“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), an English playwright, poet and actor who is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language.
BITUS didn’t leave our remote village in Serian District the way people do in stories – no slammed doors, no final glance, no dramatic vows. He faded out of the place, like smoke dissolving into the breeze.
When I was small in the early 1960s – seven or eight – I thought he lived “a few miles away” the same way the moon seemed to live “a few trees past the river”. To a child, distance is something you believe you can reach if only you have the time.
The first time I met him alone was when my father sent me with a message scribbled on a piece of wrinkled paper taken from my old school notebook. I walked farther than I’d expected, past the familiar edges of the village, until I reached his land. It wasn’t grand: a small house, a few fruit trees, and a patch of cleared ground. Bitus was chopping wood, his back to me. When he turned, his face startled me. He looked alert – not lively, but like an animal that had learnt which rustles meant danger.
“Your father?” he asked, looking at the wrinkled paper in my hand. I nodded, holding out the note, which was more a diagram than text. His fingers trembled slightly as he took it. He read silently, then folded it carefully, almost too carefully. That was when I noticed that his body didn’t behave like other people’s. Its rules were different.
Growing up, I slowly noticed that Bitus’ moods lived in his nerves. He could seem calm, but in the middle of a sentence, his skin might prickle, or his eyes might dart past the person he was speaking to, searching for a shape only he feared might appear.
Later, I understood: his body had memorised a person. That person was Ima, his old flame. I heard about them in passing once when an aunt shared some gossip with my mother.
Even a rumour of Ima affected him. Someone might mention seeing her at a village shop or hearing of her new baby, and Bitus would pale, as if his blood retreated from the surface of his skin. Once, within my hearing, he tried to explain it to my father, quietly, as though ashamed.
“It’s like your heart has pins and needles inside,” he said, staring at his hands.
I chuckled because the image in my head of what he described was odd. I was very young then, and the image didn’t make sense. He didn’t laugh. Neither did my father.
“That’s why you left?” I asked because my father was silent.
He shrugged, but it wasn’t the casual kind of shrug. It was the kind that hid how much he cared. “I didn’t leave,” he said finally. “I just … put space between us.”
In those years, Bitus was learning what happens when love doesn’t end cleanly; when love isn’t finished, but life moves on anyway.
Physically, his body treated Ima’s absence like a wound and the possibility of her presence like an attack. Thinking of her brought the sensation of pins-and-needles behind his ribs, a stomach-drop like a misstep, or a throat that closed, making swallowing difficult. I heard him mumbling about this on many occasions. His hands would sweat without him noticing, and headaches would start at the back of his skull, tightening like a band.
He said his sleep wasn’t bad; it was light. The kind of sleep where you don’t dare rest too deeply. Once, during the hot season, I saw him shiver suddenly, his shirt damp with heat. His whole body froze; eyes fixed on the road.
“What is it?” I asked, frightened. He swallowed. “Nothing,” he said, but his body told me otherwise. It was braced, anticipating the worst.
Emotionally, what happened to him was slower and crueller. His body’s alarms came and went. The heart’s weather settled in.
At first, his love became hunger – not romantic hunger, but the kind that makes everything taste faint. He ate to keep himself alive; not to enjoy. He worked, but it didn’t satisfy him. He could spend a whole day doing useful things and still feel empty, because to undo losing her was impossible.
Over time, hunger curdled into shame. Not shame for loving her, but for not being able to stop. People imagine heartbreak is loud, but Bitus’ pain was quiet. The quiet of a man who doesn’t want to inconvenience anyone with his suffering. He tucked it behind his ribs, letting it poison him slowly.
Within his mind, two versions of him coexisted. One understood the facts: Ima was married, and the past could not be altered. This Bitus spoke with clarity and restraint, offering the sort of measured advice he himself struggled to follow – reminding others that one must accept what lies beyond control.
The other Bitus, however, inhabited a world shaped by “if only”. If he had arrived sooner; spoken with greater care; or set aside his pride. Each possibility opened onto an imagined life untouched by regret. Because his pain persisted, his thoughts returned obsessively to these alternatives, as though persistence alone might unlock a different ending. He moved restlessly between reason and longing, caught between what he knew to be true and what he could not help but wish had been.
After prolonged observations, I surmised that this did two things to him.
First, it made him hypervigilant. Involuntarily, he scanned for Ima, especially in public settings in the village. Not because he wanted to see her, but because he thought if he could control, anticipate, and brace for it, it wouldn’t destroy him.
Second, it narrowed his life. The village became a web of potential collisions: the main road, the church, the provision shops – ordinary places that could turn dangerous. To protect himself, he avoided not just her, but everything connected to her.
He moved out – far enough from the village that chance encounters became unlikely. At first, it worked. On his land, his body stopped bracing every hour. His eyes softened; his shoulders dropped. He could lose himself in work – digging, chopping, mending – without constant flinching.
But solitude has a way of amplifying what you bring into it. Away from the village’s distractions, his memories grew louder. Sometimes, I’d arrive early and hear him talking to himself, not dramatically, but in fragments.
Once, I stood behind his shed, unsure whether to call out. He was murmuring, “No, that’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant”, over and over, as if trying to correct a sentence the world had already heard. I didn’t find it weird because I thought the two Bituses were talking to each other.
When I stepped into view, he startled – a full-body jolt, like someone woken by a shout. Then he smoothed his face into blankness. “Didn’t hear you,” he said, though he had.
That blankness was a mask. Not because he’d stopped feeling, but because his feelings were too unmanageable to wear openly.
He also developed rules – unwritten laws for avoiding disaster. He’d go to the village only at certain times, avoid certain roads, and linger at the edge of crowds so he could leave quickly.
Each rule was a prayer disguised as practicality: Please don’t let me see her. Please don’t let me fall apart.
The irony, of course, was that the more he tried not to see Ima, the more his mind produced her. Avoidance is a kind of attention. You can’t build your life around not thinking of someone without always thinking of them.
One afternoon, years later, Bitus confessed something close to the truth. I was seventeen, a senior secondary school student. We were sitting outside his house. I was eating his sweet potatoes while he was repairing a strap, his hands moving automatically.
“I don’t hate her,” he said suddenly.
“I know,” I replied.
He pulled the strap tight, frowning at his fingers. “I don’t even want her back. Not like that.” He paused, and the pause was full.
“I just can’t bear the way my body behaves. It humiliates me. Like I’m still a boy. Like I have no say.”
That sentence told me everything. His love had become a reflex. Not a choice, not a hope, not a plan – an involuntary reaction etched into him by repetition and loss. His heart had learned a pattern and wouldn’t unlearn it, even though the story had changed.
Emotionally, he lived with unresolved grief and longing, which reinvented itself as shame. Psychologically, he was caught between what he knew and what he felt – between the adult who understood and the younger self still waiting at the old crossroads.
Physically, his body was both messenger and jailer. It delivered the memory in chills, tingling, tightness, insomnia, and sudden flinches, then punished him for having them. His land, a few miles out, felt “more peaceful”, not because he was at peace, but because peace had come to mean something smaller: no surprises. No accidental sightings. No sudden bristling of the heart.
Out there, he could distract himself and almost pretend the world had been rearranged. And sometimes, on quiet days, he nearly managed it. But then a bird would fly up from the brush, or a footstep would sound on the road, and the old alarm would flash through him: the quick scan, the swallowed breath, the pin pricks in his chest.
Not because Ima was there.
But because his mind, faithfully and cruelly, had kept her ready.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at www.hayhenlin@gmail.com
