For my dear friend, Dwight

“Every decisions could be our last decision in our life, knowing that any moment could be our last moment in this world.”

How true is that.

I’ve never imagined that I would have to witness the truth of this statement before my very own eyes.

He was his usual self that night. Hanging around us while we were making lemon sorbet. He used to joke about how good both of us would look together. I would just rolled my eyes quietly. How can a 6 foot tall man and a less than 5 foot tall girl look good together? He called me cutie on my first day of work and was one of my first few friends.

He always asked me to hang out with him after work, but I never did.

That night, he said he wanted to find Par, one of the Thailand girls, after work.

“I’ll knock on your door after this alright?”

Then he patted my head and said, “This girl never came out of her room”.

It was the first time he touched my head. It felt nice.

After we were done with the sorbet, he helped us carry trays from the back of the kitchen to the appetizer station, where we always worked.

Maybe he wanted to impress the Thailand girls, I thought. But without his help, it would be a difficult task for us 4 girls.

Soon, the dining room started to fill up and orders started to come in. We went back to work, us at the appetizer section, him at the dish-washing machine.

 

I never saw him after that.

 

May and I were asked to prepare the amuse-bouche, which was a small plate of one glob of cheese atop a slice of tomato (I never knew what is that), while Par and Joof were left to manage the orders at the appetizer station.

Usually, the guys would be handling the entree station because the trays there would be a lot heavier. But, at that moment, Ben and Ronnie were nowhere to be seen.

An order had been finished and it could not wait. The main chef then asked me to carry the entree to the main dining room. I went out of the kitchen with the tray, handed it to the server and headed back. It was all but 5 minutes. I was not prepared at all for the things I would see when I came back.

For some strange reasons, the sliding glass door to the kitchen was closed. I looked through the door into the kitchen, wondering which joker closed the door.

I could see some of the dish washers avoiding something, I thought it was some kind of insects or monsters. Ronnie came running out as fast as he could to the nearest exit. I’ve never seen him like that.

Then I heard it.

Bang!    Bang!      Bang!     Bang!

 

~*~

My friend was killed that night. The garbage man had hid a gun inside his jacket and opened fire inside the kitchen, killing my friend and the chief dish-washer. Another target, who was younger than me, had avoided the bullet by a few inches. The police came, people wrapped themselves in towels to keep from the cold, and the whole scenario looked like something from a movie.

I only manage to cry when Chea Chea, my roommate who came with me from Malaysia, ran into the dining room looking for me. She was working as a banquet server downstairs.

It was a Saturday night. And it was our second last week in Hot Springs, before we officially end our work contract. The sound from the police helicopter hovering above us accompanied us to sleep that night.

~*~

I could never really say what that incident taught me. I’ve learned though, that when a Jamaican dies, on the days leading to his funeral, his Jamaican friends would pump up the music, dance and party every night until he had been laid to rest. It was their way of leading him onto the correct path to heaven, I guess.

And the funeral would be an event filled with music and singing.

My friend never kept his promise that night. He didn’t get to visit Par after work. His “after this” never came.

He never had a clue that that night would be his very last night here.

 

I was browsing some of the topics on LYN when a post caught my eyes. It was the same post where I got the quotations at the beginning of this article from. The forumer ended his post with this:

“ Think for a moment, if you are playing a Mario game and you have only one life left, what would you do? And imagine if you have 99 lives, what would you do then?”