Mortality and Morality.

Time feels so much slower as trucks and buses skim past my face; the driving here is like an obstacle course.

Time feels slower as I smile and laugh about how family insults family and how it's all a joke, but sometimes I wonder if the other side knows it is.

A joke at the expense of a dying man who I promised I would visit until his death. Spend my vacation on him until death visits him.

It might sound like a miserable vacation, but it's a summer holiday in Bali for the few seconds he smiles at one of the thousands of stories I tell him.

Death is natural, but so is life, and pain exists in both. How can pain be so natural yet so superficial?

Time feels slower as I visit expensive cafes and drink bubble tea, slowly ordering something different, accepting the change that is natural.

But death still seems far away, something that would never visit any of my loved ones.

Yet as I grow older, it seems more possible. Like I once thought aging would never reach me. But now anything beyond twenty-five sounds old.

Fun carries on beyond being young.

My rational mind knows everything, but at the same time, it knows that I can't know everything.

Rationality isn't a factor when you're crying on the pillow every night; it isn't when you reconsider every aspect of your life, wondering if it was all a lie.

A man with black hair but a white beard, his mother's genes, he says, once told me that depression was all in people's heads, or at least that's what his parents told him.

I wonder how many people haven't questioned some things because of their age or position, and how that formed cultures that keep hurting.

And if we question it to the people who never did, they never seem to have an answer because it never mattered in the first place.

Interfering in another's family business is wrong, or at least something that's left of it.

If we go after it, the people who don't take care of it get angry but still don't do what they are told to.

Then again, the old man was cruel too. And at this time, people talk like he doesn't exist.

He is preparing to die, scared and alone, but this man is only reaping what he sowed.

My heart still clenches, and my tears still flow; an eye for an eye would leave everyone blind.