Q

Leading up to the days I watched Pickle Party , created by my dear friend and theatremaker Xiao Ting, I had the wildest dream(s), likely inspired by the conversations we had around the piece.

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In actuality nesting in an abundance of hotel-fluffed pillows, I find myself watching from the top down, helpless observer, of a microcosmic invasion. À la Thronglets in Black Mirror, à la Conway’s Game of Life. These tiny beings, unknown bits and bytes, make their way through a petri dish, leaving behind a trail of more unknown bits. With creeping realisation, I understand that they are eating their way through and digesting their habitat. That these beings are us, this petri dish our Earth…

And now, my physical body still in a wonderfully made King-sized hotel bed, I am perched precariously atop an awfully high pile of something. It is trash — this time realisation comes as an instantaneous slap — a forever accumulation of all the trash we have ever produced as mankind. Mainly men, and not so kind. The pile won’t stop rising, a terrifying vertical growth I am once again helpless in slowing down. I watch with dizzying vertigo as I am farther and further from the safety of Earth…

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Less than a week later, I sat down in an intimate studio space, bubbles rained down at me at the same time I learnt about climate refugees. ‘Displaced by the sea’, “but,” I thought, “did the sea not birth us, did we not displace the sea – itself millenials older than the first of our kind?” Who could claim the land, the sea, and Earth?

I thought about microbes that eat, digest, and fart out their metabolic wastes. I thought about us, who convert these waste to eat, digest, fart, ad infinitum. I thought about many things the days after Pickle Party.

I guess that’s what we are. Organisms that eat, digest, poop, waste, and sometimes, somewhere in between — think.