It's rising at the back of your mind

Congratulate me, for I had at long last managed to squish my whole recital piece into my brains after practicing for the umpteenth time.

Pray that my fingers do not fail me 12 hours from now.

That my playing would be flawless. But who am I kidding?

**********************************************************

By the time I was ordering dinner at 10pm, I felt so taut and my mind kept pinging reminders of tomorrow’s recital. Apparently it was ignoring my mental clicking of the ‘off’ button. Desperate to sweep the performance aside for a while, I hauled out my laptop.

I was in the midst of fiddling with it when my salad was laid on the table with a gentle plonk.

Three heads gravitated towards the heap of vegetables and observed it with a fascination of a marine biologist in a newly discovered species of fish. Then two of those crowns twisted and stared at me in bewilderment, though it was more like amusement to me.

“Are you on diet?!”

“Erm. No. I just prefer to be vegetarian for dinner.”

Blank faces. I had might as well been speaking Na’vi. 

“Coz I’m trying to--“ save the world. But I bit back the words in time. Since SOMEONE thought that Mother Earth didn’t need rescuing, that we would be old and crippled by the time the catastrophic effects of global warming shatter the planet, that the responsibility of ensuring the avoidance of the premature end of time falls upon the next generation, and not ours.

“Uh. It’s healthier. And it doesn’t kill lives.”

Answer accepted.

And then, as if it was the most natural thing to do, an arm stretched out and, not unlike the clamp in vendor machines, an index finger and a thumb plucked the topmost piece of cornflake from the mountain of green. And it was dunked into an open mouth.

I was perplexed.

“Did you just…?!”

“Don’t worry. I washed my hands…” Wei Kit seemed to decipher my lack of words as fear of diseases transmitted by means of dirty hands.

“…before the Dharma talk. Hmm. Not bad, the taste.”

I could only gape.

He took this as an encouragement and his fingers swooped down for another piece of cornflake.

Flabbergasted.

Oh, what the hell. I made him pay by taking a photo with me and Sudharma. Since the laptop was on, why not?   

Wei Kit, me, Sudharma

**********************************************************

Alarm set to ring at 7.30am.

Have got to run through the song a gazillion times before going up on stage. 

If that somewhat fails, I would have to succumb to DRASTIC actions.

Ask Sudharma if you really want to know.

Meanwhile, I'll just have to draw a keyboard on a long strip of paper to practice. 

Though I want to finish up that chapter in The Gift first...