There was the road. There was the green car. There was the wordless realization that there was not enough time to stop and the thought, "Well this is happening." There was the sound of metal colliding with metal.
My nose was bleeding profusely. I stood up and walked to a patch of grass next to the Shell station, told myself to breathe and not to panic and to lay down right away, noted my motorbike sideways in the street behind me and my papers and bags strewn... everywhere, took my helmet and glasses off, and laid down and let my first aid training go into high gear. I called for my canvas bag, used it as a compress. I yelled for my phone, told the English-speaking man by my ear who to call. I was grateful for their help. They moved me inside. I told them—carefully, move more slowly. I knew I shouldn't move too much before I was in the hands of professionals. I told myself I wasn't allowed to sleep, conversed, let myself laugh, made sure I was speaking okay and recalling okay. I was grateful when the English-speaking man asked me the series Malaysians always ask upon meeting me: "What is your name? Why are you here? What school do you teach at? Where do you live? How long have you been here, and how long will you stay? Are you single or married? What do you eat? Isn't Malaysian food too spicy for you?" My recall was fine. All my memorized answers were there, and I played a bit, varied them a bit. I insisted on speaking BM to the others nearby. I remembered my vocabulary. I knew I was in shock, but I was doing okay.
****
I'm told that the car was a gray Honda, and that I flipped multiple times. I'm told that my helmet and my thick, cushy Swiss Army backpack saved me.
Fauzi was the Muslim man who helped me—a neighbor of one of the English teachers at SK Tanjong Gading who was excited to find out who I was. "I'm going to tell Ezadin that I was the one who assisted you!" A sweet man who helped me hold my nose compress in place as I cleaned my stomach wound, despite his obvious hesitation to do so. I thanked him profusely and watched him mutter a soft prayer to God. I told him that, if he needed, he could turn his head as I cleaned off the blood. The soft-spoken, shy woman to my right handed me tissues dipped in warm water and directed the others to get me ice when I asked.
I wrapped my stomach in gauze and washed my hands in the basin, keeping my head on my backpack-turned-pillow. I switched out gauze for my bag and held my new nose compress in place. I asked for a mirror. I wanted to wipe the blood from my face to minimize my mentors' worry—they had been nervous about me being on a bike from the start, as last year's ETA had been in an accident, too. I asked the folks assisting me if they thought my nose was broken. A crooked nose? I couldn't help it. I told them I wanted to make sure I didn't have a concussion. They agreed that that was a good idea.
"Ambulances sometimes take hours to arrive in Malaysia," Fauzi informed me. I was lucky, then. My ambulance arrived before my mentors did.
****
Friday, March 8, 11:05 am.
Taste of palm oil residue in my mouth, slick around my lips. I wipe and wipe but it doesn't come off. My hands stay dry from the heat and my lips stay slick. My mouth feels smooth, coated, and I can still taste the dull strange underbite of the cold vanilla-with-chocolate-stripe ice cream I just consumed. Today is relatively cool, and the fans in the meeting hall circulate the sweet, light breeze already caressing my back. I listen to local celebrity Azamuddin, Islamic lecturer galore, clearly accomplished performer with his own show on TV 3 (Saturdays at 6 pm), fabulously engaging speaker (students and teachers [!] alike are engaged), clearly intelligent comparative religion scholar and Islam expert speak on religious tolerance (and point to me as an example of a non-Muslim we all respect), prayer, his show, and various other things—all attended to carefully by the students, all in BM, some of which I understand, some of which Liza translates for me in my right ear, some of which passes over my head, incomprehensible. Deep breath in, life is full and good. My mouth feels smooth and tastes like my own again. I unsuccessfully wipe the palm oil from my lips one more time, then rise and salaam everyone quietly before slipping to my motorbike and off to my home, Pangsapuri Intan near Econsave in Muar Town, to finish packing up my camping gear for the weekend and head to the bus station via taxi. KL next, Cameron Highlands by nightfall. Weekend with lovely friend Julia, here I come.
And as I walk away, I hear the words "orang putih" come from my new friend up front. A palm-oil-laced burp rises to my lips.
****
At 3:30 pm, I check my watch. The face is completely smashed, but the hands are still ticking. The letters "didas" are all in place; the "A," which lodged itself on the opposite side of my watch eight days ago, when it fell maybe a foot from my arm to my desk, is the only letter missing. My laughter is filling the air before I remember that I'm on a bed in the ER, surrounded by people wrapped in bandages and hooked to machines. I check myself. There is a momentary break in time where I feel the full sensation of my body, what feels like every cell moving and living. I feel my aliveness. I feel the tenderness in my head, the blood pooling on my nose, the sting rising from my side.
I know that 3:30 pm can't be right, though. My fifteen ringgit watch may be holding up okay, but I can feel time passing around me. I know it hasn't been three hours and forty minutes since I was hit. I ask the doctor. It's two hours, fifteen minutes ahead. I watch the second hand tick on.
****
"Stick at it--fresh resolve with every breath cycle, tiny units of time. Observe each breath with care and precision, taking it one split second on top of another, with fresh resolve piled one on top of the other. In this way, continuous and unbroken awareness will eventually result.
Mindfulness of breathing is a present-time awareness. When you are doing it properly, you are aware only of what is occurring in the present. You don't look back and you don't look forward. You forget about the last breath, and you don't anticipate the next one."
****
Time in Malaysia moves slowly everywhere but on the road. Everyone rushing to get to the same nowhere on the road, to the same imagined spot beyond the vehicle just ahead. Everyone rushing to get to the destination that never comes; the next time they are on the road, they are chasing it again. It runs incessantly further and further away, and people respond by picking up time, hurtling it along in a metal box or atop a plastic frame, moving at speeds the human body was not built to handle.
There is something about the metal engine that must dehumanize time, that must strip it of its function as a lubricant between people and how they relate to one another. I watch drivers honk incessantly, angry at the slow-moving vehicles around them. I watch cars cut motorbikes off and motorbikes nearly mow over pedestrians. I watch some of the sweetest, gentlest friends I've made turn into irritated bulls behind the wheel.
I didn't see, but I'm told that the driver of the gray Honda watched from a distance as I limped to the side of the road, then got in his car and drove away.
****
Sunday, March 10, 9:45 pm.
I am breathing. I feel the air transition from not-me to part-of-me via the tip of my nose. I feel it expand my chest. I feel it deflate my chest. I feel my oneness with my environment. I feel the interconnectivity of everything, everything that breathes, everything that exists. I lose myself to the breath and time stops. I roll forward like I sometimes do when practicing, but the sting in my side straightens me back up. I am breathing.
****
"The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same."
I am thinking of time and change and how perspectives shift when we break the clock. The system we've devised for dividing and measuring time, an intangible, uncapturable concept if ever there was one, is actually a failing system from the vantage point of Romantics and those invested in the psychoemotional landscapes of our lives. It doesn't quite work as a system for describing lived experiences of time. It abstracts things. It says, "This thing took this many increments of this designated measurement of this chosen atom's radiation periodicity"—which, of course, means nothing to most people in this world. It removes the present-tense sensations of the world in an effort to standardize our conceptualization of how one experience relates to another. It says, "This thing took this many increments of time which is more or less than this other thing that took this other many increments of time." And that, in turn, usually invites value judgments. This thing SHOULD have only taken this many increments of time because this other thing is more valuable and thus should take more of the time available.
And so we regulate our lives according to some ticking machine whose mechanics are based on a system that is far abstracted from most of our daily lives.
Of course, this system is necessary, and it benefits the function of our world. It makes things smoother, and it has the potential to minimize human frustration and maximize human engagement in the world when managed properly.
But in moments like those that surround a motorbike accident, the clock does not always do time justice. Moments like those force you to be in the present. To really be in the present. You cannot obsess over a moving second hand. Nor do you really need to. You feel the passage of time. You feel time as a living, breathing entity with complex psychoemotional realities. You are fully present. You are there, cleaning your body, checking your head, thinking of loved ones. I was there, and I am here, remembering how important it is to be genuine and loving with everyone. Remembering how important real connection is, and remembering how little substantial, lasting meaning the petty, surface stuff—which can become all when we let the clock do all of our regulating for us—really is.
Still, I insisted on the traffic investigations officers getting it right in their report. The accident did not happen at 12:40 pm, like they argued it did. It happened at 11:50 am, five minutes after I last looked at my watch, one minute before I had Fauzi call Hasliza, two minutes before he called Jenny. I know exactly when it happened. I know exactly when my watch jumped forward by two hours and fifteen minutes. I know exactly when time moved differently.
And I know—I should probably still get a new watch.
(Quotes taken from "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahathera, a book that I picked up for free at the gorgeous Kek Lok Si Temple, the largest temple in Southeast Asia. Photos to come.)
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