the first day I meet both of you, perfect little beings that fill and expand my heart beyond what I could have imagined.
Life is now a timed cycle of feed, burp, diapers, sleep, pump; a well-worn story of modern parenthood amidst sore boobs and milk stains.
But oh your little faces, expressions, and sighs. Your tiny fingers flexing and the softest downy backs. They make it worth everything, nothing is too hard or too much. I go to sleep dreaming about you.
It’s also incredible that despite both of you being of identical DNA, you are wholly distinct personalities to me. I love different things and have different memories i love of you (all of 4 days old!)
Luki with the deep contemplation and serious eyes that blink and look with such clarity. Henio with the most adorable milk drunk little face, flushed and content.
Every year is a year lost, and the years we had were so much yet never enough.
This time of the year, I think of you more often that I do usually.
Your birthday, set as Reccuring Forever, remains on my calendar.
It is your birthday today.
Someone told me once you are not meant to celebrate the birthday of the dead. For each year there is no turning of the age; a reminder of the recurrence set with casual certainty that they will come, but didn’t.
But I wish to celebrate your birthday in my privacy. I celebrate that day years before I was born, when you were. For you were here, and for that many happy decades you were ours. The time I had with you was perhaps brief in comparison. Yet it was my entire lifetime, at some point. My childhood and my coming-of-age. And through the winds and tides, I see your face in the sail. Sturdy and always towards me.
That one time at the Japanese restaurant, you bid me eat more. Your concern mellow but consistent. Your voice over the phone, a quiet laugh to diffuse my childish doubts. At my shows. When I first moved out. At your home, a difficult day, the last few, when you apologised when you were the last person who should. I should, we should, the world should. Yet you did.
An thank you seemed too thin. You were more than a courtesy.
Your grip on my fingers, just before the page stopped turning. How much effort must it have taken you? That you suffered but tried so hard for us is always what rises that terrible stone to my chest.
But today, today, I celebrate your birthday. I celebrate every year you were around. For the joy you had and gave and shared. With the rest of my life I celebrate yours.
How hard can it be to quiet one’s thoughts in the absence of external stimuli? The answer seems to be: incredibly so. Concerningly so.
This has always been the case, the running brain, the ever-buzzing. But since I’ve been plagued by a host of health issues (or, that they came into conscious focus), it has been out of control.
I thought I was good and had learnt all the lessons I needed to learn, but that is so far from the truth. I’m only beginning, or have not even begun in earnest.
You can be right at the peak of a mountain, but find yourself only a quivering leaf, swept away off course by the whims of just the tiniest puff of wind. Not by any means a firmly planted boulder or determined goat.
Anyway, I will try this meditation business again tomorrow.
I never knew how dependent my mind is on my body for intense physical activity, used as a crutch and a distraction. I need to go out and smell some flowers, and be okay with just that.
Is this how it feels like to be depressed? This… moroseness. The sick, squirming feeling in the pit of one’s core, of not being the right person in the right place with the right life; of wanting to escape this very moment, your body, self, and place, and of feeling homesick for something when you’re already home.
Sometimes I’m hit with a pang at how fundamentally fucked up beyond repair the world is.
It’s bone-chilling that we live in an already dystopic world and have been for centuries. In which our basic survival and needs are shackled to a man-made construct: money. More entrenched than ever, and as a result with power more dangerously consolidated than ever.
Is it not completely illogical and horrifying that work that brings the most, and most direct, value to our lives, such as shit shovelling and trash collection, for health, hygiene, standard of living, are paid the least?
And the most useless – or most times malignant – work are most highly compensated? For instance any work that makes people spend more, manufacture more, without any positive impact to our well-being, health, survival, or propagation. Beyond a few seconds of dopamine boost. Not only is it a harm to humankind but also the soil we are rooted to. The earth that gave us life.
Is it not depressing that 99% of us work tirelessly for ONLY, and I stand by this ONLY, the benefit and luxury of the undeserving 1%? I say undeserving because all deserves basic necessities, but NO one person deserves a $2 million piece of accessory, especially at the expense of many, many other’s suffering, but they do.
I strongly believe no one person should be a billionaire. Or a multi-millionaure. There should be a universal cap on one’s personal wealth, for what one person could need or use so much? Just a tiny fraction of their assets brings about a larger than proportional benefit to individuals, and then a ripple effect to the rest of society.
When I’m feeling shallow and unthinking, I tell myself I ‘love money’, it’s fine, what’s the point of fighting a system I can never change, why not just work within in and make the best of a futile situation.
Other days I’m in shock that we let humanity spiral to this state. When such a mood strikes and come face to face with the bleak reality, I question where most of my efforts are expended.
In my ideal world there is no consumerism. We live to live: eat what we need, socialize, reproduce, have a community, simple entertainment through art and music.
Currency is but trade of skills. A baker’s loaf for a weaver’s basket. The way it was before the first shekels changed hands.
It is also in a bout of these musings that I rethink my ‘love’ for money, struck by the irony that I chase after the one thing that oppresses us all, and start thinking about what I can do that doesn’t perpetuate this rot, but rages back at the machine, even a little. Throwing starfish back into the sea kinda thing.
Ultimately, I’ve not been brave enough to begin on the harder path that aligns with my inner belief. Yet.
Unceremoniously left in the basement trash area, I’m so sorry. You deserved so much more. Maybe i could have sent you for repairs, after all you were indestructible for so long.
To my dear readers, I have all my life tended to anthropomorphise my inanimate possessions, and am especially prone to object sentimentalism. The day I left my faithful Crash baggage for the last time, my heart was heavy, heavy with the weight of my own betrayal and callousness. Even today, when I remember my dear trusty luggage, the heaviness remains.
So today, an ode to my luggage of many years.
You came into my life in 2019.
USA, our first trip together, and what an adventure we had! You were left on the carousel while I passed through customs, through a silly turn of events. And with barely an hour of transit, I begged through warm tears for you to be released. By ingenious miracle, you were! You were, literally, unbreakable – a slip acknowledging an attempted check by TSA stubbornly forced into your innards, but you refused to nudge open for anyone but me! I knew then it was going to be a grand time between us. I’ve retold this tale proudly many times over.
And then COVID, we were stuck in Singapore, you and I. Nevertheless you were significant in my ventures: you accompanied me not across borders, but to a new home. My first time moving out alone!
When we could finally fly, you did with me, to Bali, Lisbon, Porto, Paris; for work, to Seoul; to Chiang Mai; to my first trip to visit K’s family in Wrocław, to Munich, to Taipei, Sydney, London, Dublin, France again, Bali again, Wrocław a yearly affair, to my first time in Beijing and Shanghai, to Tokyo, to my very first ski trip in Japan, to, Galicia, to London and Portugal again. That fateful last trip where you finally cracked.
Oh Crash Baggage, what a time we had together! What glorious, glorious memories we shared. I wish so much I had spent more time at our final goodbye, where I could thank you – a proper one – for being my mainstay through some unbeatable experiences. You were so good to me, the best luggage I could ever, ever hope for.
I will never forget you. I promise you this as the ‘very, very sad classical’ playlist I’ve put on echoes my very, very sadness. As that heavy stone that has been sitting in my chest pitches up to my throat and hot tears threaten to spill from regret, guilt, sentimentality, gratitude, and so much more. Memories of you, that bright and jovially scuffed up yellow, that iconic dented body, well-used and so proud for it, whizzing down dozens of carousels towards me. My joy at seeing that familiar sight of you, always. My pride having you by my side in so many cities. You were fun, reliable, loud, loaded with meaning, so functional, yet so good looking. You were a lion and a dog, fierce and loyal. I miss you and always will, every day of my traveling life.
Adios Crash baggage, I hope with all my heart you are well recycled, and that your spirit is carried over more continents and oceans than I can ever bring you.
It is to be heard, and seen, and known, and felt. It is to simply be yourself, to shrug off the costumes of roles you perform, with the confidence of knowing you are wholly accepted. And if you have forgotten who the ‘simply you’ is, they will help you find it again.
I’ve half-jokingly referred to this weekend’s getaway with the girls as ‘a spiritual and emotional retreat’.
The truth is it is closer to the truth than the humour implies.
What did we do besides sit around and talk about ourselves, each other, and life? A top-notch massage with the sound of waves, excellent breakfast spreads that kept us dreaming the entire day for more, spontaneous deadlift and pull-up tutorials. Being vulnerable and sharing what we have carried as a heavy stone for years.
I am sitting at the cusp of having so much to learn about the world and others, and so, SO much to unlearn to be better for this world and others. To be a girls’ girl is the strength that comes with knowing they will rally around you. I’m ready to take on what’s upcoming.
Is to age to become so utterly, disgustingly trite? I am bored, bored, and BORED to near death by my boring preoccupations and thoughts. I do not want to think about: housing, children, and health.
I want to think about the immaterial, the fantastical, and the madness that is in every infinitesimal gap of every material thing.
I no longer want to be enraptured by these gormless pixels that so easily tell me what to do, think, buy, and say.
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.
I have dreamt of you a hundred times since you left. A hundred different ways of you back home again, with us. In every one of these dreams, I’m ringing with joy — pure and uncomplicated.
I dreamt of you again, more realistic than ever. I wanted to ask why you left the convent, but was afraid asking might make you go back again. A hundred mornings of waking up to you silent and unreachable.
Are you happy? I don’t know if I want to know.
Once, our lives ran in perfect parallels. You lived two streets down from me. For six years through primary school, we were in the same class. We ended up in the same CCA, without machinations. We traded stories and sketches, what brought us together. Do you remember the endless well of games we thought up and played between everything?
We went to the same secondary school, took the same car together every morning, that 10 minutes wait standing with you by the road every weekday, without fail. We entered Drama together, took Japanese third language together.
We performed together, whenever we could. From Fungly-Mungly to Godot to CAP. I never found another person who can replicate the chemistry we had onstage.
C, you were the person I spent the most time with, from 7 to 16.
Even when we entered Uni, our lives taking different routes, relationships, and friends, we always found our way back to each other. The same Uni, your dorm a block away from mine. Taking Japanese Studies together. Remember the night we scaled the rooftop with G and D? Remember how G fell straight through a hole? “I hoard these moments in words online for us.”
For years, all the years that matter, you were by my side.
Now you are somewhere, doing something I have no way of knowing, maybe speaking another language. You have dedicated yourself to God, perhaps more and more so every year. And I have over the years gone from believing in the same God you do, to believing in a god not of our conception, to believing that maybe there are higher forces beyond our comprehension; to that there is nothing but the physical plane, evolution, and energy. That there is not only no god, but nothing after death. We are organic beings that cease consciousness and return to the earth. Once you stop fearing death, or what comes after, you stop needing a god.
Somewhere out there you are praying for my sins, praying that I too can join you in the paradise of your beliefs.
This is where we diverge: you sacrificed some of our time together on earth to have eternity together. I want nothing after death, and a bit more time with you on my transient, insignificant, and beautiful whisper of a life on earth.
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.
Q 