Superstitious

I am actually far from the proper description of being a superstitious person. But the last so many happenings in the past 3 months were way too overwhelming for me not to become superstitious.

Let's recap it.

• On the 4th of March, a thief broke in to my house by breaking one of the windows on the first floor. I suspected that it happened when I was at home because whoever had this evil doing did not climb upstairs and steal more valuable things like laptops, surround speaker or my precious camera and lenses. Things missing were my purse that had only about Rp 300,000 (but it meant a lot to me!) and my very important papers, a mobile phone that I bought 2 years ago which cost Rp 500,000 that I suspect wouldn't be worth more than Rp 250,000 now and even the coins my maid collected and saved on the dining table that we reserved for parking fees. It was not a big robbery but it still made me paranoid in case these thieves dared to do more on their second visit. I keep a knife under my bed ever since.
• Not long after, I went to Fabio's place for lunch and parked my motorcycle in front of his house. When I was about to leave, I saw one of the mirrors was gone and the other one was left half unscrewed.
• I suffered from lymphadenitis, an infection on the lymph (Bahasa Indonesia: Kelenjar getah bening) right on the left side of my bikini line. It first felt like I had a very small lump far inside my skin that I could only feel by pressing the surface of the skin hard. In one week, it got bigger and another small lump appeared on the right side of my bikini line. In two weeks, it got so big that naked eyes could see that there was a lump under my panties. One night I had a terribly high fever and I hallucinated that I saw my father. I thought it was very serious so I took myself to an international clinic in Bali, SOS, and got diagnosed that I had this lymphadenitis. The doctor immediately ran a blood check on me to know if it had spread to other parts of my body. Lymphadenitis appeares to be a relatively curable infection IF treatment is early. A few days late, I may have developed a cancer. I couldn't walk properly for 3 days afterwards.
• I had never had allergies of any kind before and I was always proud of that. But it just so had to happen that the antibiotics that the doctor gave me was rejected by my body. There were red rashes all over my right face and I felt so terrible. I went back to the clinic and was given another type of antibiotics. I just had to remember that next time if a doctor wants to prescribe me an antibiotic I should tell him/or that I am allergic to Penicillin. That is weird. I am pretty sure I was given penicillin before and I was okay.

• Our kitten, Geisha, was the next to be sick. She was weak for 2 weeks and became not greedy anymore as she was always known to be. Vincent finally took her to a vet and after a week, she got better and active again (read: naughty). That did not last very long. One morning, I had a tukang to fix my broken waterheater and she got out to eat the grass. I let her do that while I was busy with the tukang. Then I heard a cat howl that did not belong to Geisha so I checked it out. A black cat that was three times her size was threatening her. Vincent came out and tried to hush away the black cat. And only when he did that, the cat attacked Geisha and bit her back. Geisha was terrified and ran and hid inside the compartment that kept our water pump. She was sleeping the whole day that day and died less than 24 hours after the attack. I blamed myself for being a bad mother and not protecting her from that evil cat. We wept for 2 weeks until...
• Vincent lost his passport and KITAS blue book - 2 very important papers for every expat in Indonesia. We looked around the house literally everywhere. We even removed the furnitures to see if they somehow fell down. Nothing. My maid helped to look for it every where but they just disappeared. I had terrible nightmares for days where Geisha alwas appeared in the beginning or the end of the dream and the rest was spent on forcing my unconscious brain to remember and think where these papers could be. These dreams did nothing good but giving me revelations of other things that had gone missing: my red CDMA phone and the certificate of my ring. The mornings when I woke up all sweaty, I would get up and looked for these things that I saw were missing in my dreams, and they were indeed gone. I went to look for my actual ring, and it was still there. It was only the papers that disappeared.
• I formerly did not speak much to my neighbours next door. But the one on my right side just approached me and said that someone was trying to break his window - same MO like when my house was broken in. The next day he came to me again saying that there was this large 2 meter cobra that got into his kitchen at midnight. Not long after the neighbour on my left knocked my door and said that she saw a huge snake crossing the path in front of my house and then hiding in my water pump compartment. And also that she caught two men wearing helmets trying to break her window too. I never really saw the actual snake maybe because I don't have a garden like they do. But the story from Karen freaked me out. Now we were thinking that maybe Geisha did not die from the black cat's bite, but maybe from the snake's. Think about it: would your kitten die from a cat's bite in less than 24 hours without any open wounds?

Anyway, Vincent has been so much under pressure since if he did not do anything about the papers right away, his arse is on the line and he can be kicked out of the country soon. That means my arse is also on the line. And there was still the dispute of his sister's villa in Canggu that never seemed to end and he had to take care of everything because he was the only one residing in Bali that they could ask help from. He wouldn't normally complain about it, but with all the things that are in his hands now, he really does not need anymore burden.

Lately I have been thinking if it was the house. I can hardly remember any single good thing that happened to us since we moved to this new house in January. There have been pains and more pains. And unlike the rule of wheel of life that I believe, all these bad things happened in only a short time. I really, really can't help being superstitious after all these. Maybe it was an exaggeration. Maybe I just need someone or something to blame. Maybe it was just the effect of watching too much TV Series Supernatural. But I need an explanation, logical or otherwise, why we had these in our life when before, things were always looking good even in bad moments.

I am still stressed out and just recently started to pray again to God. But whether it is superstition or not, I am definitely moving to another house next year. I'll start hunting for houses again next month.