:: Ornamental ::

Our turbo-charged Audi thundered across the Northsouth highway from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, our tyres stirring up angry dust devils as we volleyed across the asphalt. Dark-bellied clouds billowed across the sky, casting a halo of casket grey across the emerald plantations lining the sides of the highway. Random stabs of sunlight pierced through the brume, rebels against the impending rain. It wasn't an afternoon painted with postcard perfection, but it was flawed in the beautiful, unpredictable way only nature can.

I was happy.

I stepped airily on the accelerator and imagined the guttural power of the engine growling like a restless animal, a metal beast unleashed. AC dozed uneasily beside me. She had handed over the wheel to me in sisterly hesitance―I have yet to prove myself as a capable driver, and I'm prone to careless spells that could rile the calm of most experienced drivers. But the drive was long and the traffic was kinder than AC remembered, so midway to KL, I slipped into the driver's seat and couldn't help my impish smile as I felt the surge of power gunning from the engine.

It felt more like a holiday than a roadtrip for business. I felt freedom with the diaphanous fingers of a spoilt child. I felt it in the speed of my car as it ate up the highway with a mechanical appetite. I felt it in the rattle of the wind against our charging chariot. I felt it in the undecided way the clouds were blustering across the pale. I felt freedom like I never had before.

I was happy, even if this happiness was an emotional white elephant, intricate but inconsequential, an ornamental moment within the moments. It was a private flash of mindless cheer, a trifling, two-bit high―not exactly something to eulogise, but it was an evanescence of bliss that made me glad to be alive.

Small things, always the small things―while I clamour for a bigger satisfaction out of this thing called life and even as I cling to the various pillars and paragons of ideas and ideals, I've learnt how to angle for small joys. Good company, good cars, good caipirinias, good chocolates―and together with like-minded humour, poetic conversations and gracious insights, these are the Botox injections to the wretched wrinkles to life, temporarily paralysing my various aches and discontentment, smoothing out the folds pinched out by my―your―harried happenstance.

'We're here,' I told AC later, as the rolling plantations eased into the concrete jungle of KL's cosmopolitan city.

But we never really are, we never truly arrive, as the limbo suspended between time and space is the crux of life, a kinetic kernel that propels us between the good, the bad, and the great grey sitting on a power keg.

Are you happy?