The laughter, after the crash.

( The story “The Laughter, after the crash.” is written by Yulia Ratnasari)

That feels right.

Waiting for Godot theatre, for me, is rather unsettling than comical. I didn’t laugh watching and reading the whole play even though the other audiences find it entertaining. Beckett packed the misery of Vladimir and Estragon into comedy, despite the fact that I rarely find Western jokes as funny. In the story, the Godot (God? or multi-interpretative being) is unlikely to come and becomes the centre and the aim of the story. Didi and Gogo keep and keep on waiting, discussing hope and despair in a ‘humorous’ way; and the wait continues until forever while in fact, it was really miserable.. by clinging into an uncertain hope.

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.”, as Beckett wrote in Endgame, sometimes echoing inside me. Besides its social function, it’s absurdly true that we spontaneously laugh at something miserable. And beyond doubt, laughing is always beyond control. It is not man-made or something to decide upon. Laughing is a natural thingy. We laugh when the body and the brain want to laugh. The human system is sophisticated, isn’t it? The science behind things is that we can burst into laughter every time we process something ‘funny’ or ‘painful’ or ‘bizarre’ or ‘inappropriate’ or ’embarrassing’ — in which the brain might attempt to balance out stress by releasing certain hormones via laughing. Compulsive laughter is a beneficial evolution function for human survivability.

I was in a car crash.

I thought I’d certainly die. It was the first time I experience a car accident scene from a first-person point of view. It wasn’t a dream. It was an absolute fucking reality. I was on the toll road around 18:00 the 80kmh speed when it happened. It was raining heavily causing myopia disturbing the long-distance vision. The highway road was constructed using premix concrete which lacking pores as one of its drawbacks in handling rain. The road was super slippery and the tire lost its grip on the surface. The brake suddenly malfunctioned, causing a skid, and losing its manoeuvre. The car went directionless and accelerated into an S, O, and U shape. It happened really quick. Once my head hit the pull adjuster of the safety belt, and my jaw felt the blow, I realized:

This time, I’d die. 

The car went out off the drive track towards the rocky hill. The moment the car going to hit the lane barrier, my retina widened, the space I saw stretched, and the time I perceived slowed down. “So this is the end. Sorry, mom to make you sad. I’m such a foolish child” was renounced in my head as my last words before leaving the world. Then a flashing concept of emptiness, the state before I was ever born, that everything existing will soon be vanished to oblivion, racing inside me. But, I’m ready for this.

Death, here I come.

And the car collided with the road barricade.

But I was okay.. 

I’M OKAY!

I thought everything would turn into total unconsciousness? Or at least temporarily and woke up in the hospital? Like in the movies? But I was.. fine..

The car crash procedure was complicated and time-consuming: waiting for other PIC’s arrival and so on. The police put me inside a decker truck since I was all wet and shivering because the rain hasn’t stopped. Astonishingly, I didn’t feel shocked nor traumatized. My head and my right jaw were hurting but I was okay. I sat quietly, with the beaming road light was flashing tangerine colour decorating the foggy window, and with the sound of the truck’s hazardous warning lights rhythmic ticking sound; I tried to comprehend what has happened… I tried recollecting moments during the accident chronologically. When the ongoing memory scene was replayed in my mind, I uncontrollably burst into laugher.

It wasn’t a miserable laugh nor a lunatic laugh… 

It’s a spontaneous, natural, pure, and blissful laughter…

Beckett, Stroker, and Freud have tried to unravel the mechanism behind laughing, sadly in a pseudoscience way, that I remember cited an analysis mentioning three types of laughter where: 1) you laugh at others as the most common type; 2) laugh at yourself, and 3) you laugh at nobody, and to no one. You laugh at the whole situation as it is. At that point inside the towing truck, I suddenly grasp it… Life can be ended at every millisecond, at every space in the atom. We are only a fragment, a little creature for the world.. yet most of the time we plan the future As if we own it. AS IF we are the centre of the universe. And these all might be only an illusion, a creation of one’s mind… Nevertheless, life, believe it or not, has its own pace that cunningly guides and bring us to wherever and whenever we are supposed to be at…

And in this truck, alone, with the tangerine radiant street lights, I think; I think this is where I supposed to be: safely, with just a very little harm on my head, in my Java homeland, with a huge fear of mom’s cancer recurrence, shivering because of the rain, and laughing at the absurdity, of life.. after the crash. 

Despite all my sins, my ego-centric decisions, my foolishness and my impulsive, unconscious living… I absurdly think that in that truck, on that day, 18:23 GMT+7, I was on the right path… I’m not talking about predestiny shit, but everything feels as what it should be and has fallen into its right place, falling into its accord. And all the past, all present, and all future collided as it is.

And I kept on laughing, at nobody, to no one, and my laughter echoing back at me.

I laughed at the whole situation as it is… Laughing,

at an absurd, and nonsensical life.

After the crash.

2021.