Worth 
/wəːθ/

Adjective: 

A: equivalent in value to the sum or item specified. 

What is the point of living until the age of a hundred when it will most likely be connected to machines?
Barely alive but barely dead. In the hospital, hardly a part of the humdrum beeps, buzzes, murmurs, and occasional chit-chat.

Bags are tubed into your stomach to infuse liquefied amino acids, protein, carbohydrates, and whatnot. Bags are tubed out of you to release bodily waste, like a full circle back to being a baby, but worse: bedridden, loss of taste, loss of sight, fatigue.

Blankets wrapped around you with one more, folded twice to fit around only your stomach. Since it’s cold here. Apart from the chilly air biting the back of your throat, your hands lay in the middle of your body with whatever strength was left to cast that incessant fester out. 爸爸，医生会检查你 Papa said. You scrunch your face.

Will you even be aware that your son is talking to you instead of the nurse? Will you keep insisting that the food is too hot and should be placed in the freezer? You did that once. Put the chewy chai tow kway in there for a full two hours and secretly throw it away behind your wife’s back.

Whenever you are presented with real food instead of it being tubed in, is it worth savoring your last bits of life when you don’t even recognize yourself?

In the measly span of half a year, your body could no longer afford to nourish your hair, which was all lost. As you lay with legs extended, arms folded, hands placed on top of the chest, adjusting the head to face forward, you screech yourself upright.

Your body changed its priorities, so you are hardly able to live: to keep the heart beating, stomach churning, and brain synapsing, your muscles deteriorated to nothing, bones protruding out as if they were needles stabbed through the skin-like fabric. With just enough time, your bones might as well burst out of your skin.

However, you insisted on not being put to sleep. To keep on living, if that’s what you define, what you are now.
Why—pride? Tradition? Religion? To show that you are still as healthy and strong as you were just a year ago, and nothing has really changed?

Oh, Grandpa. We still don’t understand why you did what you did. Imagine the simple balance scale with chains suspended, each side holding a small container: your heart on one side could have been equal to the feather on the other—if not for your desperate running away from the inevitable truth.

You knew the time would come when you would be diagnosed with the incurable. The diagnosis was just paperwork, the fine print. Nevertheless, you’ve seen it in the lives of your father, your grandfather, and yourself. You lived not only one but two lives. No one ever gets three lives. Isn’t that enough time to accept yours? Yet when the annoying gnawing from your stomach surfaces, you insist it was just something you ate wrong. “No doctor,” you said. Did you know then what gnawed from inside you?

Were you lucid when you said those words, “I don’t want to die here, I want to go back home”? It will remain a mystery and we’ll never know what you truly wanted. You died in the hospital bed, not on the chair back at home when you said those words dazedly.

As if to complete the last of his memory, I would like to believe the plastic creaks it makes when sitting on it, and more will come when you press your weight down until you see the spinning ceiling fan. Like those times again.

B: sufficiently good, important, or interesting to be treated or regarded in the way specified.

Dizzyingly entranced, I try to focus my 20/50 eyes. Squinting clearly. It was always there. Merely not as noticeable when surrounded by constant attention, blindness, chatter, and dynamics. I sometimes feel it on lonely nights back home as I wonder what I will do with my life. And wow…how can life feel so lively and lonely simultaneously?

The loneliness hit especially hard. I couldn’t remember what we were talking about. But they, my friends, would talk excitedly about something, and I would only contribute the “oohs” and “aahs,” “yes,” and “totally,” laughs, nods, and smiles.

Looking back, I felt stupid. I probably was stupid—the shiny ornament, eager to be part of the tree, with its bling bling. In the sweltering summer, I would like to add. If you step back to marvel at the shininess, perhaps a red rubber nose atop a clown would be a better fit. At least a clown would look atrociously incongruous among the crowds.

I am tired of being in this circle, but I don’t know how to start from scratch and find mine. It feels like we are all individual circles, constantly moving.

Bumping, overlapping, sticking.

The chaotic rule #1 is that rings are always moving. The chaotic rule #2 is that you can increase the radius of your circle. As surface area increases, the probability of superimposition. Hence, the goal is a circle so big that you are superimposed on top so snuggly among the other small circles.

The more layers made, the more saturated they are atop the tiny circles. Deep with color. Deep in richness.

It is like a job.

You have to clock in, put your skills to the test, clock out, and refine them. It takes hard work. I am not condemning those who put in the hours into networking. In fact, I admired their drive and their grit to ignore those who may ridicule them.

But then again, the effort you put in builds memories and a supposedly closer, tighter friendship. The sunk cost fallacy. Is it tiredness, laziness, or attach-ness?

The hypocrisy of it all was the lengths I would take to be part of the group. Recalling that moment: thirteen years old, middle school, science class, friends for two years, and chit-chat.

It had been stale and quiet among my friends and me as of late. And that unsettles me. I can feel the status quo shifting
internally and am not ready to be out externally. Walking into the science class, I heard the whispers and giggling in the corner of the room, where most students and friends were. I remember putting my bag down to the other corner and attempting to squeeze into the crowd.

“I hate Sam.”
“Exactly. Why is he always so stuck up?”
“There is something wrong with the way he looks.”
“The moment he opens his mouth, it’s game over. He’ll keep on rambling, rambling. Honestly, he should just shut up.”

The remarks about Sam, one of the many new kids of that year who was a bit outspoken, geeky, and excited to share his opinions and knowledge, rolled like a snowball on a hill. With nothing left to say about his personality, his voice, face, race, height, parents, what makes him him, were tugged out of him one by one.

It seems that there was a hater for each aspect of him. The air continued to be childish and playful. We were little surgeons huddling around the patient insect. Light taps transformed into harsh stabs, causing the insect’s abdomen to ooze pus. Its six legs were gradually plucked out one by one as the stick squashed it on the unforgiving concrete. Despite attempting to escape, the insect injured itself further by pulling off its legs.

To us, it was voluntary. Sam was practically screaming to be a target—the price of inadaptability.

“Ying, what do you hate about Sam?”
“... … …He talks too much,” hastily said to fill the staleness.
“... … … You’re way too nice, Ying. That’s not even something you should hate about.” In other words, my “ridicule” wasn’t even significant enough to be recognized. I still hate myself for giving in to the pressure.

Still, air crashed into the room, quiet. Everyone uttered not even a word. I wanted to run away and return to my seat in the far corner of the class. As I turned, he was there, and it seemed that he had come into class just in time to hear what I had been hiding this whole time about him— instant karma.

It was a split second that I could see his eyes before he shielded them with his hair and hands, hastily retreating to his seat, quiet. Ding-dong, ding-dong. That class that day was parched. It was as if that small moment had spilled through, even as it seemed that students who came at the last minute knew what had happened.

I feel sick, my head hurts, I feel lightheaded, and my neck is stiff: sweating palms, dodging eyes, shaking legs. I had been careless and wanted instant gratification—but now I wanted to go back, pick up my words, and stuff them down my throat.

It may be because I was still a thirteen-year-old teenager with the attention needs of a baby. For that tender age, its most severe symptoms included the gnawing of my teeth and the desire to be in the center of things. I wonder now if it will ever stop.

Once class ended, I huddled back with those friends. I wanted someone to dispel these symptoms, puncture and imbue me with feel-good pills, forcefully stuffed.

And they delivered: quenching and dismissing any atonements, as I was too scared to face him. To apologize. And I never did. Time flees as I fumble; I wonder if time has made him forget because I didn’t. And never will.

Noun:

C: the level at which someone or something deserves to be valued or rated.

I’m an overpacker. I can’t begin to count the number of times I would have to open my luggage to take out the items to make it weigh lighter. I like to believe that I am not, but I would always have a recycling bag at the side of my carry-on haversack.

The luggage and the carry-on are larger than the average size and look abnormally bulky by my side.

It’s similar to when a child would wear their parent’s shoes to take a few steps but only go as far as the hallway: sandals, sneakers, high heels, oxfords. You hop from one to the other, hoping to find the right size, but all are obviously too big to be mine. “Go straight, straight, and straight ahead!” Mama would encourage, on the other side.

It is not only the traveling days where I’ll be away for more than a day but every time I go to school or go out for a meal as I scurried down the steps, was late, and was too afraid that I’d forget something. Suica, wallet, water bottle, hat, three lip balms, gloves, phone, earbuds, charger, creams, snacks, glasses, three glasses cloths, tissues, pen, I mumbled, often looking back to the door summoning anything I’d missed. Eventually, when I came back, I didn’t even use almost half of them.

Besides being the person who stalls my family to check in the luggage, I would also say I’m an overachiever. Sleepless nights, too many club responsibilities, initiatives, meetings, events, too much homework, reports, tests, and exams.

I reasoned that it was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the future. So, it seems I should be greedy and try it all. As quoted by my dad, “Try everything before you decide what you want.” It may be unintentional, but I started stacking my wide range of odd commitments, and the attachment became sticky and stickier—stack and balance and stack and balance.

The tipping point is inching closer and closer, but not just yet. My choices may no longer be rational, as I downplay the toxins while accentuating the positive. I’ve gone too far. Time, effort, tears, sweat, blood, all given and spent. It can not go down the drain. Instead, overflowing the tub will be much better.

What started as a solution in an attempt to make life clearer became even murkier, vague, and ambiguous. In a similar fashion, you attempt to give directions to a stranger, but you overload it with information: proceed along the road until you encounter the second traffic light. At this point, you should decelerate and execute a left-hand turn, ensuring you observe all traffic regulations and yield to any oncoming vehicles or pedestrians.

It is no wonder that my heart gnaws.