Too much heart and too little words,
thoughts that run for days and days
on end. a steady hand on chest to quiet the clamor
of something hollow battling its way through my lungs.
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Letters to C
Dear C
How have you been? I ask and really want to know.
Back here, days are days, lapping into each other. I dream of you more often now. Sometimes you’re crying, sometimes we both are. Others you tell me you’re fine, and you’re happy, you’re coming home, you’re finally home.
If you were here we would talk endlessly. I pass by the train station half-expecting your mop of hair to crest into view.
I hope you’re well.
xo Qing
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loss // hope in another universe
As a child i could not fathom loss. Everyone – everything – was fixed so decidedly in their respective orbits around my singular world, that i could not imagine them as their own universes.
My first was a bluebottle, proudly captured beneath a plastic container as it wandered on our kitchen sink. Its coat was a gleaming swirl of green-purple-blue, a whole galaxy alive between those tiny wings. For a day it was mine. Mine in a way no other possession was.
But by morning, i was told to let it go or it would die: tiny holes punctured on the plastic lid were simply not enough. Despite (or because) of my fierce and determined love, it was suffocating. That morning i sobbed by the window sill as i watched the bluebottle stretched to its full span and take off into sun.
I sobbed and decided my little heart could not possibly hold a loss greater than this. Years later, i would again choose to lose someone i loved to watch has wings open against the morning light, and realize that was the easiest pain to bear.
The loss that broke the world as i knew it; where everyone is as they should be, but with everything changed. When i understood that death can be willed.
The loss not of a person but of a place, of dislocation and homesickness.
The loss of one vulnerable and fully dependent, in my arms, gone from warm to limp. A loss i had the power to stop but did not.
The loss of one alive but away – a physical loss, a speechless loss, a loss of utter absence. Of something always there – so much always there that i’ve never turned around to check, and now it’s gone.
But through it all i remember that glint of indigo against sunlight. The moment when my tear-streaked seven year old self vaguely understood: this meant hope in a universe that wasn’t mine. Hope that was beyond me, but no less meant for me.
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a lifetime of memories with you
before i forget
– hosting st nick’s national day ceremony with you. singing badly in front of 10 cohorts of girls.
– the days i went down my block every morning, waiting for you to come by – that blur morning face. that few minutes we have together before our ride pulled up.
– the days of maran, us mugging math together, giving each other side glances at maran’s unintended innuendos.
– the days in primary school we were collectively punished by chan ah moy. (taking turns to sit on the bin.)
– the days you had brownie after school and we’d prank you while you were flag-raising.
– when we had table tennis together, and we would think up games to play. making up ridiculous stories about sumos being so fat they collected sweat in pools of fats. your story about the indian man who went for a tan and became fair. our one line each poems together.
– math. teaching each other how to draw models.
– calling each other to ask about homework, but ending up chatting.
– our communication book. upgrading from passing notes in class we passed a book around to record our conversations.
– writing and illustrating stories together. our first one was about a man. with a heart which spilled out. tumbling down a hill. in a single-lined exercise book. we never finished that one. our second, a love story, written on foolscap and neatly filed.
– R U Chicken board game. when we invented a game of truth and dare translated to a board game and won that award. when we screamed and cheered when we won.
…
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resolutions 2.0
It is our 1st anniversary today and i don’t think you remember.
christmas, new year’s eve, my birthday, it has so far been disappointing. so i have prepared myself in advance, pep-talked myself into believing that i don’t mind if you forgot – that i want you to forget. So that my gift of labor to you is all the more precious in its guilt-inducing asymmetry, because i’m messed up like that. i hold guilt like power.
all the preparation, but last night i woke up at 4am and couldn’t go back to sleep. i cried because i knew you’ve forgotten, before the day’s begun. i cried because i couldn’t make myself not care.
but this is self-destructive, i’ve decided that year 2 with you will be defined by these resolutions:
I won’t put you as the center of my life anymore, the disparity is too huge. You obviously care for me, but the positioning of you and me in each other’s universes is too disparate.
- I won’t plan to spend every spare moment i have (off-days, free nights) with you. In fact, i will stop asking you whether we can study together (unless i really need/want to).
- I will choose to spend time with friends/family if given the choice, over you. I will.
- I won’t agree to every thing you propose, if i don’t feel like it. If i’m sleepy, tired, busy, have other things to do – i will say no
QING, please. Come back to these rules you’ve set yourself, alright?
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Solitude is bliss
The feelings i love and hate most are curiously intertwined, a fact i only realized today.
On one hand, i love feeling like i’m the only one in the world. On the other, there is a deep fear of being the only one left in the world.
From the time i started making my way to school every morning, i’ve come to savor those moments alone – before anyone in the house is awake, when i have the place and air and time all to myself. Everything is quiet, liberating, my own.
Solitary walks are another one of my indulgences. I’ve done two, three hour walks around neighborhoods just to be by myself for awhile. Sometimes i sing my lungs out at the roaring traffic.
One of the closest times i’ve gotten to complete solitude was recently, in Taiwan. While trekking Yang Ming Shan, there were stretches where i could see neither what was ahead nor behind me. As if my world consisted of the immediate steps i was on and my furiously beating heart. All else was fog. I’ve never felt so alive.
I knew i found my special someone when i wanted to – and could – share this solitude with him. Rather than feeling the urge to catch a breath somewhere alone, i feel a peace that never suffocates. I knew that when the feeling of delicate solitude extended and encompassed HS, whenever we stayed out late into the night, the streets a ghost town, the air crisp from un-use.
“Don’t you feel like we’re in a video game where everyone else are NPCs and only we’re real?”
Sometimes it’s really just us. The city streets turned upside down with every last human shaken off its tarmac. Only Lana Del Ray’s deep, reverberating beats in our side of the one earphone we were sharing. My nose was cool with midnight condensation and my brain fuzzy with near sleep, but i didn’t want this shared solitude to end.
On the other end of the spectrum –
but also what i suspect to be just the flip side of a mobius strip –
is that utter loneliness i feel in my insomniac nights. When every single person, one by one, drops off into a peaceful sleep. When I’m the only one left awake, my mind buzzing like a singular lost radio-wave shuttling in space without receptors. I scroll through Telegram and count the last seens move further away from my current time. Facebook green dots flitting into gray. “I am so lonely.” I always think then.
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Valentine’s Eve
Are our relationships defined by shared experiences, or by our objective liking for the significant other? Is it possible to tease the two apart?
Here’s a thought experiment:
One day i have an extreme, highly specific case of amnesia. All the memories i have of my S/O are wiped clean, as if he never existed in my life. If we spend some time together, will i fall in love all over again?
Or was the first time i fell in love because of a set of circumstances, happenings, coincidences, that predisposed it?
I want to believe that it’s the former. That i can have amnesia once, twice, more – but in every instance i would fall in love as i did the first time.
Even if we didn’t hit all the highs or weathered shit together, i would love him because he is kind, strong, funny, respectable. I would love him because he’s the one i want to go through the highs and the shit lows with.
Ohey, it’s an hour into Valentine’s Day. An appropriate post for the occasion, for once. Today (yesterday?) caught me in terrible menstrual pain. The late half of the afternoon had me completely incapacitated, curled up fetal-like in bed. I could not stand for more than a minute without feeling bile rising.
Less than an hour later i had menstruheat (it works!), panadol, and a cup of warm water delivered right up to my bed. Thanks HS, although you just spoiled your own market for Vday because no other gesture could be as touching as running several pharmacies to find me pink Panadol.
On this note, sleep i shall. First day of many many that i’ve willingly stayed up this late. My dedication to blog these days is astounding.
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Skincare
Every morning and night, i slather my face in skincare. It has such a therapeutic effect on me.
I’ve always been a moisturizing maniac, but recently got my act together and sketched out a proper skincare plan. Toner, advancer, essence, lotion/night cream. There is something about the consistency, the structure, that appeals to my primal need for order and routine. That and also, good skin.
I’m not the least bit ashamed to admit that i look forward to my twice daily slather-session. You’re also speaking to the person who does lymphatic face massages on public transport all the time, so i may be more prone to face-touching than the average human.
At this point, i’d say that the process of skincare matters more to me than the absolute results.
This reminds me of what i told H just yesterday about my nails.
“I don’t actually care how my nails look. I just enjoy painting them. It’s so therapeutic.”
Is it a coincidence that i find peace in activities of feminine beautification? Is this the part where i discover my psychological well-being is dependent on patriarchal determinants of worth?
I don’t mind it that so much though.
Zen and beautiful are great things to be.
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A bientot
This MAY be the longest i’ve gone without a post. It’s a curious situation. I never thought i’d stop writing on this platform. Through the years it has taken all shapes and forms: a platform for unfiltered rants, updates. Later a place for exposition and lengthy opinion pieces, and more recently still a curation of updates and abstractions. Far from being less valuable to me – this blog has become too much so. When I open up the new post page, it becomes something of a grand undertaking. Frivolity, on-the-go scribbles have taken residence in alternate channels. Sometimes I lament the lack of incentive for me to structure my thoughts more coherently and reflectively, which this place offers me. Other times I’m grateful for the relative privacy and convenience this blog doesn’t offer.
I’d hate to leave things hanging, so this is somewhat of a ‘just in case I don’t come back for a long time, here is why’ post. I may do a round-up on Taiwan, when the time permits. Because hey, working adult and all now!
Till then~!
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Always summer
I woke up in summer to a world thrown in stark relief. A consuming nightmare disguised as a dream. So deep and lulling, it is the only peace I know.
Summer was alive, was of everything bright and real. At times it made me drowsy and in need of the slumber i once knew. Mostly i don’t want it to end. I look down at sunkissed palm and don’t know who i am.
–
Summer is me, vaporizing. Over here summer is eternal.
Q 