In Continuum.

I remember when I was younger, I used to hole myself up in a cave made up of pillows and blankets. I'd build the back and the sides of my cave with pillows and then cover the top with layers of blanket so that the whole setup looked somewhat like a really short tent. I used to crawl into this hole that I made with my uncle's fancy torchlight in my hands. I remember that torchlight very well, because it was the oddest thing I have ever seen in my life - in the standards of a torchlight of course. It had three different types of light bulbs, and three switches for you to switch in between the various modes of your choice. One of them was the ordinary yellow light, the other an LED light, and the last one was a flashing orange light that flickered on and off like the lights on top of a police car, only without the irritating sirens. I'd crawl into my hole and pretend to be trapped within tons of rubble after an earthquake, and then just lie there for long periods of time until somebody literally came to rescue me. Rescue missions of that sort never involved any heavy machinery or tools, just a question like "What are you doing in there?" That was the closest I ever got to be trapped inside a collapsed building, the one that came crumbling down in my mind for a few minutes that night after an imaginary earthquake. I was seven, so bear with me.

Claustrophobia soon took over me as I laid there inside my cave, in the darkness with nothing but the alien torchlight. Perhaps that was how I overcame my fear of closed spaces when I was young, the way my sister used to stuff me into giant cardboard boxes and traveling luggage bags. I'd be zipped up in those bags for a long time until my mother would come and get me out of there, but it was all for good fun at that time and we never considered the possibility that I could have died inside that bag because the smell of dirty socks was just too overwhelming. Anyway, I recall the feeling being 'trapped' in that hole of mine, hearing my own breathing and the sound of my heart pulsating against my ribs. It was a strange feeling to be lying there and telling myself not to move, because that is how it is supposed to be like when you are trapped under tons and tons of debris. As you can see, I was a really strange child, but that never stopped me from doing such things by myself. I had the tendency to imagine myself in catastrophic situations, and what I would do in times like these. I pictured the island of Singapore sinking, a meteor hitting planet Earth, alien invasions, tsunami waves and whatnot. Every form of natural disaster and science fiction story line has been hypothesized by me over and over, and I still think about it from time to time even now. 

Naturally, the real deal is vastly different from child's play. I have experienced my fair share of earthquakes in my life, and I am not talking about those teasing little tremors you feel in Singapore whenever the earthquakes in Indonesia decide to be generous with their tectonic vibrations. I was in Taiwan a couple of times when it happened, and it certainly wasn't a very fun experience, not when my sister was yelling about death and the end of the world for the entire duration of the swaying. The dog freaking out to the earthquake was rather amusing admittedly, but the real earthquake isn't something anybody would want to experience truth to be told. A lot of my friends always ask how it is like to experience a real earthquake, and their enthusiasms almost make them seem as if they want to be at the epicenter of one some day. I usually tell them that it feels like a really maddening roller-coaster, which is the truth - only, this roller-coaster ride does not have safety precautions and there is a very good chance that your house may collapse on top of your head. It is not a joke, because earthquakes are probably the scariest things mother nature can unleash upon us, and we are so puny and insignificant in contrary to her wrath. 

I think it was in 1999 when it happened in Taiwan, that earthquake that killed almost three thousand lives when I was in Singapore. I was at the swimming complex when I overheard somebody talking about it by the side of the pool, and at that time all I had in mind was to keep my mind on the water that I was trapping. Earthquakes happen hundreds of times a year, which was why I didn't take that eavesdropped piece of information all too seriously. Besides, when the latest news comes from two old men dressed in nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, you wouldn't take them all too seriously either even if the news involves the assassination of some government official. My mother came to fetch me from the swimming complex soon after, and it was in the car when she told me about the grave situation back home and the aftermath of things. I asked if my relatives were doing alright, and thankfully they were. Still, there were more than two thousand people killed in that earthquake alone, and it was hard to stomach just how fast and how efficient the earthquake took away so many human lives. It was difficult for me to comprehend, the same way as it was when your history teacher taught you about the Holocaust. 

I got into a fight over that earthquake in school, choked a classmate because he joked about my grandmother dying in the earthquake. It was in the library when it happened, and a couple of my other classmates had to pull us apart before I puncture his windpipe with my right thumb. I guess it was the way all the news images and videos snowballed into a hill of emotions that exploded that afternoon in the library - besides, I never really liked that douche bag in the first place. Every program of every channel was about the earthquake, and images kept flooding in with people being pulled out from the rubbles, some of them alive and breathing while the faces of others were censored. Rescue efforts carried on for days and nights, water was sprayed over the debris for the survivors inside the wreckage to drink from, and there were people everywhere with hopeful eyes and broken hearts. People prayed with their palms together, some of them knelt down before the collapsed buildings in silent prayers. Everybody hoped for the best and prepared for the worse, and that was when I genuinely felt terrible for an event that happened thousand of miles away from me.

It was difficult to explain, and it still is. I guess nobody likes to see people of the same nationality or the same race, being pulled out of rubbles with dust and blood all over their faces. And there I was, sitting in front of the television with my steaming hot dinner while everybody back home suffered from the loss of a family member of the terrifying aftershocks that came swiftly after. It was heart breaking on my part, to see people of my own kin like that, and it certainly wasn't a good feeling at all. Every survivor pulled out from the holes was as if a brother or a sister was being found, and I remember myself cheering as the list of people missing decrease in the bottom right hand corner of the television screen. It was uplifting, but that only lasted for so long. After all, there weren't  a lot of lucky people back then, most of them remained buried underneath those cement and rocks. It was a time when everybody threw aside their differences and helped out because they had to, because it was something right for them to do. My parents, along with my relatives, donated a hefty sum of money to the charities involved in the rescue efforts back then, and their names were all carved into a great marble wall back at home in the memorial built to pay tribute to the dead. They are still there, even today. 

So, the earthquake that rocked Sze Chuan happened a few days ago, a piece of news that I received with similar enthusiasm back when I was trapping water inside that pool nine years ago. It was a topic briefly brought up by my mother who saw it on the news in the afternoon. At that time, the death toll was only about five, which was somewhat typical of most major earthquakes anyway. That was until the piece of news came in when they started reporting about the school that collapsed with nine hundred students being buried alive. That was one school, then another school was reported, then another school, then another village, then more schools. So the reports kept on coming in with new footage of people running away from houses, from factories, from schools, people screaming and yelling in those horrific videos and people not being able to call home and stuff like that. It was hard to watch, it really was. As much as the media has desensitized us to images like that, an event that affects so many people on such a big scale is still disconcerting, no matter how you see it.

It got me thinking about how separate mankind has been somehow, the way we have drifted so far apart from one another. I think all the wars and all the revolutions in the history textbooks actually brought more people together than to bring them apart. Patriotism was something to be proud of back then I am sure, but owning an iPhone or perhaps driving an Audi R8 is something to be proud of these days. Patriotism is more like a joke now, and it'd be somewhat amusing if someone were to wave your nation's flag around and sing the national anthem all the time. It takes a disaster for people to really come together, to put aside our differences, to really reach out a helping hand. On one hand, you have the people dying and the people suffering from all the famine and all the hunger. But then on the other, you get a really raw and unedited view of how humans can help each other, how humans can come together, instead of how they always seem to be fighting one another on news channels and on newspaper headlines. Even if it takes a disaster for it to occur, at least it still happens. At the very least, we still have that. 

Somebody over at this American forum was talking about this tragedy the other day, and he mentioned how the world is going to end very soon, seeing how things have been turning out these days. The biggest snow storm hit China in February this year, the cyclone that swept across Myanmar, it snowed in Arizona just the other day, and now this giant earthquake that shook the foundation of the country and the hearts of the people around the world. It does seem somewhat biblical doesn't it, the way the Bible depicted the end of days and the judgment day coming soon. I am not a believer of such things of course, and I certainly am not a believer of the myth that the world is going to end in 2012 according to the Mayan calendar. In fact, I think it is times like these when I think the world is really going to survive for a long period of time. If not for these disasters, we are always going to find new ways to kill ourselves somehow. Be it a faster missile, a deadlier gun, a bigger bomb, humans have been known to annihilate ourselves in a variety of ways that puts ourselves to shame to other species. If not for such disasters to happen, we'd still be fighting over land, still fighting over water, still fighting over oil - or in the case of Iraq, fighting over nothing at all.

Is it just me, or is everybody sick and tired of seeing the same news broadcast over the television day in and day out. We have one candidate fighting over another for their general election nomination, then we have the ten billion dollar foreign affairs scandal in Taiwan, then we have a government in Myanmar who cares only for themselves and not the people drowning in the flood waters all around the country. I, for one, am tired of how people have been fighting over things that do not and should not matter to mankind. It really isn't all that difficult to take a step back, to side step for somebody else, to say "Let's stop fighting and look at what we can do about this" It brings people only further apart and never closer together, that's how conflicts work and that has always been the case for a very long time. That is when people lose faith in the species, that is when I look upon mankind and think about biblical verses from the Bible that speak of the day of judgment. At this rate, the world is indeed going to end with tidal waves and great earthquakes, we are going to die by the billions and we are all going to hell for what we have or have not done. 

But it is times like these, when I see the silver lining in the clouds somehow. It is times like these when people cannot care less about what they have at hand, when they care more about people they don't even know about. I was deeply moved, personally, when I saw the picture in this morning's newspaper. It was a picture of a slab of wall being lifted by the rescue workers at what used to be the site of a primary school. Lying there underneath the brick wall in a hole were the bodies of a dozen primary school students, covered in mud and dust. They looked so peaceful, they looked as if they were sleeping. I couldn't tell that they were victims of an earthquake disaster at all, just tired children falling asleep in a hole - like myself, just pretending, just acting. But their hole wasn't made out of pillows and blanket, wasn't as comfortable and cozy as my own. They didn't even have an alien torch line as company, just the death of their classmates and perhaps their teacher somewhere on the other side of the collapsed pillar. It was heart wrenching, but at the same time really uplifting as well. I mean, the way the rescue workers worked day and night just to find more survivors gave me a lot of hope in, not just in finding new survivors, but also in the fate of mankind as a whole. It's so cliche to speak of such things like that, but that is how I feel. This isn't an end, but a beginning of things. Our world isn't ending with a disaster, it doesn't work that way.

I am sure there are a lot of people out there right now who have lost their parents, or lost their children, their grand parents, or a friend at school. Some of us do not even know any of the victims at all. Still, it doesn't matter if you are white, or black, or brown. It doesn't matter if you are straight, or gay, or lesbian, or a bisexual. When you see pictures like that, when you see people being dragged out from underneath a brick wall, all those colors and all those sexual orientations don't matter anymore. You are a part of mankind, you act because you are human - and not because you are also a Chinese, that you also live in Sze Chuan, that you have a family member trapped and still lost. Perhaps this disaster shouldn't be seen as a catastrophe, but a sure sign that humans still have the ability to stand together because we should, and we must. 

There is still hope in things, if you believe in miracles. It doesn't take a miracle in fact, just a belief and faith that things will turn out the way that it should. It's getting late, and I am really tired from typing this entry at four eleven in the morning. Yet, these are the things that I have to say, these are the events that I have to acknowledge before I go to sleep in my comfortable bed. At least I'd feel less guilty, to be here and they are there. Bless those people who are still alive underneath those rocks, bless those who are still waiting for a sign of their relatives being dragged out. Bless those rescue workers who are still working their breaths away, and bless the rest of the world who still gives a shit, who still cares.