When Were You Lost?
Contributing Writer | Ng Yi Ming
The first and only foster dog my family ever owned came into our lives in November 2013.
He left just as abruptly in March the following year. I was sixteen at the time. That afternoon, I had finished a late-afternoon chat with friends in the school canteen, lamenting the necessity of our ‘O’ Level examinations and gossipping about everything else under the sun. I left to catch the bus home, and on the azure steps of the school lobby I stopped to call my mother to let her know I was coming home. An odd, heavy silence crackled over the line. Then:
“He’s gone, Mei.”
Her exact words had since long faded out of my memory, yet I still recall the events she told me about. How the veterinarians had made a mistake with his feeding tube and punctured his trachea. How the veterinarians had not called her when that happened and the only way she found out was when she had called them to check on him. How they mis-diagnosed him twice, and the adoption agency had made a terrible mistake of sending him there to begin with.
I felt as if a hole had opened up underneath my feet. The world around me began to pitch in a way that was new and terrifying for me. I sank onto the steps feeling a new hollowness grow within me.
Loss, especially in the form of grief, at times is best written about in fragments. That might be the only way one can express the paralysing confusion or dislocation that can come with it. There are times where we don’t know how to react, or are just completely be unable to. Ng Yi Ming writes below about a time when he, too, was lost for words:
“Ah boy ah, remember to store his medication where he cannot find it ah.”
…
It is a cold, dark, stormy night, deep in the forest, up in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal.
Thunder booms, and the farm’s feline couple streak into my room in search of shelter.
I make my way from the guest’s hut over to the large thatch farmhouse.
The geese begin hooting as I pass by a pond, startled by my emergence from the dark.
At the farmhouse the fire crackles in the fireplace as a Persian fire cake bakes in the stone oven.
“Recipe’s from my grand momma in Iran”, the elegant Persian innkeeper chirps.
My fellow travellers, boy and girl, sit grimly around the table.
We sip on a glass of raksi, a local liquor, celebrating the climb up the hills earlier that day.
Boy excuses himself to the loo.
He does not return.
Girl & I step out to find Boy.
Boy is on the bed in the guest’s hut.
I approach Boy.
Boy slowly raises his arm, revealing a sleeping pill packet in his fist.
The entire packet is empty.
“It is over. Let me go.” Boy says, and begins to wail.
…
After what feels like an eternity, a past conversation with Boy resurfaces in my head.
“Did you know, a sleeping pill overdose with alcohol is sufficient to cause death?”
…
So afraid — cannot stop shaking violently.
So excruciating — scrabbling at the edges of the skull for a solution in what feels like slow-motion.
…
I am unable to pry open Boy’s clenched jaw to make him throw up
Girl & I make our way to the farmhouse to get innkeeper’s help.
Sploosh! In the darkness, Girl falls into the pond.
Geese squawk and take flight.
I laugh, and the world snaps back into the ordinary.
Ng Yi Ming is a student in Yale-NUS College from the Class of 2021.
