A hundred years from now.

I finished this book yesterday. Sumpah habis merembes air mata! I tau, memang sungguh kurang sopan sekali membaca buku sedih serupa ini sambil berguling di katil dengan air mata penuh di muka. Tapi the book is a wonderful read. It reminds me a lot of the kind of sister I am, and the kind of sister I wish to be and the kind of sister I hope I'd never have to be. I've asked myself many questions along the way, half of them are still unanswered even after I finish the book, but somehow that's OK. Because I don't need them now. Not yet.

The book touched my heart at all the right places. Feels great discovering that you can feel a lot of people at the same time. And for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time, I envy Picoult's ability to write extraordinary stories using the very ordinary, everyday vocabulary. OK, envy is an understatement. I want to be able to write like her. I want to have a copy of her storytelling gift imprinted in my DNA. I want to leave the kind of impression she leaves on me, on my readers. I want that much. And maybe so much more, too.

I was never her fan until about 2 or 3 years ago, when I bought The Tenth Circle (my very first Jodi Picoult book). And then it becomes an obsession - wanting to write like her. Because I realized that after one or two chapter, her writing made me feel so small. Because she seems to know so much. Because it seems like all the characters in her book had personally told her what to write about them. Because they are so real. And I don't have 'real' in my stories. I need 'real'. Badly.

Reading her stories make me dream. Or to be exact, it makes my list of dreams longer. It also reminded me of what I used to want when I was younger; of my selfish wishes when my brain wasn't functioning the way it does now, when my heart could want so many things at a time. She made me look back into my childhood, which is something I rarely do. Because of the regret and heartbreaks that were graffitied on the walls of my past. But when I did so yesterday, it didn't feel so bad anymore. I'm still able to dream. I bet I'm still able to make more of them come true in the near future. But then again, how near in the future are we talking about? How near is near?

So My Sister's Keeper made me ask myself a lot of things. One of them was something as simple as 'What did I used to want to be?' I remembered how I used to want to be a doctor. I wanted to be a mermaid. I wanted to be a witch. I had wished to be a comic artist. I wanted to own a bakery. I wanted to be a florist. I once wanted to be a surgeon too, at one point in my life. And as far as I can remember (oh, I remember a lot), I had never once thought of, 'What if I'd never make it to university?' or 'What if I'd never get to finish high school?'

All my dreams were things so far ahead they were beautiful just thinking about them. So when I read about Kate Fitzgerald who had almost nothing to look forward to because she could die anytime, I felt terrible. Because a part of me felt incredibly sorry for her, for people like her, for families of people like her...and the horrible part of me was thankful that leukemia didn't happen to me, or anyone in my family. I don't know if that was simply being human. I just know that I don't like the way I felt.

Now I'm a teacher. I teach students how to write correct English the way I know it. I teach them how to speak correct English the way I know it. And I have new dreams, too. For me. For them. For many others. I want to see them become the people they're meant to be. I want to be a part of that circle in their lives; a part that would mean something when they reach the future. I want to be able to smile when they do. 

I also want to have a personal library. I want to build a house for my cats. I want to own a bookstore the size of Kinokuniya and I wanna name it Shaariah's. I want to have a family. I want to have kids. I want to be famous. I want to sign my own books my fans bought. And this list can go on for another hundred miles if I want it to.

I don't know if any of them would come true. I think some of them might. Some of them might not. Some might even be replaced with new ones. But there's one that will always stay in the list, and it'll keep coming true every single day for the rest of my life. No matter what. 

A hundred years from now, I'd still wanna be Nur Farhinaa's and Muhammad Nazif Aimaan's sister.

That much I know.