Needle in the Mud

Oleh Nana Sastrawan           

He stands at the top of the building. His eyes stared at the sky, orange sun. In his heart a stone has been shattered. The years of buried revenge in the chest has been shortchanged. His shaking hands hold pistol grips. Sweat pouring from his body, seems like the color of pearls when the sun dims. His face is getting dark, somber.

Short breath! Holding the emotion that is not fully separated! Feeling rumbling, his heart pounding, his teeth chattering. Why the anxiety is still there? And destiny can’t be changed? Suffer from God, isn’t it? Every human has it. Damn! He stared cruelly, hatred enveloped his whole life without mercy.

 “Son, please don’t grow your revenge. It will not let you be a human.”

Nana Sastrawan in reading

Those are words every day spoken by a mother when he looked at a picture of a marriage between his father and his mother. The image is faded, so the face of his parents aren’t so clear, especially his father. Why is that? Did not mom always suffer every time? Is it wrong if he condemning a man who never came home since his birth? Even to kiss his forehead there was no time.

More bitter again, his mother have to work hard to living him. Tirelessly and selflessly! If women are really the most powerful person in the world, it must be his mother. Maybe not only his mother who living in misery and honesty though unyielding attitude. Which should be emulated by state officials in this country, more than a quarter of women in this world ever do that. Although in the end most of them surrender. It sympathetic!

He wants to kill his father very much. What is the reason? Don’t know, maybe he’s just losing his mind or crazy? If observed him, he is not mad, but there has been erosion of confidence in him. All the chaos in his life occurred from outside himself. Observation and assessment of a life that is filled with sadness and poverty make people forget the nature and law. This is where the use of a conducive environment to restored all circumstances in him. However, other human are rarely willing to understand each other until rise new pressures to his heart, until the hatred is completed.

“How long you stared at that picture? Don’t you understand every people have their own way!” mom bewared him one more time.

They are who lived in lose will be selfish even desperate. That is why the feel of losing is worse than madness, is he sane or selfish? He feels strange in this life, as a prisoner who jailed in hatred. This is hurt to be a child without a father, isn’t it? So why many people prefer to having sex without married? Or it is worse than that infidelity. Don’t they think about their children fate?

But this is not about him. About 25 years waiting for his father to come home for asking some news or just sitting down stared his wedding photo. Those questions about his father make his psychology getting worse. Every day he gets drunk and cursing everyone as he likes. Worse yet he had imprisoned due to hit everyone who cursed him. Is there really no mercy in this life? In prison he became a recluse. His heart was filled with all kinds of hatred to fellow prisoners, prison guards, and his mother who visit.

“Don’t you satisfied to be anybody else?” his mother said.

He increasingly looks strange, he often standing on the prison building to stare at the sunset before the prison guards led him into the cell. There is nothing in the sunset isn’t it? Will sunset brought him into happiness? The beauty is needed by every human being, but that doesn’t mean that sunset is the ultimate happiness. The sun will disappear from view.

In the night, his body shivering! Half of his face is bruise, by hits. Blood flowed from his nose, red and sticky.

“In here, your life is in my fist, understand!” one prisoner who has stocky body snapped.

Cruelty in the cell eliminated all the balance in him. Good deeds maybe just a dream that came in while he is sleep, formless and abstract. Several times he whimpered in pain, cold air just weakened his body. Now he is waiting for death to pick him up; that's the good deeds from God. But once again his body was hit by a kick of prisoner in his cell, the sound of moans were infuriated and disturb the quiet night.

A few years later he became a part of the environment, the community. Then what happens? He only becomes garbage, ostracized and be insulted by many people. He never recognized by customs and morals. A former prisoner is not part of the community. Wonder what it's called? He actually ready to leaved hatred, be a man who knew each other even if only with a smile.

But he remained for the sake of a love that still lagging behind. His mother had a long sick, aged middle give a new that life has its limits. Every life is doomed to death, when and where it is confidential. Confidentiality is extremely closed, no one ever be able to open even the prophet. Better to wait it open by keeping his mother to stay alive even have to be human waste in the environment.

“Sometime the memories coming back when we are weak Son, because in every memory there’s a door to wake us up about the life is real.”

The last sentence his mother said made him very chaotic. He has been abandoned by people who loved him. The red mound soil fertile back the hatred, his mother's name craved on the headstone! The silence made him a man who lost, unwittingly melted tears fall into his mother's grave. Wet.

His eyes stared up at the sky, wishing to uncover what hidden there, a timeless space, can’t be touched even by the imagination. He is pensive! Create a question that once again the answer is revenge. So what exactly is love?

Look! He is becoming a recluse. His fingers wringing, clenching and punching wall of the room. Blood flowed between his fingers, wound. His eyes darkened, his hair matted, his body frail. The rooms that have been raised him now have monopolized feeling, chaotic and uncontrollable. He takes the gun out of the cupboard then he approached a middle-aged man who claimed as his father. The man who wants to see the grave of his mother, hustled him to the cemetery, without a single word spoken from them. Only their hearts beating fast, hold the feeling of cluttered.

He truly become man with revenge, a gun pointed at his father’s nape who sit crying on the side of the grave, then he executed his father by a bullet from his gun. Father's body fell limp, crushing the red soil. He is getting upset then run! Sweat keeps pouring, his feet running faster. Sometimes fall down, got up again and keep running until he decided to stop at a roof of a building in the city then committed suicide!

Share This Article :