nanar

kala mencengkam
mestaan pora dalam hujah
tuil demi tuil binasa
sampirlah semata
kata mencekal

Kecemasan

Saya biasa cemas, mencemaskan diri sendiri, mencemaskan tentang keluarga, mencemaskan masa depan, dan sebagainya. Kecemasan ini semakin menggerogoti dari waktu ke waktu. Kalaupun sesaat bisa saya atasi, kecemasan itu hanya menjadi bahaya laten yang suatu saat akan mencengkeram saya lagi.

Kecemasan ini diperparah oleh kelalaian saya dalam banyak hal, kemudian oleh kegagalan saya dalam mengatasi kelalaian itu. Karena sadar bahwa menyalahkan keadaan berarti menyalahkan Allah, saya pun menjerumuskan diri dengan menyalahkan diri sendiri. Allah Maha Adil. Semua hal buruk terjadi gara-gara kelalaian saya sendiri.

Mulai Maghrib tadi saya diserang kecemasan lagi dan mata ini masih berat karenanya.  Alhamdulillah di antara sesak yang mengimpit saat itu saya ingat Allah dan menyadari kesalahan saya. Selama ini saya mencari sandaran di dunia untuk kecemasan saya, padahal Allah selalu ada. Kerinduan yang luar biasa kepada-Nya menarik saya untuk mengambil kertas dan menulis nama-Nya. Saya pun sadar betapa lamanya saya tidak melakukan ini. Menulis dan melihat nama Allah tertulis memberikan kekuatan tersendiri kepada saya. Maka saya lanjutkan menjadi Allahu Akbar dan Bismillah, kemudian Al-Fatihah.

Lama-kelamaan saya paham. Sesungguhnya ini sederhana saja dan seharusnya saya sudah menyadarinya sejak dulu. Bila saya ingin mengadu, Allah yang Maha Pengasih dan Penyayang selalu ada untuk kita. Bila saya butuh jawaban, Allah yang Maha Bijaksana telah menurunkan Alquran untuk kita. Maka nikmat apakah yang kau dustakan?

Dua jam kemudian saya tersenyum semata karena-Nya.

A Brief of My Comeback in Fiction Writing and Margarita

2011 was a remarkable year. I enjoy the fact that I've been in my way to come back writing fiction after the disastrous 2010, haha. I've been focused on fantasy, however, for it's been my passion since I was a little girl. I submitted my pieces to three short story contest: LMCR, 2011 Fantasy Fiesta, and Vandaria. I managed to be in the top 200, top 100, and top 3 consecutively. I actually participated in another contest, but I won nothing *gulp* so let's not talk about it ;)

From these contests, I met new people--most of them are young writers with strong passion in writing fantasy. Among their stories, I was most attracted to "Selamanya Bersamamu" written by Fachrul Razi. The piece has a strong character, which is a mad female villain trapping her so-called lover, Richter, in her very own realm of hell. This is how Fachrul's beloved Margarita illustrated by Reinhard Perkasa.

I bet NOW you can see why we adored her so much. Fachrul gave me a poster of this illustration when we first met at the 2011 Indonesian Readers Festival. If you want to know more about Margarita, then, please purchase this book (look below). Fachrul's "Selamanya Bersamamu" had the priviledge to be published in it with 17 others of the top contestants plus 3 of the judges.

I already have one, of course. Margarita's sister, Fachrul's yet another epic character Josephine Armster, would likely appear in the "coming soon" book compilation of Vandaria's top stories (probably 20 pieces as well?) with Melviola from my story which won the contest. Josephine Armster is unique but I still prefer Margarita in many ways. Therefore, I was so excited when Fachrul offered to make Margarita intervewed Melviola. Even in such a supposedly simple conversation, he could make one that was not less spine-chilling. No wonder he is called King Awesome, after all. Thank you, King!

Check the interview here.

Check Melviola's story here.

Date a Girl Who Reads by Rosemarie Urquico

Date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads.

You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street.

If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads.

Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close.

When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it.

You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

By: Rosemarie Urquico

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl by Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you



Charles Warnke