo and it took place at the bridge too. Basically a combination of my friend’s and my own story. A man passed by riding motorbike (why do I have a feeling this was the same fucking weirdo), pants down, and let his lil’ billy have a show in front of school girls. 

There is fat chance these disgusting men are porm-obsessed lone wolves. Although it was even worse if they’re married men or men with partners, because I bet nobody wants their partners and children to be sexually harassed, ever. To anyone reading, please watch out for your surroundings, take care of yourselves and protect your children from some nasty creeps out there preying on them. ♡

blue-bun-21.tumblr.com

Finished with the clean-up as well as her business, she turned around and was about to go back to sleep. With her body facing the door, in the dim light, vaguely she caught a sight of something—with patterns on its surface—‘sticking’ on wall only a few inches by the door.

She described the pattern to be looking a bit like diamond tiles, but was not so sure either due to the poor lighting. After staring at the ‘thing’ for a couple of seconds, everything finally registered and it made her nearly jump out of her skin.

At the horrific sight, mom quickly took to her heels, shrieking incoherently all the way to the living room.

I was jolted awake by the noise and sat up in my bed. standing with horror in her face, trembling and so visibly shaken. (I legit thought she had run into a ghost or some mythical creature lol.)

I needed a few moments to collect all my senses and process what was going on, befofe I realized that the word she muttered in between every panting was...

goodreads.com

Dad flung off to the bathroom and we heard him pulling the door shut just as fast. Since it couldn’t be locked from outside, he used a rope to tie the doorknob and attach it to nearby object that could keep the door still ’til morning came.

About fifteen minutes later, dad came back and we bombarded him with questions, thinking he got to get a glimpse of it. He didn’t. It was one of the rare moments when I found my seemingly-dauntless dad feeling daunted by something, too.

Despite that, he did hear hisses from what seemed like sand-like particles hitting the floor from inside. Dad notified us that he tied the doorknob to prevent the snake from emerging to other parts of the house and hide in unseen places. That also meant that we couldn’t use the bathroom before we successfully drove that buddy outta there.

Before sacking out, we stayed up for like an hour listening to my mum’s account about what had gone down. She apparently felt something was off right off the bat. The scattered toiletries and shifted drain cover were the first red flag, but she shook it off as a deed of a rat.

Now that everything had clicked, “ohhh no wonder the pot was laying like that on the floor,” she said. Correct. What rat is robust enough it’s capable of knocking over a water-filled pot thrice its size? Unless, it’s some humongous mutant one.

The weather was pretty much perfect for tucking ourselves to bed, and yeah we did (even after such an event taking place in our house). We slept in the remaining few hours before sun came up.

By morning, my dad was ready to open the bathroom door and equipped himself with a bat (just in case). Mom, on the other hand, was worried for his safety. They went to get help and were back with a neighbor who brought another bat with him. I locked myself up in my room, so that I wouldn’t be a pain in the ass for the others.

Once they slammed the door open, it’s gone, the snake mysteriously gone. They even checked through the entire bathroom to make sure theirs eyes were not tricking, only to find traces of it. There were a heap of wall debris on one side of the floor, which seemed to be the sand-like particles dad heard the noise of when securing the door last night. To cap it off, the water in my bak mandi (i.e. a tall ceramic basin we scoop water to bathe etc. from) was polluted with dirt and cobwebs.

It almost felt like we were hallucinating, but these traces won’t lie, will they? Still find it tremendously puzzling and unsettling, as to where and how the reptile suddenly disappeared. Mum had put the drain cover back on, rather unthinkable for it to slither away through it. Another shot was through the toilet pipe. Such case of ‘toilet snake’ is not unheard of, but be that as it may, it’s one in a million chance. Moreover, instead of escaping, ain’t it more like trapped? Yuck!

[Read: Can snakes really come up a toilet pipe? 👉 https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/can-snakes-really-come-up-toilet-pipe.htm]

The only possible way was through the ceiling as there’s a fairly thin yet wide fissure up there. Though it is pretty narrow that a sizable snakes like pythons would need to flatten out to fit into the fissure. Can it? IDK. My parents tried therefore to clue our neighbors in that there was a snake wandering about the area, to which they responded only with a grain of salt. Even a couple who lives next door said that it was likely just a paranormal sighting. Goshhh.

This time’s Chinese New Year’s ‘gift’ is absolutely not soon to be forgotten, especially by my mom. She’s hugely affected by it and still traumatized. Ever since that night, seeing snake’s pics always jogs her memory of the blood-curdling sight and even triggers a panic attack. Never had we imagined having a python chilling in our bathroom, let alone such a close encounter with it (was only two feet away from her face). Thinking back on it now already sends shivers down my spine.

Fun fact, though this year is Year of the Sheep according to Chinese zodiac (生肖 or Shēngxiào in Mandarin), my mum’s zodiac sign is snake. And thus, dad just can’t stop teasing her about it now. He thinks that last time’s visit must have a lot to do with her zodiac sign. The snake must want to greet and wish her—as someone who was born in Year of the Snake—a happy new year. I am ctfu. Dads and their so-bad-they’re-actually-good dad jokes are the best.

To all my readers whom I care a great deal, watch out for any kinds of ‘midnight intruders,’ ’kay? 🐍 Stay on guard always! And before signing out, I just wanna say something. 恭喜发财, 红包拿来! 

There was a fuss in our department this morning. I just arrived and there a panicky senior finance staff was telling everyone in the room that she had just got a weird dream the previous night. Iirc, she caught a flying animal (I think it was a bat or butterfly) intruding her house. The senior kinda freaked out for fear that it was some kind of sign that something possibly bad would happen, and kept asking if anyone knew what that means. Everyone tried to help look up for the meaning while she rang up her family who lives accross the island to find out whether they’re alright or not.

It harkened back to a dream I had years ago. 

In said dream, I suddenly woke up all alone in an unknown, retired place that was as dark as pitch. All of a sudden, a beam of light broke through the skies and slowly permeated, illuminating my surroundings. It was then I began to realize that I was confined underneath a giant-ass glass hemispher, with no hole, no rift, nor even a single air ventilation. As weird as it was, it’s not suffocating and I could breathe just normally.

Still confused, I laid eyes on a group of people upon the side of the wall I stood nearby. Much to my surprise, two of them were apparently my mom and dad.

I shouted, imploring for them to take me out. Though it was as if I carried coals to newcastle since the soundproof hemisphere made my bawling inaudible from outside. I started to scream on top of my lungs while hot tears streamed down my face. I did see (or feel like seeing) my parents saw me jar against the glass wall, but both of them didn’t seem to care a pin. Instead of trying to help, they turned around and walked away before completely disappeared in the dark.

There it goes, the most frighteningly peculiar dream I’ve ever had.

I keep wondering why of all dreams, all that I got down cold are the ones that left nasty taste in the mouth. One is this one, one is about me getting subtly rejected by an idol I’ve stalked around for an entire day [this is so stupid omg], and the other is about an encounter with a ghost lol. 

The latter got me feared and crying when I was child, but this dream is just straight frightening as 1) everything I did was just wild-goose ‘cause nobody could hear nor see me, 2) my most precious people didn’t care for me no more, 3) people left me scraping along helplessly and hopelessly.