Perhentian Islands: Part I

4/17-4/23

My five or so days on the Perhentian Islands were like being in the 7^th Season of Lost. At first it seemed like paradise, like everything I would need to survive in this tiny tiny place that would sustain me for as long as I wanted to stay there was there. But then I started to notice bizarre things, as though as much as the island could give me everything I would need to survive, those very things would take away from the experience. When the peak of that came, I decided to leave on the first boat ride out of there. Even Poseidon was like, “girl, get out!”. My exiting boat ride was a grandiose display of the ocean's fury as we drove the fastest I have ever driven on the rockiest seas I have ever been on and for the first time ever I felt a boat swerve. The ocean shook us to a point that even Jonas, my gap year baby faced German friend, who just the other night exuded an amazing amount of confidence for a 19 year old, looked at me as though to say, “Shit, my family doesn’t know where I am right now”. The girl next to me held her stomach, while her “Kentuckian” boyfriend (ugh, only I can do that because people here know where California is and I hate the option of pronouncing myself as American, which is what he did first) laughed at her. I almost yelled across the hissing ocean-spray, “Dude shes pregnant and she doesn’t want to tell you because clearly you’re not the father-type.”

There were lots of thoughts running through my head as I prepared for this boat ride to be my last. I knew the Island wanted to keep me there to extend my contract, and I would have to learn how to hunt half-tailed cats and massive monitor lizards (the only animal life there, besides the drunk people) to survive. I thought, “at least I'm not pregnant, at least my like jacket is bright orange and I LOVE that color, at least I’m wearing a life jacket, at least Jonas sometimes smiles at me in between looks of terror, at least my shoes aren’t getting wet, at least I didn’t eat breakfast...I wish my sunglasses had windshield wipers. I wish Sebastian were here, he would love this.”

These thoughts kept me sane.

Regardless, we made it and we were fine. I don’t know how pregnant girl is but then again, I don’t even know if she's pregnant.

I realized, after scouring the beach for my friend that I was supposed to meet, that I don't think self-dependence comes easily. Its different from independence because independence is perceived and judged from the outside in, but self-dependence is something only the self can know about. Only I will know how really dependent I felt on my piles of life that I had back home, on my loves, my friends, my house, my work, my family, my constructed life that I created that was consistently depositing Becca into other people's selves. Only I know that feeling, and I know when it creeps slowly and suddenly, and often sullenly and desperately back into me like an addiction that I haven’t had in a while and I feel my love for me drain out. This transformation happens...my body locks up into almost a robot-like state and I start to do things out of habit. I can't say no, I always apologize, I get angry then I revert and smooth things over, I can't be alone without feeling that brown Sunday at 3pm feeling. It's like I'm falling into life with nothing to hold onto and I feel nostalgic and poisonous at the same time, like my skin is turned over. Maybe that feeling is fear. Maybe I'm feeling it right now because when I feel it is when I'm unsure and say “maybe”. Whatever it was, it was with me on the Island when I felt I had to find this girl, Elissa, when I couldn’t find my own place to stay, I couldn’t do my own thing, when I couldn’t be alone. But that all changed later.

We went snorkeling one day like pawns in this endless war of man versus environment The island is full of dead coral and fishermen having to go further and further out each day to catch fish, of trash and no trash pick-up. I felt I was contributing to that by indulging in this eco-unfriendly day-trip. About 8 of us went and I lathered on the SPF 55 and wore a t-shirt, some long lost memory of me deep fried on a boat haunted me but I couldn't quite place it. And I was burnt from laying in the shade the day before. Malaysia's elements are doing a great job of hunting me down. Our guide couldn’t speak that much English, but he could whistle, laugh, throw things, and say “shark”. He wore an outfit that I've seen people wearing to Church, khakis and a long sleeve dress shirt, and he went snorkeling with us. It was a slippery slope from here on out to full-blown Twilight Zone. We went to about 6 places to snorkel, each place full of dead coral, feces, oil, and garbage. Oh, and beautiful fish who looked like they were suffocating. All sorts of purple rainbow fish, Nemo fish, yellow fish, triggerfish, little silver and yellow fish that would swim right up to me and swim away when I blinked.

After we swam with the dying fish, we went to Shark Point. For some reason, we all felt fine swimming with sharks, not even knowing, due to Tour Guide's limited English, if they ate people or not. We all hop off the boat at Shark Point, and immediately, one of the guys, a fellow States-ean, hops back on, shouting expletives and refusing “to go back in there” after seeing a massive (5 ft long) shark. I start to get excited. I follow Tour Guide, who has one of the girls attached to him because she cant swim and for a brief moment I pause and think about how many laws back home this is breaking, and how much I didn't sign any papers before going on this trip.

Regardless, me and a girl from New York think we are extremely confident and swim behind tour guide, not seeing him grab a small fish from the water, rip its heart and guts out and wave it around bleeding through the ocean. This inevitably attracts the sharks who look like the real life version of the shark in the Little Mermaid, and I, of course, am Flounder. They swim all around us and paralyze us with fear, which easily and thankfully melted away when they saw something more interesting than fish blood and foreigners and we were able to go back to the boat.

For dinner the night before I ate barracuda, and would later eat stingray and lobster, most of which I saw snorkeling. I still don’t know how I feel about that. Its like eating fried chicken while going out to see if your chickens have laid eggs. I cant tell if its the circle of life or if its disgusting. Or if it's tourism creating this awkward push-pull phenomena of preservation and knock-down drag-out consumerism that has yet to be remedied for Malaysia. I was, and am, disappointed in myself for not being more eco-minded, and for that I apologize to the island.