Everything you do is well thought-out, deliberate... Have you ever felt like just letting go... resting your mind, your soul? That is because I'm so confused. My mind weighs a ton, throbbing in every direction, trying to hold on to a semblance of normalcy. Though.... I'm failing miserably....

He maneuvered his way through the labyrinthine corridors, in search of a room that had been assigned to him by his college. It was dark and stuffy all around, and reeked of that 'laundry' smell that had seemed to settle itself into his every fibre. Students' hand-washed clothes hung like dead, stretched meat on sale at the night market at every available space. The smell was making his head throb.

When he finally reached his room, he pushed it open and was greeted by two Indian males. They acknowledged him with a mere nod and continued shoving things from a cardboard box into a wooden drawer that was provided. It then occurred to him that he had not brought anything at all. Not even the one thing that had seemed to matter the most before this. A sane mind...

He recalled something from a few days ago. He was stuck in a crowd of sweaty people, and some of those sweaty people waiting for the countdown to begin were his friends, except he suddenly found it hard to remember each and everyone of their names. Because they never mattered... and never would matter. An explosion of fireworks brightened up the dark sky, courting 'oohs' and 'aahs' from the eager crowd before it happened. The fireworks stopped abruptly. Everyone looked around in confusion, wondering what to feel about this when he plunged into a dreamlike state.

"WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!" a distant voice yelled.

It was in the dreamlike state that he saw two people running towards a green door nearby. Nobody in the crowd seemed to have noticed it, but by then, the crowd had already turned into useless mounds of meat before his eyes. Nothing else mattered then, except the two people who were running towards the door. He recognized one of them. Jacob, the quintessential cool guy that was in his class during secondary school, someone he'd tried to emulate during those years...

He ran in after them. A blinding blindness seemed to swallow the whole room up. The first thing he noticed in that brightly-lit room was the label, "Red Room", stuck atop another door. Jacob sat trembling at a desk, muttering, "I can't take this anymore... I can't......" He ignored Jacob and marched straight up towards a fat old lady sitting in the middle of the room.

"What place is this?" was his question.

"An institute for people inflicted by the Red Rose disease. These people believe in things they see in movies, and then succumb to insanity when triggered. Different people come with different triggers."

Funnily, he never saw the other guy that also ran into the room. His mind flashed back to the present and soon, he found himself muttering to himself, completely detached now from whatever was going on around him. Have you ever felt like letting go from this social aspect of your life? You just want to be alone, not for a while, but maybe forever... You don't want to act like you care. Well, that's because you really don't...

He stumbled out into the corridor and felt his way around with the walls. Where he was headed to, he wasn't really sure but one thing was certain, he had been in that place before. When he finally reached the door to his destination, an old lady approached him and said, "But you did not exhibit any signs of the disease!" He looked up at the label and finally broke down.

"Not where it appears, but where it matters."

Tee Pei Vin