Her Power Suit

The thought of pushing past thirty without the prospect of marriage scares her terribly.

It haunts her in her most vulnerable moments, the grim image of a successful technical manager, the typical career woman, single, haggard and lonely. During meetings and on minutes-of-meetings, she will be referred to as a "Miss" - a thirty-five year old lady in the dark power suit, the sharp cardboard shoulders, the treacherous 80’s hairdo. Her social life will be reduced to flirtatious mingling with balding pot-bellied middle-aged executives during coffee breaks and business luncheons. She will have to learn to endure their sexist jokes, sports metaphors, vulgar display of machismo, and foul body odor.

Her circle of friends will be her own staff, wet-beaked college grads in daddy-bought MyVis, a troupe of suckups and whiners, celebrating the boss's birthday, wishing her Stay Cool, Kak Ani! Hypocrites who make fun of her in the pantry over office coffee for trying to be hip with the yuppy in-crowd, What's up with the iPod? You listenin' to Bon Jovi? Her cheery friendliness will be mistaken for desperate attempts to net a man, a dismal seduction, an old maid’s playbook, a filthy disgusting wench, the destroyer of ideal happy marriages.

The thought of living alone in an empty apartment, dining-in in an empty kitchen, a living room devoid of life, scares her. A room without the screams and shouts of children - so hollow and frail, that little piece of Life inside of her, yearning for purpose, a provider.

She remembers a story about a succesful woman her age, alone in the big city. She slipped and fell in the bathroom, bled to death, a slow and agonizing death. Her neighbors complained of horrible odors emanating from cracks on the wooden floor, leeching putrid liquid, the smell of rancid meat. Dogs were barking rabidly, stark raving mad, for weeks and weeks, foaming in their mouths, famished for blood. The smell, so wretched and foul, had driven the dogs crazy.

Nobody knew she had died five weeks ago, says the news reporter. The corpse was so bad they had to use shovels and garden cart wheels.

The image of her sprawling lifeless on the cold cement floor, rotting flesh, eyes bulging, maggots crawling on the persian rug, brings her dreadful nightmares. It catches her and refuses to let go. As she lays down at night in the comfort of her bed, dead stillness of the dark arrests her, that fear of the unknown. The crushing loneliness bears a heavy, unsettling burden, as if drowning, stifling, suffocating.

She finds herself asking: Where have all the good men gone?

This was written in 2007 in Bintulu. The tone is nasty. I do not remember why it turned out like that. Probably I had written this during a horrible mental state (e.g. angry about something from work). This is not about anybody in particular. The sentiments conveyed here no longer represent my opinion about such issues. I am publishing it still because I want to capture that state of mind, and also to remind myself that this gift of writing can be a very dangerous and hurtful thing.