It Wasn't Meant To Be

Friday afternoons should be the happiest time in a week for me. I should be home by 5.00pm and be watching my favourite toons. I should be eating dinner by now while making weekend plans. It should be a joyful, most awesomest, super-fantastical-psychedelic Friday.

6.15am I was still trapped in Jalan P. Ramlee, where everywhere seemed to be completely clogged up in one enormous jam that stratched all the way down to Jalan Ampang.

Damn. Why there’s always something, somewhere: roadworks, a diversion, a wonky traffic in this maddening rush hour? Why? WHY?!!. Whatever it may be, I kept hoping it’d sort itself out in a moment and the next green would release lots and lots of cars and we’d all be rattling along, multiple lanes of happy motorists zoming out of the city.

No.

Still here

One hour ( I mean, seriously, one our) of heel-toeing-clutchwork-that-had-my-ankles-aching later, I was still on the same spot. Damn. I fiddled about with the radio to find a song, any song, but there’s only wittering, ‘slow moving on the........’. Oh come on, I mean, surely there must be some traffic moving somewhere. I thought, ‘If this goes on for much longer I’m going to start fretting’.

But then I reminded myself to not let the little things get to me. Not.Let.Them.Get.To.Me. And that was just about time too when I gazed out of the window and saw a sign - just a few meters from me. The sign from God.

KLCC parking. That’s it!

The wheel in my brain was immediately spinning. I talked to myself (I’ve done this a lot lately), ‘All I need to do is just escape to the parking, find my way to the exit to Ampang Elevated Highway and voila! I’ll be be home in no time’. Yes!

A-ha! Who would have thought of that? Pretty briliant idea, don’t you think? (Especially when it comes from the guy who once thought Toni Braxton was a guy) I was really pleased. So hurriedly I drove in, picked up the parking ticket and rushed to the other side of the exit. I was so happy about myself. I thought this got to be one of the smartest thing I’ve done, that no one ever thought about. I should get medal for this. Or patent the ‘secret route’. ‘I am such a genius’. Gosh, I simply couldn’t stop gushing about myself.

But as they say, good things never last. And the cruel reality will set in sooner than I thought.

F***! My ticket got rejected. Shock slammed me in the chest like a truck. (And now this is the part where I hate myself so much I wanted to die in a violent sex-gone-wrong accident). I forgot to pay the ticket at the autopay machine.

And by the time my puny brain realized this too, a dozen of impatient cars already lined up behind me, honking – increasingly irritated about the hold up.

I was breathing harder and harder till I was almost hyperventilating. I felt as though I’ve lurched into some evil parallel universe, where everyone would kill each other for sport. ‘I don’t deserve this, I am a good person, I pay my taxes and I love animals’. I chanted.

Apparently no sign from God this time for me.

Only after a few intense moment later, I managed to pull myself together in time and accepted the fact that there was only one right thing to do - get out of the car and face the consequences. So I turned off the engine, put my bravest front and stepped out of the car, causing a slight commotion at the back. I thought I would face a firing squad as they got their rifle f****** loaded and ready to go.

But alas, the best I could offer to these angry mobs as a rebuttal, was just a weak hand-waving like I was a second runner-up contestant in beauty pagent.

I felt slightly wobbly about the legs and slightly manic inside but I plodded through, passing all these cars looking calm while trying to ignore all the curses hurled at me. I headed to that damn autopay machine as quickly as possible just to get this tragic episode of my life over with.

Once paid for, I started the engine and sped off – running away from this excruciating, painful memory forever, far, far away. It should be a happy Friday afternoon for me. But it wasn't meant to be.

Damn!