How did we get from not wanting a wedding ceremony…
To having three celebrations, in two countries?
I need to get around to recording these memories in earnest — once I have the official photos ready!
Category: Kosio
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Dearest Q of many years past;
If only I can reach back to your times of most impatient loneliness and loneliest impatience. If only I can give you a hint that – as you rightly and defiantly believe – you do meet the one you have dreamt up ages ago and continue dreaming of.
All the times you feel unmoored: like life is moving forward but you merely floating, seeking a somewhere intangible and undefined. All the times you feel unknown to others. A profound aloneness. All the times you wonder what you must do to find or conjure this somewhere, something, or someone.
Is it dogged persistance? Hard work? Something about yourself to be changed or learnt?
No, Qing, you simply have to wait, intolerable as it is. Until your lives – floating, but towards each other – meet. Buoy to anchor.
One day, soon, he will be your universe. One day, you will write your vows to him and they will be the most truthful words you’ve spoken. One day, he will mean more to you than you do to yourself, a detachment of the ego and an attachment to love as you have always wanted.
He is a much gentler, kinder soul than you are, the sort you long to be. Good news! He brings a softness to your stubborn, prideful spirit, and you will want to be more and better for him; for what you bring into the world with him.
Dearest young baby Qing, there is one last piece of news I would bring you, if I could. You may not believe me, but hear it anyway: He loves you just as much as you do him. If you have ever feared your capacity to love (and you have!) … don’t. He has just as much to give, and wants all you have to offer.
Love you so, so much, you in 2024
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3.45am streams of consciousness
Once upon a time without you, I would have said ‘You are my rock‘ and thought that was enough.
But it is not a rock I want to have and to hold, a shape defined and immutable. I want an ocean – to be buoyed, to be brought places; to be engulfed and drowned; to be shown depths and to know the unknown.
To immerse myself, whole; to be one with; to plunge into ice cold water, to every second be reminded that I am so alive.
To move as you do, yet know where I am, always (with you, in you). The gentle waves the passionate tides. The always new to know of you. The endlessness of you, the borderless of us, the bridge to some horizon.
You are my ocean.
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Letters from a different time
The astronaut releases a letter into space
Today, the sun is orange.
Yoked by the too-slow turn of earth,
it has a different face where you are.Today, the sun is orange, waking me
from dreams of hollow scapulas crumbling to touch.
Blinking, my fists close to a dust of faraway light.–
The seafarer casts a letter into the ocean
I count fish bones the way I count days
we are apart. Fine, silvery threads pulled from
skin, lined in neat parallels that do not meet.Where I am, the watery sun breaks like yolk over waves,
wave after wave on a lone axis, bringing me to you.Q
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Skull
Seismic or vibrational communication is an ancient sensory modality of conveying information through vibrations. Earth, a plant stem or leaf, the surface of a body of water, a spider’s web, a honeycomb, or any of the myriad types may be vibrational substrates.
That day, it seemed to him, was the first that mattered. Every memory and thought after bright and real, clarified through a looking glass. Everything before a dream with edges runny like broken water.
❖
Soft rain pelts on his nose and eyelashes, beading on his blue sweater where they land.
To his north east, neat rows of pine trees raise their branches coquettishly, needles shaking off the last of their white winter cap. As the row curls westward, it begins to lose its form. Pelts of moss sidle up the base of trunks like quaint socks. A little ahead of him — pressing its slobbery nose over the grassy mounds — trundles a dusky bronze Labrador. At times, it cavorts over with surprising agility for its size and age, winding between his legs, heavy tail whipping carelessly at his thighs.
For a reason that has yet to coalesce in his consciousness, he finds himself walking to where the trees sit haphazardly, unkempt.
❖
His scale is steady, even as one step rises to ragged rocks while the next sinks into a cluster of prickly ferns. He feels curiously safe, cradled by the bubbling brook, the occasional whistle of a lone bird that does not tire of its tune. When twigs give way beneath his boot with a wet crackle, he finds footing reliably on the padded marsh beneath.
He is not sure how long it has been, only that the sun filtering through the pinewoods above have sharpened into columns and are bleeding into orange. The trees rise higher here, while the sun makes its way down. The brook — he concludes from the swelling, constant burbling around him — is now a stream. It muffles the huff of his breaths, but each inhalation now brings greater flavor: the sweetness of pine, mellowed by the earthiness of mushrooms before dissipating with the frostiness of winter’s passing.
He notices first the shaft of golden light pouring from its mouth (or a gaping hole that could have been one) spilling into a pool of amber, illuminating the square of forest floor before it. The surrounding browns and greens dulled, it seems to him, in an instant. The stream drums on, almost eagerly.
❖
The skull sits on a fallen bough, horizontal at knee-height, like a child’s makeshift swing. Near the bough’s midpoint protrudes a broken branch threading through an oval crevice adjacent to its eye socket, cozily fitted like a natural horn. The rest of it is dominated by that light-yielding cavity, framing it a fine jaw bone lined fastidiously with blunted teeth. From an angle, he can almost imagine the skull to be held in place with its bite on the mottled bough.
In his trance-like examination, he has come eye-to-eye with it. The dual chambers glow gold, amber, white — lit within from the sunlight’s shifting angles on its westward descent. Now, he cups the jaw, tender as he would a lover, and unsheathes it from the horn. Gingerly, he tests its mass and matter. It dawns on him that he cannot know any more about the skull: he already knows it, and is merely re-acquainting with its shape and form; with its startling lightness and powdery touch.
Without much forethought he brings his lips close to the cavity, pursing them like he would a mindless whistle; a casual kiss. He blew soundlessly into the skull.
❖❖❖
Years later (and yet more years later), in places far from his childhood, the forest, the Labrador, and his self that day, he would find the skull again, many times and in many ways.
In the passing of a subway train, the all-encompassing rumbling, the flit of fluorescent lights, shadow, lights. The skull grinning back at him from his blinkering reflection before rushing away with the last carriage.
Ducking under the shadow of a building to shake musty rain off his coat, glancing skyward at the mural-sized glass glittering proudly to no one. The glint of the skull’s wink with hollow eyes set aflame.
At the carefully clipped green mats of a sprawling lawn, walking a friend’s dog, the skull dancing in a mist of sprinklers. The back alley of a bar, in the steam hissing from colourless bricks where he pressed his knuckles, heaving emptiness.
In a bed that had lost all spring. A sleeping female shape next to him under custard yellow sheets, the cold plastic of a remote in his hand, staring at the TV until the static burned into a floating afterimage of the skull.
Each time it calls for him. He knows it from the hum at the base of his neck and the back of his throat. A reminder, a trail, a knowledge gifted and slipped away.
❖❖❖
He blows into the skull. It may have lasted seconds, minutes, as long as his breath can hold. But there is no strain, and there is no sound. Only an unearthly frequency that reverberates, at once hollowing out his bones and filling him brimful with an ancient song. The forest is listening, rapturous. The Labrador stands at attention, majestic in its serious, knowing expression. Blades of grass twitch in remembrance. Roots tunnelling closer to core than land yawn beneath his feet. Mushrooms, shied under their thick brown caps, stir and bare their intricate patterns to surface.
When it ends, he is not sure if it was him or the skull who willed it to.
As if the forest has been holding its breath, a deep, collective sigh released the flow and flurry again.
He knows the forest murmured a secret to him, and he is to understand and know. In the days that follow, much more became clear. But the one he was to know remains obscured. All he can be sure of is that at the moment of the forest’s sigh, he heard softly but surely the give of water: a small creature diving cleanly into the stream.
Not a month later, he packs a compact suitcase and starts a trek of cities with fluorescent lights; clipped lawns; glittering buildings; warm figures he seem to always find but never keep.
❖❖❖
In one of the cities where his suitcase landed, foreign ferns are streaked with maroon, with leaves wide and wet as newborns. In the summer, when the heat is feverish, he cools off by the pool with a paperback and his sandals kicked off. In the languid air hung a cloying scent of sunblock and shrieks of children romping dangerously near the pool’s edge, but he does not mind. Resting his eyes, he watches them tumble and fight like puppies.
It is while resting that the glimmering, chlorine blue of the pool’s surface began to eddy again to that familiar shape, the drumming and hum catching in his core. This time though, he is jolted by another long-known sound: body breaking water.
All he can see of her from the surface is a crown of raven like seaweed undulating in the water. Around her, the skull ripples and dissolves, its grin wider than ever. Now, the body turns towards him, rises from the water. On her face that biding, knowing look the skull, the Labrador, the whistling bird and coy mushrooms had held.
And then, as if two looking glasses rolling at random now snap to perfect alignment, he saw with clarity the knowledge the forest had gifted: “You’re home.”
❖
Q
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february – november
it was february. you broke into my life with little fanfare. blonde with a killer smile and eyes a thousand shades in different lights. you with your catholic sensibilities and love for art. you with your Chopin at night and savant-like Jeopardy knowledge.
so many things in between, and here we are. today. november.
your arms around me the first of my waking consciousness, “i like you so much” the first words i hear in the morning.
against my cautiousness, despite my guardedness, you’ve proven to be nothing but worthy of my trust.
let’s put it this way: maybe i can never get over the possibility of someone simply walking out of my life. or losing all their affection in a day. but there are those who are worth taking the risk for, maybe even worth the eventual heartbreak. i think what we have is worth it.
who else will slow dance with me in the rain? or pick me up and spin me around with so much ease and mirth? or rap with me, air guitar an entire sequence of fleetwood mac, dance to baby metal? or pretend three-legged race, sketch with me, okay all my artistic whimsies?
how can i replicate the feeling of you making a string of random noises, and me knowing exactly what you meant?
i like this rhythm. i like the cadence of our conversations and the way our hugs fit just right.
i like who i am with you, and who you believe i can be.
my relationship with the weather as an allegory of character growth:
years ago, i hated the rain. hated it with equal parts fear and condescension. in another timeline, a comforting hand made my rain-induced moodiness better. i thought this must be what a partner should do: to soothe and to provide escape.
with you, i forget that this is the rain i hate. to you it was another day. to me it was that scene in a bildungsroman novel one would break down as a literary character development.
we ran in the rain, you opening the trail, portending splash spots. we kissed in the rain, our lips slick with wetness but finding each other with quick familiarity. we survived the rain: a grand adventure than lost hours and foiled plans.
a question. do people typically like what someone is in relation to them, or who they are independently?
i find myself gravitating towards the latter, reading you as a protagonist, a first-person narrator. and i love the world through your eyes. it is this much more vivid, this much brighter. this much more intriguing. worth going through, because every obstacle is a welcome challenge, a means to be better.
this book is one i never want to stop reading.
Q 