My eyes begin to droop as I burn through the last chapter of a clichéd but oh-so-addictive fanfic that I’m frankly quite embarrassed to be reading but can’t stop anyway. Lying in bed and disappearing into this over-dramatic world, dissociating from real life, is all I’ve wanted to do today. Also yesterday. And the day before. Basically, this entire fucking week.

It’s early, hours before the usual (admittedly, stupidly late) time I’ve been going to bed these days. But it’s been an exhausting week so I figure that it makes sense to go to bed early. Maybe that means I’ll wake up early, too, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, because I’m going to have to spend Sunday making up for all the work that I haven’t been doing. Executions or no executions, Mekong Review needs to go to layout and print soon.

I can’t tell if I’ve fallen asleep; it feels more like a semi-conscious doze than actual slumber. But I’m in a different world, pushing a—of all things—little toy wagon around. Only the toy wagon is alive, sentient. It can feel, and it’s scared. Someone has shot it, torn a hole into its side. I have a sense that it was two humans, who claimed it was an accident, a slip-up from a long distance away. But as I push the little wagon along, a voice whispers that no one shoots by accident and no one shoots to miss. It sinks in, in this bizarre dream that both feels and doesn’t feel like a dream, that these strangers had chosen to shoot at sentient toys. As I emerge from the shelter of a building with the toy wagon I’m guiding along, I feel over-exposed, and vulnerable, and unsafe. There’s a sense of evil lurking out there, and the most sickening part is that this malice doesn’t manifest in fantastical monsters, but in other human beings. And they could pop into view at any moment, take an “accidental” shot at us again.

I wake to the feeling of adrenaline seeping into my fingertips, even though I already know that wasn’t real and I’m snug in a very comfortable, king-sized hotel bed.

Suddenly I’m not so sleepy anymore. Or am I? I’m still tired. But am I going to sleep?

I’m aware that, apart from exhaustion, I’m also hungry, which feels like something room service fish and chips might happily resolve, and maybe a bit traumatised, which can’t be so easily addressed by a shit ton of fried stuff. (Although that doesn’t mean I won’t try—I’m getting fish and chips and curly fries.)

There are feelings I can’t put into words. I don’t like that. As I said in therapy months ago, I don’t like it when I can’t articulate how I’m feeling, even if it’s just in silent narration to myself in my head. I’m a words person; I think I’ve always been. It’s how I process shit. I don’t really know how to process things for which I don’t have words.

I’d recently done a rough count of the number of death row cases I’d worked on or had interacted with the family in some way that had ended in execution. It was more than twenty, likely edging towards thirty.

That’s a sickening number. And they’re only a portion of the hangings that have taken place in Singapore over the past fifteen years.

Today someone asked me how I deal with the emotional impact of having worked on the death penalty issue for so long.

“Badly,” I said.

When people ask me what the hardest part about working on the death penalty is, I always say it’s the day after an execution. That’s when there’s nothing left to do but confront the deep emptiness and rage-grief that has nowhere to go. When it feels like all the effort and love and care and desperation had been futile after all, because the state had gone ahead and killed them anyway and now they’re never coming back and their families are going to have to live with that forever.

Datch was executed two days ago, but—what with the evening wake in Singapore, the late-night drive into JB, the wake at his home the next day, the flight to KL, and Pannir’s book launch at Gerakbudaya—it took a little while for the horrible reality to start sinking in. After I gave an impromptu speech at the book launch and there was officially nothing left for me to focus on, it finally hit me that Datch, who I’d never met but had still kind of known for almost a decade, is gone, and Pannir is next, and what the fuck is this fucked up state of affairs?

Suddenly it felt ridiculous that we were all just sitting around listening to a panel discussion about the death penalty and literature, even though the subject totally made sense for the launch of a death row prisoner’s poetry collection, even though, as a writer and activist, I’d have been into the subject at any other time. Suddenly it seemed utterly ludicrous that we couldn’t just storm Changi Prison and pull Pannir and everyone else on death row out of there. Suddenly I wanted nothing more but to get back to the hotel, jump into bed and pull the covers over my head for at least the next twenty-four hours. Suddenly it felt like I was going to be sick. Or have an anxiety attack. Or maybe be ambitious and do both.

The feeling ebbed gradually, and I was more or less back to normal by the time the event was over. If, by normal, I mean that I’m still pissed off and repulsed and terrified that we’ll hear of another execution notice and the cycle of horror will repeat again. But at least I didn’t freak out in front of everyone. So that was good. I wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would anyone else. Especially not with Pannir’s family—if anyone deserved to freak out publicly, it’d be them—right there.

I’ve made it through today and I’m okay. I’ve eaten as much fish and chips and curly fries as it’s reasonable for one relatively petite woman to eat alone in a hotel room past midnight. It’s now coming up to the usual time I go to bed, so I didn’t go to sleep earlier than normal after all. I’ve finished reading that fanfic, even re-reading some of the more melodramatic scenes because my brain wants the literary equivalent of comfort junk food right now.

Tomorrow I will lock myself into this room and maybe get room service again and catch up with as much Mekong Review work as I can. On Monday I’ll head back home and show up at Hong Lim Park at night for our rally against the death penalty. I’ll soak up the energy and be bad at chants because I’m weirdly too self-conscious to even yell properly at a protest. I will write a newsletter about Pannir’s book launch, because no one else in Singapore’s media scene is going to (except maybe The Online Citizen). I’ll do all these things and more, because I’ve done it before and know I can. It probably doesn’t mean that I’ll be done processing what this past week has been like, but it at least means I’ve got over the bigger humps and will (hopefully) work the rest out as I go.

It’d be so much better if I—and my peers, and death row families, and death row prisoners—didn’t have to process shit like this, though. Especially when the assholes who make these decisions probably don’t grapple with these sorts of emotions at all. Fuck those guys, seriously.