To HELL with Valentine's Day!

Valentine’s Day is sweet for some, depressing for others. Me? All I got was a dead body.

My bus was moving towards Jurong when I noticed a big crowd by the side of the road. The crowd comprised mostly of Indians and Bangladesh. The bus then shifted to the right lane and as it moved forward I saw a policeman and his bike. The guy sitting in front of my suddenly became excited, stood and pasted his face against the window. Restless energy filled the air. I wondered what could have elicited such excitement. Then I saw it.

A corpse lay in the middle of the road, face up, and arms sprayed to the sides. A large pool of blood had spread from his back. Its thickness glimmered like a mirror, and in the darkness, it looked black and accusatory.

When I turned back, the excited guy was gone. He had probably alighted for a closer look. While he was at it he might as well get at the flesh before the other vultures moved in. Not much meat to go around by the looks of it.

I felt a bit…I don’t know how to put it. I was neither sad nor frightened. I thought of the dead guy’s family and how sad they would be. I supposed I should feel sorry, but I was not. I imagined myself standing next to the corpse. It was grisly of course, but no worse than the dead body of a suicide I saw when I was a kid. She (or he) leaped from maybe sixteen floors and landed ten metres away from the block. The corpse was a mess , but there wasn’t much blood. Death was instantaneous. As I looked down from the third floor I could not help but feel fascinated. So were the boys next door. Our parents talked to each other, their tone gossipy.

I wonder how the cheap laborer died. Apart from that solitary pool underneath his body, I didn’t see blood anywhere else. There was no car parked at the scene so it was unlikely a traffic accident. Murder? Probably a stab in the back. What did the man think about as he lay helpless on the road, too weak to even breathe and his life blood seeping away? Pain. His loved ones. Did his life flash in front of him? Nobody helped him – perhaps they were too late. Did anyone see him die? Did anyone see how he died but walked away, thinking it was none of their business?

I HATE VALENTINE”S DAY.