Illy & Eddie

Two Movies, Two Days, and the Weight of Being Alive

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Two Movies, Two Days, and the Weight of Being Alive

Eddie · April 2026

I turned 38 this week.

Friends sent birthday messages. They came in bits and pieces through WhatsApp, Instagram, the usual places. I haven't read most of them. That's normal for me. I've never been the kind of person who gets excited about his own birthday. But this year felt different. It wasn't indifference. It was something heavier.

I wanted to disappear.

Not in the dramatic way. Not off a bridge, not into the ground. More like slipping out of a room when no one's looking. A quiet vanishing. If the world forgot about me, I think I'd be okay with that. There's a strange comfort in the idea of being no one, owing nothing, mattering to nobody. I grew up not wanting to trouble others, but this goes deeper. There's a part of me, self-sabotaging, quiet, hard to name, that genuinely feels unworthy of being remembered.

I can't explain it. But I know it's there.

On Saturday, Illy and I went to 1Utama to watch Project Hail Mary.

We sat in the dark and watched Ryan Gosling play Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up alone on a spacecraft, light-years from Earth, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The same Ryan Gosling I first fell for in Blade Runner 2049, walking through neon rain as a lonely cop searching for proof that he's real. Something about this man and the roles he picks. He keeps playing people who aren't sure they matter, and I keep watching because I understand.

Ryland Grace isn't on Mars. He's somewhere further, stranger, more alone than that. No one to remember him, no one to miss him. Just the hum of a ship and the stubborn act of staying alive.

I envied him.

Not the loneliness. I have enough of that on my own. But the clarity. When you're the only human for light-years in every direction, the question of why am I alive becomes very simple: because I haven't died yet. There's something clean about that. No expectations, no performance, no birthday messages to leave unread.

After the movie, we stopped at a shop nearby and bought herbal tea. The kind that's almost black, so bitter it makes your face twist. Illy and I like this about each other. We don't reach for sweet things. We reach for things that are real, even when they're hard to swallow.

The next day, Sunday, we watched Rental Family at my place.

We were on the couch, drinking that same dark herbal tea, the kind that feels like medicine even when nothing's wrong. The movie started slow, the way Japanese films often do. They trust the audience to sit with silence, to not need every moment filled.

There's a line that runs through the film like a vein: "We sell emotions."

It cracked something open in me.

The premise is strange and beautiful: a company in Japan that rents out people to play roles. A father, a friend, a mourner at a funeral. You pay, and someone shows up to feel for you, or to let you feel something you can't access alone. It sounds dystopian, but the movie treats it with such tenderness that you forget to judge it.

Japan has always fascinated me this way. A society that climbed past selling goods and services and arrived somewhere higher on Maslow's pyramid. Not self-actualization exactly, but something adjacent. The selling of connection. Of presence. Of the experience of being seen.

The mangas and animes I grew up with circled this same gravity well. One Piece, a boy who'd rather die than stop chasing a dream no one else believes in. Macross Frontier, love triangles set against existential war, where a pop song can literally save a civilization. Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, a boy who becomes a monster to build a world worth living in, then erases himself so others can have it.

These stories raised me more than school ever did.

I used to stay up through endless nights in college, not studying, but thinking. Wondering. What is the point of any of this? The education system felt like a machine I was supposed to feed myself into, and I couldn't make myself do it. Not because I didn't understand. I understood fine. I just lacked the discipline. The structure. The thing that turns potential into results.

I crashed every Ivy League entrance exam on my own. No tutor, no guidance counselor, no parent hovering over my shoulder with a study plan. Just me, my overconfidence, and the inevitable rejection letters.

And then I watched. I sat there and watched classmates, people I'd sat next to, joked with, competed against, walk into Oxford. Into Stanford. Into lives that moved upward while mine moved sideways.

For years, that regret ate me alive. I carried it like a stone in my chest, this sense that I had been close to something and had fumbled it through sheer laziness. That I deserved the failure. That I was always going to end up here. Burning through a startup that never took off, pouring lattes for people who had their lives together.

I've made peace with it now. Mostly.

Peace, for me, looks like this: I wake up. I clock into ZUS Coffee, where I spend my days figuring out what's next for a company that's growing fast, running innovation programs and building things that didn't exist yesterday. My team is from Malaysia, Vietnam, Bangladesh. People who don't care where I went to school, only whether I can solve the thing in front of us. At night, I go home and work on OpenClaw, my personal project, my strange little obsession. Building an operating system and an agentic army of AI tools that might one day be something, or might not, but it's mine.

Peace doesn't look like arrival. It looks like showing up anyway.

And honestly, I don't want Stanford as badly anymore. AI has changed the equation. Anyone can learn anything now. A degree is a signal, but it's not the thing itself. The thing itself is the work, and the work is right here.

But I'd be lying if I said I don't have bigger dreams. I want to build a 四合院, a traditional Chinese courtyard home, with my sister Leia. I want a workshop full of 3D printers, making things for myself and friends. I want to run a restaurant that only serves food I personally love. I want to drive a caravan from Malaysia to Norway and Iceland with Illy and Leia, sleeping in parking lots and cooking roadside meals. And if I live long enough, if Bryan Johnson and the Don't Die movement and the Beijing Genome Institute are right about what's possible, maybe I'll go to Mars. Maybe I'll die there, looking up at a sky that isn't blue.

But I want to live first. That's the point. I want to live.

Back to Phillip.

In Rental Family, Brendan Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, a washed-up American actor in Tokyo hired to play roles for strangers. A temporary father for Mia, a temporary companion for Kikuo, a retired actor losing himself to dementia. Professional. Transactional. Emotions sold by the hour. He's supposed to show up, perform, and leave. Clean. No residue.

But Phillip breaks the rule.

He gets too attached. He starts caring about Mia. Not as a client, but as a child who needs someone real. He visits Kikuo not because he's paid to, but because he wants to. He crosses the line from professional to personal, and it causes problems. For the client's family, for his crew, for himself.

But the human part of Phillip. That's what wrecked me.

He didn't want to be forgotten. He didn't want to be someone who shows up and vanishes, like he never existed. So he sacrificed the job, the safety of distance, the professional boundary, and chose to be real, even if only for a moment. Even knowing it would cost him.

Maybe that's what made him feel alive.

And sitting on that couch, sipping bitter tea, I thought: isn't that the question everyone's afraid to ask? If you meet someone knowing the ending is already written, knowing you'll part, knowing it might hurt, knowing the goodbye is baked into the hello. Is the moment still worth entering?

My answer has always been simple: Be present. Live the moment. Even knowing the outcome, I'd still choose to walk through it. I'd still choose to feel it. Every time.

But Illy felt it differently.

That night, same couch, same room, same bitter tea gone cold, we moved to bed. The lights were off. The AC hummed the way it always does in my apartment, that low mechanical drone that becomes the sound of silence when you've lived with it long enough.

Before we slept, Illy handed me a small, heavy object. A stone. Dark, rough, ancient in a way that made my hand feel temporary.

It was a meteorite. A piece of Mars. Amgala 001, she told me. She'd bought it from the States and mailed it over. It almost disappeared during the courier, nearly lost somewhere between continents before it found its way to her hands, and then to mine. My birthday present.

She knows. She knows I've been talking about Mars for months, years maybe. How Elon Musk is building humanity's escape route. How I dream about being there someday, even though I can't pursue it now. Not yet. She listened to all of it, every rambling late-night monologue, and she went and found me a piece of the place I want to go.

She said, half-laughing, half-serious: 用尽一生的能力把最有意义的礼物提前给了我. She'd poured everything she had into giving me the most meaningful gift she could think of, and now she was worried she'd set the bar too high. That next year, whatever she gives me, I'd judge it as lesser.

I wouldn't. But the fact that she thinks that way tells you everything about who she is.

That night, I dreamed about Mars. Not the dead, red planet from the textbooks, but a living one. Different communities scattered across the surface. Me, building the same mechatronics stuff I build here, just under a different sky. Discovering foods that don't exist yet. Waking up and looking out a window at a horizon that curves wrong.

All because of a stone she put in my hand.

And right before we fall asleep, Illy started crying.

Not about the movie. About us.

She was grieving something that hadn't happened yet. The possibility that this wouldn't last. That seven, eight months of us might be all there is. That I might leave, or she might, or life would do what life does and pull us apart. She was mourning a future that doesn't exist yet, and might never exist, but felt so real to her in that dark room that it broke her open.

She said things. Things I'm not going to repeat here, except to say that some of them scared me. She talked about dying the way some people talk about sleeping. Like it would be a relief. Like it would be the final version of rest. She said if she had to go, she'd want it to be in my arms.

I held her. I told her I was here. I meant it.

But I didn't cry. Not then.

I understood where she was coming from. I've been in dark rooms too, metaphorical ones, where the walls press in and the only light is the screen of a phone you don't want to answer. But in that moment, I was steady. I was the rock.

The feeling found me the next day.

I was at the office, writing this piece, just trying to get the thoughts down before they evaporated, and it hit me. Not a wave. More like a crack in a dam. Tears, in the middle of a workday, at a desk surrounded by people who know me as the guy who's always joking, always building something, always fine.

I had to find a corner. A quiet spot near the stairwell where no one goes. I sat there and let it happen, and I thought: did we feel the same thing, just at different times?

I've always told myself I'm the kind of person who can't hold onto emotions. Thirty seconds and it's gone. The anger, the sadness, the hurt. I forget. I move on. I've built an identity around this: Eddie, the guy who doesn't get stuck.

But maybe that's a lie I tell myself so I don't have to sit with what's underneath. Maybe the emotion doesn't disappear. Maybe it just waits for a quieter room.

Here's what I know about Illy.

She is kind. Genuinely, almost painfully kind. The sort of kindness that comes from having been hurt and deciding not to pass it on. She is bright. She is shy in the way that people are shy when they've learned that being seen too clearly is dangerous. She would describe me as someone obsessed with OpenClaw who doesn't know common sense and can't take care of his own life. She'd say it while laughing, and she'd be right.

I love her. I think she knows that.

But I'm worried.

Not about us. Us is fine, us is two people on a couch drinking bitter tea and watching sad Japanese movies and trying to figure out what it all means. Us is good.

I'm worried about the weight she carries when I'm not looking.

When someone you love keeps finding different ways to say they want to die, softly, romantically, almost like poetry, you start to listen differently. You start hearing the bass note under every melody. And the bass note is: I'm tired. I'm so tired. And I don't know how much longer I can do this.

I know that sound. I've hummed it myself.

I read Naval Ravikant a few years ago and decided that life is meaningless, and that the "because" is what matters. You don't need cosmic meaning. You just need a reason. A "because." Because I want to build something. Because I want to see what happens. Because this tea is really bitter and I kind of like it.

That worked for a while. It carried me through the failed startup, the latte-pouring years, the long nights of wondering what went wrong.

But now, sitting here at 38, I'm questioning the "because." Because of what? I genuinely don't know anymore. The framework that held me together is showing cracks. I can see daylight through them, but I can't tell if it's sunrise or something else.

And maybe that's okay. Maybe not knowing is the most honest place to stand. Maybe the "because" doesn't need to be a fixed answer. Maybe it's something you renegotiate every morning when the alarm goes off and you decide, again, to get up.

I don't have the meaning of life figured out. I thought I did, once. I was wrong.

But I know this: I want to live. I want to live stubbornly, absurdly, ambitiously. I want to build my 四合院. I want to drive through Iceland. I want to print strange things on a 3D printer at 2am. I want to see what Mars looks like from the ground.

And I want Illy next to me for as much of it as the universe allows.