![]() ![]() She takes two deep breaths, then a final gasp, as if she is about to shout something profound. Time moves slowly and in flashes, dreamlike. In this moment, we are in her womb for the final time, safe and held before a painful rebirth. My sister and I do not stop crying we have been crying for days. “Very soon,” I hear in lightly accented English. The nurse comes into the room to check her vitals. Each intake of air is a delicate shudder, an instrument slowing into silence. She hasn’t moved in weeks, but this is the stillness close to death. Her breath rattles softly her eyes are open and unseeing her mouth is gently gaping. We are curled up on either side of her in the hospice bed, sobbing in anticipation. In order to continue to persevere, a belief had to create itself: that my punishment had been for the purpose of turning me into a new, improved, walking perfection. In my case, humility was also difficult to cultivate after a year of being starved of praise. This is a common misconception about the road to self-actualization (as described by Maslow) - we always think we are further ahead than we actually are. When I came out of my twelve-month stint in Singapore’s prison system, I thought that I had it completely figured out, that all the answers were available to me. It’s not violent - I always kill it with kindness, slit its throat and place it gently on the earth to bleed out as I sing a sweet lullaby. It has appeared so that I can set it free from the constraints of my body. When a part of my psyche shows itself in all its distorted glory, I cannot let it live. Nobody wanted to catch them because my manipulation was too transparent. With incredible pellucidity, I saw that in all those situations, I had intended to elicit a specific response, to paint myself in a certain hue, but my words could not land anywhere. The wires in my brain were rewriting themselves into an improved formation. It was as if I had thrown a ball that had stopped falling midair. And again when speaking in front of my whole BA acting class. I recalled the same feeling when walking to a party with my friend Rich. I remembered the moment a year before when I said something at dinner that made my friends skip a beat, laugh strangely, then continue their heightened discussion about the uselessness of the literary greats. I jumped from one life event to the next with complete disorganization, as if the marbles of my mind were bouncing across time and space. Sitting on the floor of that prison cell, I felt my psyche zoom in and out of my body. Every time I die, one of my smaller parts dissolves to become the biggest part, the way a drop in the sea becomes part of a wave, and many waves become an entire ocean. They want to protect me from experiencing pain again. They want to stay snuggled up within my corners so that I never forget. The smaller parts remember everything: what was said and the exact inflection used, the way light hit the bodies of everyone involved, how my heart cramped or my throat opened. The biggest one is the part that knows nothing else matters except this moment, and that being stuck in the past is holding me back. Every time I die, there is that familiar sensation of pushing against myself in a battle to stay alive. The mystics say that the fear of death lives the longest, even until death itself. This is not boastful, since nobody really wants to die. When it comes to living through death, I am an expert. You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes? This is what they’re talking about. Everything is clear under the hard fluorescent lights, and all the pieces feel like they are slotting into place. I am nineteen years old and aging quickly. It is a good place to die - in a Changi Women’s Prison cell. I wonder if those people know how lucky they are to be free. On the other side of the bars, crickets scrape themselves into orchestral song, and a car drives by. Iam folded upon a cold concrete floor, my back against the wall. Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights There, she finds more questions than answers about how to live cyclically, and offers her writing as an invitation to the reader to consider their relationship to mourning and death. At the heart of this piece is the writer’s turn inward, a yearning to peel back the accrued layers of a busy life and examine what lives inside her core. Originally published by Ethos Books in the anthology Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore, “The Seven-Year Cycle” charts ArunDitha’s evolution from using avoidance to deal with loss toward relinquishing her resistance to it. What came after was a renewal and the emergence of a new person, a journey she chronicles through a series of pivotal moments, seven years apart. During the year she spent in a Singapore prison, ArunDitha lived through her first encounter with dying.
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