for the four of us

for the four of us best friends from those days, the sea would claim a significant site in our teenage memories. often we would take our bicycles and head over just as the morning quiet began to disappear, and the sun rose and whitened the sky. sometimes if we were utterly bored we would collect and ride in the bright noon day, the searing reflections from the waves tempting us to jump through them, which once, twice we really did. then we would sit on the sizzling-hot granite breakwater while our clothes spread out to dry. or we would climb the coconut trees and pick its fruit, competing to be the first to crack the husks. the beach wasnt teeming with people and eateries the way it is now, and its sunsets, with the returning tranquil and the occasional dives of seagulls across the orange clouds, were ineffably beautiful. there was a particular spot that had an abundance of palm trees, and from where we sat, its leaves would frame the flaming expanse of sky with sky and its defiant-appearing crescent partner, descending onto the jutting overland in the distance, before being gently engulfed by it, the dark quietly taking over. what remain of those vivid, blazing images soaked in our dilating irises are now sepia snapshots tinged with nostalgia. all five years we never tired of those trips - perfunctory pilgrimages made almost daily, a ritual of our friendship with the sea. without anyone's realising, the lapping waves and the sandy steppes had partook in our conversations, eavesdropped on our secrets, watched us grow up and apart. if we were to return to the sea now after so many years, we would find ourselves alone, awkward and forlorn with the other three, the once-familiar and cherished living like phantoms in our collective and uttered reminiscences. some years ago, we met there for the last time, after not having done so for some years already, each busy living our post-teenage life of freedom and worry. we didnt plan it to be final, of course, such prophecy absurd. but meteor showers were forecast a few minutes after that midnight and we felt it would be fascinating to lie once more on that familiar slab of uncomfortable granite, relive old dreams and share new ones. then there was one long moment, where out of nothing our chatter fell away, and thought-filled silence hung between us, as if paying a homage and bidding a farewell to all that had gone before, and laying them to rest. what more could we ask, when there would be old dreams to live on and new ones to look for? that last night in front of the whispering sea, we hushed our wishes together, yet, alone, under the silvery shooting stars.

obsess my mind

i contemplate the different futures i could arrive at and before having so much as taken a first step i continually re-write them. the only result thus remains, an unwritten future. not too long ago and for not too long a time i had my life laid out a predictable straight-line. i craved for uncertainty and some riot. now that i am in a thrall of incertitude, i am torn between time past and time future, and from which the paradoxical conditions of torpidity and stasis emerge, hijack, and obsess my mind.

___

'it appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. the material point can hardly be conceived anymore.'

-- albert einstein

'what am i? atoms. what are atoms? empty space and points of light. what is the speed of light? 300,000 kilometres per second. what is a second? that depends where in the universe you set your watch.'

-- jeanette winterson

more books

as if i were subconsciously storing up food for the cold months; but the recent additions in the last two weeks (including a mega spree just now to my shelves were quite conscious choices:

john fante, ask the dust

don paterson, landing light: poems

vladimir nabokov, lectures on literature

helen vendler, coming of age as a poet: milton, keats, eliot, plath

paul auster, brooklyn follies

kazuo ishiguro, the remains of the day

philip larkin, required writing

philip larkin, further requirements: interviews, broadcasts, statements and book reviews

n.k. kleinbaum, dead poets society

t.s. eliot, the waste land and other poems (2nd copy, this with frank kermode intro)

nadine gordimer, get a life (because she nobel laureate and i thyroid cancer patient)

kingsley amis, lucky jim

william faulkner, light in august

martin amis, money

philip roth, the professor of desire

ted hughes, collected poems

david remnick, ed., wonderful town: new york stories from the new yorker

john gardner, the art of fiction

thomas hardy, the mayor of casterbridge

thomas hardy, under the greenwood tree

truman capote, answered prayers

mark batty, about pinter: the playwright and the work

john fletcher, about beckett: the playwright and the work

virginia woolf, mrs dalloway (i couldnt resist getting another copy, this time hardcover)

gertrude stein, three lives & Q.E.D.

sylvia plath, collected poems

mark strand and eavan boland, the making of a poem

david lodge, the art of fiction

jeanette winterson, tanglewreck (for my little cousin)

virginia woolf, the common reader vol. 2

shakespeare, the tempest

jeanette winterson, written on the body (for mrs chan whom i'm meeting on tues)

raymond carver, where i'm calling from

raymond carver, call if you need me: the uncollected fiction and other prose

omg.

i used to think i could control my book purchases. but while reading woolf i had an epiphany (she does have that kinda effect) - that for as long as i read books (i'm addicted i'm obsessed) i'll always find new things and names and directions in them that will lead me to further and more and even more literary touchstones, lighthouses, glittering pearls. at this moment if there's one reason for me to continue living it is quite just so i can continue to ravish these rapturous pages.

you regret only the ones you did not buy

i need one more bookshelf. my repressed and starved soul from ten weeks of juvenilia and atrocious handscrawls on tattered foolscap more or less exploded during the just-ended one-week september holidays.

james fenton, the strength of poetry: oxford lectures

mark strand, the weather of words: poetic invention

john ashbery, selected prose

samuel beckett, 3 novels: murphy; watt; mercier and camier

samuel beckett, waiting for godot

colm toibin, the master

haruki murakami, birthday stories

czeslaw milosz, to begin where i am: selected essays

czelaw milosz, the captive mind

james & elizabeth knowlson, beckett remembering remembering beckett

elie wiesel, night

ralph waldo emerson, essential writings

c.s. lewis, reading the classics with

john fowles, wormholes: essays and occasional writings

harold bloom, the western canon

a.s. byatt, on histories and stories: selected essays

seamus heaney, opened ground: poems 1966-1996

jack kerouac, the subterraneans & pic

terry eagleton, literary theory

anais nin, delta of venus

umberto eco, on literature

john bayley, a memoir of iris murdoch

anatole broyard, kafka was the rage: a greenwich village memoir

paul auster, collected prose

anton chekhov, five plays

boris pasternak, doctor zhivago

wallace stevens, the collected poems

elizabeth bishop, the complete poems 1927-1979

adrienne rich, poetry and prose

mark strand, selected poems

mark strand, dark harbor

ernest hemingway, a moveable feast

hmmmm.

actually having bought them a few at a time over the week it didnt seem numerous. i cannot help it. if i've one last dollar in my pocket it will still be used to finance a book. and i dont have many places to wander on this island so i go to the bookstores. and once i enter bookstores i invariably stumble upon books hitherto undiscovered. my fates with books have always been serendipitous, uncanny, apocryphal.

i stand with jeanette winterson who incants:

if you love books as objects, as totems, as talismans, as doorways, as genii bottles, as godsends, as living things, then you love them widely. this binding, that paper. strange company kept ... the world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.

i didnt buy too many novels this time round, the purchases veering towards the poets and literary essays/criticism (or both: essays of poets). i enjoyed fowles immensely, and am in awe of milosz's intellect, and i'm looking very very forward to ravishing fenton, strand, and ashbery. hemingway was a terrific steal at $1 i chanced upon in the school library. how anyone would want to throw this brand new paperback which would otherwise cost almost $20 is unfathomable and utterly embarrassing. otherwise, of special mention is paul auster's collected prose, which was truly love at first sight. this binding that paper. i love the cover, the texture, and his writings especially those of french poetry and poets inspired deeper interest, and i suspect, opened an eye. also reading alfian's unpublished collection of poetry completed five years ago, the invisible manuscript. it is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, an incandescent manifesto.

i'll end with yet another winterson:

... i have not for a minute regretted it. that is the way with books. you regret only the ones you did not buy.

it's something i've always wanted to do

it's something i've always wanted to do, and now one and a half months into it, having glided through the good days and fought with the bad ones, i am not sure if i am as good as i have always thought myself and made myself out to be. i also cannot but be affected by how they perceive me, judge me, like me. those bad days, like last friday,had been very affecting experiences, hard blows to my esteem. i could be the fiercest, and in turn the most feared, but at the end of the day, if everyone of them thought they'd rather someone else in my place, then i should have failed in this endeavour. and i so badly want them to be nothing but their best.

we who were fluent find life is a foreign language

great writers are artists par excellence. and through the lineage of time and tradition, ancestor worship and inspiration, the ethereal pens of littérateurs, winged by the magical mastery of language, conjure for us mortals invisible cities spiraled like a dream.
___

the man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar. in every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes' palaces, the high priests' temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. this - some say - confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.
-- italo calvino

how is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? travellers at least have a choice. those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. explorers are prepared. but for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. we who were fluent find life is a foreign language.
-- jeanette winterson
___

sylvian love

alf and his sylvian love. strangers striking up conversations, wondering if we were really that old enough to vote; people cheering from across the roads; students requesting photographs; the silver mercedes slowing down to thumbs up; the cab drivers offering discounts. it felt foreign; it felt surreal.

to the boy standing in front of me, clutching a copy of dostoevsky (the brothers karamazov), to the scores of jc students and their excited chatters long after, to all those idealistic young ones who went and gave the air resounding applause and rousing plumes of hope, they re-captured for me, an imagination that i, and perhaps this entire nation, had thought long eviscerated.

for the local media, i only have sheer disgust and contempt at the astounding level of prejudice, unprofessionalism, and mediocrity of coverage and scatological drivel masquerading as 'analysis'. only this time, sparred against a formidable blogosphere, its snivelling, repugnant political motives were ripped bare for all to see. some of those blogs' field reportage, commentaries, insights, *photography*, put theirs to utter shame (and would easily put them out of jobs). this contrast could never be starker. my belief of the mass media now rests on democratic, citizen, journalism, that has exhibited an admirable level of quality and credibility. the abysmal propaganda machine pretending to be newspapers and broadcasts should never, ever, be believed.

bring me to your king

it's an image the national press would do its utmost to obscure (let's all wonder why), where the internet would defiantly grace. it's an image that will be emblematic of a new WP, if not of the general state of opposition in singapore, in the years to come. even if the WP loses hougang, loses in aljunied and elsewhere, loses, this time; this amazing oppositional momentum will likely continue to reverberate long after.

i was there that night with alf and sam, and somehow we'd managed to mouse our way to the front. we were a good hour late, and yet there were still endless throngs of people streaming toward the bright lights. there was a massive jam along the roads because all the vehicles had slowed to a crawl, one side of their windows wound down for a breath of that rare, impassioned air.

that night obliterated my perception of singaporean apathy. the passion and desire - be they deriving from supplicant gratitude or fiery disillusionment - to take charge of, to be interested in, one's country's political trajectories, exist - you create it; you search it out; you keep shoulders with the people, whoever they may be, whichever party they are, who have offered to lay your convictions upon their rightful kingdoms. but you cannot be apathetic, apolitical - because you cannot afford it. because a nation of sheep begets a government of wolves. that night was heartening, it was galvanising, i got my pristine-white, red-and-blue-striped converse shoes muddied, and i had never felt more singaporean in my entire life.

april time past and time future

of all my notebooks, my favourite is the hard-cover, unlined, black-cloth-bound from Borders. they disappeared from the shelves after the christmas i bought it, and i spotted them again last saturday - i shall buy ten and use one a year. it's very sturdy and the size of a novel, i carry it wherever i go and scribble everything inside, from observations and ruminations and to-do lists and phone numbers to book titles and their call numbers. short of losing them on the streets or in a fire, they're more reliable than blogs. i look forward to reminiscing these youthful times decades on, and they're intimate mementos that i can leave to my loved ones when i die. its this reason i always wished my grandparents even parents kept journals - i know nothing about them and their lives. (aside: why are moleskine notebooks so expensive? they're like diors of notebooks sans spring/summer-autumn/winter transmorgifixions.)

one innocent afternoon a hundred years from now, a distant great-grand-nephew of mine, suffering utterly from the ennui of his school vacation (hopefully he's a student of history, philosophy and english literature) would stumble upon my pile of essays and journals and other assorted letters in an obscure storeroom of his granddad's house, and be curious enough to reconstruct my life. stoked by his fecund imagination and whatever little, incomplete details he could glean, a story - never mind it wouldnt be wholly factual - would come into being, that could only become possible from the both of us colliding fatefully along the plane of transcending time.

背影是真的人是假的没甚麽执着
一百年前你不是你我不是我
悲哀是真的泪是假的本来没因果
一百年後没有你也没有我

there is intelligence and there is intelligence

phillip and i had affixed yesterday evening for a phone conversation regarding my research topic. in a last-minute scramble and flipping through his books and articles, i couldnt help but be impressed by his elegant prose and august erudition; a regretfully dying breed in today's publish-or-perish MacUnis. speaking to him work-proper, after these years, revealed (and reminded) how little i know, so much i was half-afraid he'd get bored with me and think me unworthy and subsequently and politely decline to supervise.

there is always this debate between art and utility, although which being the superior entity is obvious. an analogous example/argument could be that flair presupposes technique. some write all technique and little or no flair; some write bereft of both, what remains being wanton, spineless masturbation; and the rare one glides on incendiary sparks of both. while intelligence underpins technique, talent underpins flair. of intelligence, it is harder to think you stupid (not impossible obviously, though mostly are facetious in delivery), than it is to think you unintelligent. the difficulty of quantifying intelligence has often been flagged by the marginalised as both a defence and a justification... of their own fatuity. the dodginess of yardsticks true to an extent, it is nonetheless unconvincing. you need not descend to specificities to gather one is better than the other. it is similarly unnecessary to resort to (and sometimes should not be) referring to the number of academic accolades amassed - or for that matter, how much knowledge you possess. what would be more expedient a method, would be to excavate how your mind process information - in speed, in depth, and in scope. while intelligence might be protean in nature, the potentiality of it, though harder to detect, is ironically a surer indication. an example might be how you need not write intelligent matters to exhibit and prove it. be the output serious or facile, intellectual or sentient, heightened or popular, exalted or every-day, the thought-processes behind these, of quality or otherwise, are the determinants and constants. by and large however, a good mind will show itself unexpectedly and effortlessly; but if you have nothing, then nothing will show other than torturous tripe. it is quite idiotic to be embarrassed by your cerebral lack - though the tendency to, in a society eager to show off and to impress, is compelling - for only from an acknowledgement of this deficit is where knowledge, with its infinite supply and possibilities, can and shall come. and as it were, the antitheses of intelligence are neither ignorance nor stupidity - they are indignance, petulance, and obstinacy.

impoverished students . struggling writers . dishevelled poets

the cold and grey of this morning were unexpected, this being april. it reminded me very much of those shivering and wet melbourne mornings i used to trot through to get to class, snug in my trusty levis and woollen jumper, invigorated by the wintry air. i had lived behind lygon street, the italian alcove famous for its cafes and restaurants. very few things change at lygon, though the crass and the vulgar (e.g. starbucks) have lately begun their invasion. but most of the cafes that had sprouted along it after the war still stands, run by the same quibbling italian families dashing around with pasta and pizza and shots of expresso. and then of course, there are the students and artists - keeping alive the spirits of generations of impoverished melbourne university students, ex-students, faux-students, angry-students, refuse-to-graduate students, struggling writers, dishevelled poets, apprentice philosophers. all who have, over the decades, indelibly left their artistic and intellectual marks - along the sidewalks, by the shopwindows, in the coffee cups. one could almost still hear echoes of their debates, conversations, commiserations. echoes, because like the invasion of fastfood and fastcoffee, so too the harlequin yuppies have begun their intrusions. but it is of course, always easy to pick out these philistine poseurs. the genuine lygon intelligentsia and literati are somehow invariably unkempt and beggared - there they would sit, swigging strong coffee, scribbling into unintelligible notebooks, peering furrowed brows into tattered copies of camus, kerouac and kafka, exhaling cigarette smoke and discarded thoughts, cogitating with the auburn evening as it tanned into the night.

why should i be a corporate fuckwit?

sometime last year when i had this ascetic epiphany was also when this soulless country, with its obscene applause for relentless material acquisitions and standing ovations of skyscrapers do not impress me anymore. given a choice i'd live and work in academia the rest of my life. there is nowhere else i can obtain the intellectual stimulation i crave, and the lofty promises of the vacuous, avaricious world outside have ceased to arouse me. why do i want to be reduced to a pathetic cog in that machinery forever whining about unreasonable bosses, retarded colleagues, and dead-end jobs, where nobody thinks they're ever paid enough yet would never admit to their own ineptitude? why do i want to stuff myself in a claustrophobic panopticon of an office never seeing sunlight and slogging endlessly for yet another paycheque only so i can lust after the next ephemeral bourgeois fandangle, when i can take daily strolls through intellectual bohemia ruminating politics and philosophy, reading the masterpieces of literature, and penning treatises that would always be my name? perhaps i wont be as productive or wealthy as you, but why should i want to be? how many nonsensical self-help books do i have to read and next-door-lims to compare before my esteem and existence can be validated? how many ipods, nokias, powerbooks, volkswagens and condominiums do i need to be happy in this life? i cant take with me any of these when i die and i would rather people remember me as someone who contemplated the world and life, than as someone who could only afford prada and a car.

besotted with form-lit for some time now

besotted with form-lit for some time now, and have attributed it to simply the beauty of elegant, heightened prose itself. winterson, woolf, d.h. lawrence, who made me forget this dull world breathed. then there were the few books due to be returned tomorrow - essays by georges perec, susan sontag, roland barthes - all whom i havent properly sat down to keep company. and this line from barthes's writing degree zero glowed (from the chapter "is there any poetic writing?"): "the word shines forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content, grammar is bereft of its purpose, it becomes prosody and is no longer anything but an inflexion which lasts only to present the word." it was a remarkable sentence! barthes literally, literarily, conjured the elements he was arguing about - the poetic and prosodic. and barthes was a translation! idea-lit worked after all - it unravelled my mind and its ruminations and set free the fishes of ideas to twirl in my head. i realised my obsession with form-lit was cathexis - that everyday for the last few years i had been inundated, harrassed, bombarded by the accoutrements of academia - the newest articles, the hottest books, the latest op-eds, the official pronouncement of american policy of five minutes ago, the death toll of this bombing, the political ramifications of that tsunami, the eventual analyses to offer, the papers to write, the deadlines to submit, the inevitable criticisms - i love my work but the lethality of their deadening qualities manifested themselves in my subconscious evacuation, from the irrepressible hecklings of politics at day to the wine and waterfall world of literature at night. this is also why i love the night and wish day would never dawn again.
___

england ... throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. what did it mean? for what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

-- e.m. forster, howard's end

how not to be awed by his magisterial paean to his beloved isles!

IS MAKING ME VERY PHYSICALLY ILL

THE AVARICE THE MEDIOCRITY THE HACKNEYED ASPIRATIONS AND CLICHED EXISTENCE ALL POINTING TO A HELLHOLE PLATITUDE PRETENDING TO BE A COUNTRY IS MAKING ME VERY PHYSICALLY ILL.

what kinds of forevers are we looking for

would we not love knowing it would end, or would we love nevertheless? do we, love nevertheless? the love could end, but is it pronounced "death"? the dead lives on; we keep them alive. that's what make doomed lovers immortal. lancelot and guinvere, tristan and isolde, romeo and juliet; fallen souls with burning hearts. but why do we keep them alive; what was that incandescent moment that tarried between the two hopeless flames like - fallen souls of burning hearts - before they immolated, fire into fire, swirling ash flakes into shimmery dust motes, into fairytale tragedies snowing eternally in our minds. was it not that furnace of a moment of theirs, that we searched a lifetime on frozen lakes to bear? and yet we love not, knowing it would end. so what kinds of forevers are we looking for; the brief yet true and eternal, or the living long dead?

speak, memory

Through the window of that index
Climbs a rose
And sometimes a gentle wind ex
Ponto blows.

-- vladimir nabokov

fraudulent walls

when the cool evening air felt so fresh and light as it never had been for a long while, i wondered if those longstanding, gradually-built-up barricades and walls had been erected for nothing. but they had to have served a purpose - that they existed in the first place could not be for nothing. or was it only in this particular presence it was but defenceless? walls protect - not only those who set them up but also those kept out. but after getting so acclimatised within these reassuring confines, a reality of its own kind surfaced, fortifying itself while slowly nudging out the original reality - the real-er one. this was one such occasion this vaporous, formless breath of fresh air - yours - seeping through these dividers of realities with such ease and candour shattered that dichotomy and struck a tremor into the heart of these confines, tearing down not just barricades and fences and walls but also realities and false securities and that nerve-becalming confidence; enacting instead an invisible mirror compelling me to confront fears and false-confidences in their nonchalant faces. this was one such occasion i fervidly wished you would be walled away from this me.

65

tis phil's birthday (he turned 65!), and i had phoned him with my wishes. apart from the few letters and emails, it's the first time we spoke since i left. my ears could not but ripple to his voice, with all its old-world genteel charm that could only bespoken by a kindly, congenial don. one of my most vivid images was of bumping into him one rainy and grey morning on my way to class, and he off somewhere, wrapped in a black aquascutum trenchcoat and wing-tipped oxfords, a black silver-handled, silver-tipped umbrella swinging by his fingers, cutting a very elegant, very patrician figure. his gently wrinkled face broke into a wide smile when he saw me, and asked how i was, tilting a little his whitely-mopped head. this was to be a recurrent gesture of his, reserved for any student who passed his way who said hello. and it was this little nippin of his time off his footsteps wherever they were heading no matter how hasty, that endeared him to us, quivering voice and all.

...loved; life; London; this moment of June

i had been renting dvds that, unintentionally, turned out to be rather british, like the english patient, being julia, closer, pride and prejudice. it was the last that got me pulling out austen's trope where i had left off a year ago and finished up the final bits. and because of that i'm very inspired to pick up dickens again. ahhh. past one week saw me on a novel rampage, finishing up in earnest winterson's oranges, the powerbook, rereading desultory bits of the passion and written on the body and reread her art objects in its entirety. when my mind's more settled i'll tackle art and lies. i tried reading it a month ago and i just couldnt get into it. also finished (finally) mrs dalloway in rather quick fashion, simultaneously reading her diaries. pulled out nabokov's lolita and started on it today - a most funny, sardonic book i must say - i think i'm gonna enjoy this one.

had browsed at kino earlier far longer than expected, lately zooming into (or starting from) 'W' for you-know-whos, and working my way down the alphabets. i went back to naipaul and after a long spell of wispy winterson; his lean, exacting and introspective prose (not to say ms winterson arent these, but she's different) offered ambivalent sentiments. i'm not so much into plots as themes now; in fact i think novels should abandon plots totally and simply focus on telling stories. it sounds contradictory but it isnt - stories and plots overlap but are not the same things. use language to tell a story, or use stories to elevate language? maybe it depends on which you prefer or privilege so it neednt be so stark but i am beginning to believe the obsession with 'plots' submerge both stories and language. if a story is internally coherent a plot-of-sorts will naturally follow. so its no wonder i'm not a fan of detective novels. where's the joy of reading about a murder if you already know one is going to happen? anyway, i should like to avail myself to more victorian and early 20th century works - somehow i never tire of the former, while the latter ones are a recently-acquired predilection.

the cafes in singapore are going mad. one has too much space indoors and too few tables, the rest are blasting music till kingdoms come. it's bad business sense and bad for my state of mind. so i wrote a note and before leaving, stuck it onto the coffee mug: please do select appropriate music and turn them down to suitable levels conducive for a confined place like this, so that the baristas would then have no need to compete with it and the expresso machines and shout atop their lungs above the din, making being in this establishment unpleasant, even intolerable. ohhhhhh yes i am allergic to noise.

and i loved mrs dalloway - i love virginia woolf:

.... they love life. in people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

listen to her rhythm! poetic, dolce, and light; and the alliterative decrescendo - ...loved; life; London; this moment of June. it was vivaldi cascading on violins of words.

whose stories; and who tells them?

this is a world of stories, without which it is not a real world. a world without dreams and fantasies and miracles, is not the real world. you do not have to will them to life, let them remain sapphire steeples and emerald spires, edifices in your imaginations as alive as the thousand expirations in one relucent night. one day though, they might just awake stone-hard, precious-glittering, testaments of once-upon-an-imagination. the least you can do is not demolish... - because the ensuing rubris will be an inverse tribute to their reality. there is a world from which atlases and maps are drawn - inadequate, abstract, but of course, real. we have forgotten that the world's first Atlas tumbled out from a story: passionately beheld in the grecian heart, carrying this weight of the world, and from which many other stories tumbled forth. so authentic these fables, cloud-high skyscrapers and invisible (global) economies graze on it. there is another world that resides in the heart - diminutive, frivolous, and naturally, unreal. but it is truer than anything in this world. it has always been. does it matter whose stories and who tells them, as long as there are stories to be told?

falling nights

1 dec 04.

"You seem rather quiet..."

What did you expect me to say? I didn't want to (and couldn't) peer aimlessly into your mind. I'd rather you let me know how you feel, what you think, and how you intend to... With you i feel defenceless and weak. I cannot bring myself to indulge in mind games and flirtatious banter. Because you remind me of a past. You remind me of a forgotten stab-wound whose scars have almost healed. Would you remember your promise to have a meal with me over the weekend?

but to what are they connected?

when i left ... i thought i was running away. running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. i thought i might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. and then i saw that running away was a running towards. an effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way. but what good are destinations without journeys? i did not wander into this quiet village following a trail of norms and conventions and easy acceptance. truer was the opposite. for better or for worse, without quite knowing what next would come, it was one of countenancing people's thoughtless doubts, defying their flippant assumptions, defacing and obliterating their timorous condescensions. it was one of proving myself and showing them wrong. i do not know what other villages there are, but i keep the faith what has, will still; that hopefully there would arrive a hamlet, where the coin is not money but emotion, where i shall relieve my every and all, and live with just ink on my hands and sunlight at my feet. there are people who tell me that i am cut off but to what are they connected?
___

realities nonetheless

the raindrops generously plattered onto the moving window panes, spraying mercurial lines that cracked and jagged, windblown diagonal, before blurring away as if a life went spent; many lives spent; in its place new splatters. i had philip glass in my ears, and it lifted but calmed my spirits, so much my mind became pellucid. i saw us in the car, me looking out to the flashing rows of trees, lampposts, the more reluctant buildings. and i thought how you could become a lover that never was; i was sure you had, at some points in time shared this exact sentiment; how time and distance apart, we extracted the same memories and reconstructed similar fantasies, that then became realities of sorts, even if fragile and ephemeral; but realities nonetheless.

p.s. i've always been ambivalent about the outside world this window presents. but in time to come i think i'll start missing those hours and days and nights sitting by this window, looking, contemplating, imagining; the numbness as well as the inspirations; the quiet time with myself.

s in town

when an intellectual firebrand that's simone flies in and hooks up for coffee three consecutive days, challenging conversations and the deconstruction of current trends are as inevitable as yet another drivel. but when today, the coffee-table got surrounded by simone, me, drew, and edison, it was the bohemia that i had missed so much, enacted, if only barely, all over again. ed had casually remarked that singapore's an intellectual deadpan, i thought him generous. because singapore's wasnt even about dispassion, apathy - it was pathos and passion for all the wrong things; because the intelligent has got conflated and confused with the (absent) intellectual, and the term 'scholarship' has become a catachresis. ashis couldnt be more prescient when he said, "knowledge without ethics is not so much bad ethics as inferior knowledge." so it was too, for truth, for passion. when i held my coffeecup and felt its warmth, when i closed my eyes and stretched my ears, snatching at those brilliant bursts of remonstrations all in the spirit of debate, three years ago seemed there and then.

because you're winged yet cant fly and every step an epitaph

because i doubt, i question, i interrogate every word you say; because it's an opening question it's not a final judgement; because i satirise i criticise i parody, and can laugh at this stupid world and 'tis moronic me. because i refuse to conform to a people who has nothing, but trite conventions and puerile expectations; because you yearn for an apartment, only to worry about having just an apartment; because when your car's scrapped and four walls dilapidate, you've nothing more to flaunt and think you're no more a man; because i'm not keen in the latest tiniest phone nor the newest mall of the same; because i'm indignant i'm adamant - there's more than just one way to live a good life, one money cannot buy. because you accuse me of arrogance but not of your colloquial condescensions. because i care, i feel, this people this life - pity its deadening sensibilities; because your truisms masquerading as truths are tiresome and misguided, not to mention dangerous; because your aphorisms are exhausted, and silence should tend to them. because we're winged, and because there're territories only imaginations can conquer; because what will be might not be; i refuse the quotidian and mediocre; because an integrity is at stake that's not begging for your dictate; because i cannot condescend but to climb, if i want extraordinary views; because you're winged yet cant fly, and every step an epitaph; because living is a struggle and against its daily deaths i refuse, to submit, to lie, to die.

like the faraway pegasus in his unhurried flight

when i found myself to you and heard i said - give me your memories to protect it, hand me your fears to cage it up, pour me your sorrows to halt your tears, i will hold you for as long as you want, and leave you as soon as you wish - i clothed myself in zodiac leo and vowed beneath its borrowed sun. gallant words from the blinding rays, bloomed a mirage of me king to your flesh. a few victories and invincible i think myself. but it was you - who drew these words from my throat like a sword from its sheath, and the sword was yours to wield. i gave my heart in all its inferno but all you came for was one last night. the kingdom that was you - my crown and glory rendered an aubade gallipoli. armoured in these weary wounds, bereft and afraid, i heard i said - sleep be my cavalier night, and yesterday will come at last.
___

why the hurry; the stars are above, nailed into every faithful night; the rain will fall when cotton clouds spill, and blossom on grounds like ricecrops on soil; and the sun will, when tomorrow comes, tendril and spray. why rustle this comforting rhythm. come and sit by me; sit by the chimerics, can you see. listen to its breathless secrets as you breathe into mine. reach through my eyes and touch my heart and knead every thought of mine. listen to my secrets, every pulsebeat every tremble every sprinkled thought. let time ride over the shimmering sky, like the faraway pegasus in his unhurried flight. come sit by me, and hear the stardust sing.

january and you

i thought of you when it rained yesterday evening. it came sudden and unexpected, just as how you had first appeared. and like the plenty that only hindsight sees, the beauty of that moment escaped me then. rainfall, yesterdays, evenings, you. embodiments of romance and dreams in my reach, what more could i have asked for. what more should i, apart from perhaps, for ever? why, for treasuring the moment of course. cliches. that's one thing you have taught and taught me well, why these cheap words are to be fiercely avoided like spurned raging lovers. the rejected do nothing but harm. but contrary to what you believe, cliches are not the trouble-makers - it's their users. cant you see, those instigators - no - vandals defacing with abandon the hallowed, wizened words of yore, all for a desperate minute of plagiarised pride and fame (so they think), all because they can. slowly, our lines blurred - guide-traveller, mentor-pupil, heart-soul - lovers. i ventured to touch your soft white hands, and you held on to my laboured, trembling ones. but that adventure did not smoothen my doubts. i dont know of what; of the unknown - can you see this irony? but we couldnt resist one more cliche, tempting fate - we'll see, let time decide. i could not tell whether you whispered out of conviction or resignation. it was blind faith in life's hopeful little destinies, but what could we do really, but to await the Grand Dame Time and Her Ticking Hands show us what will be will be? i dont know if Time wears a watch, perhaps she has no need for it. watches and ticking seconds are man's invention, only mere mortals like us device such mechanics to interpret this universe and its invisible wheels; not unlike how the myriad of gods man conceived since time immemorial have always been what man is not and can never be, isnt it? blind faith in us as man have in their gods. but dont let hubris get to me, susceptible though i am, a few victories and i think myself invincible. fallen men and broken hearts invariably surrender themselves to melodious paeans of time and god and its ever-grace. i'll return to thanking life's little mercies. like meeting you. like thinking of when we first met: i had looked at you from afar, and thought i, only i, was the secretly-admiring voyeur.

no, you later said, i was but a fish in the tank.

when the seconds wash us by
to the next years of this time
will we revive our raucous laughter
from this second night of twelvetide?

from the passion

we sang our strongest voices and the warmth and nearness of other people thawed my unbeliever's heart and i too saw god through the frost. the plain windows were trellised with frost and the stone floor that received our knees had the coldness of the grave. the oldest were dignified with smiling faces and the children, some of whom were so poor that they kept their hands warm in bandages, grew angel hair.

the queen of heaven looked down.

from the church came the roar of the last hymn. what gave them this joy? what made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better? you play, you win, you play, you lose. you play. it's playing that's irresistible. dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value ... does it matter whom you lose to, if you lose?

one has already drowned, but what is one death in the midst of so much life?

-- winterson

i cannot effuse enough but winterson's an english sorceress and her pen a dazzling magic wand.

trust me. i'm telling you stories.

vanished in an instant

i was walking through the aisles at borders, immersed in my own world, when i heard a gentle and soft voice call my name. it was eve. that moment her face registered on me and i realised how ravishing she was, the thousands of books, the shelves, the people, the entire bookshop vanished in an instant with a woosh, leaving us and our connected gazes, lingering in this strange radiant world.

i guess i will talk to you sometime soon

i do miss u j, and hope you are well. haakon says hello too :) bye
___

it's hard to imagine we were classmates until only recently, because reading what she wrote made me feel as though we were reminiscing some shared childhood absconded. and reading it groggy this morning sure made me want to crawl back to bed and snuggle under a quilt of memories.

pure as a pain of ice

whenever the periodic silence settled, she would twitch her head and blink her eyes - child-like - that would behold me in such earnest. was she silently beseeching me to speak, to ward off and protect her from that inaudible, invading noise, or was she pleading for that phosphorescent quiet to still, i could not know. then, she would close her eyes and give her head a little violent shake. to sober me from reality, she said. and that was what she repeatedly did, to keep pulling herself away from the strokings of her own enthralling, but abysmal sub-conscious. to keep pulling herself away from the blinding, numbing, darkness.

it like what plath said -- floating through the air in my soul-shiftpure as a pane of ice. it's a gift.

so close

it is like getting into a vehicle that has a driver and a pre-announced destination - route even - and that is the reason why both the vehicle and the driver are there, and that you confidently climbed into it, in the first instance. you thought you knew. but when the ramble begins and quite suddenly the road appears you realise there's no other way but to go on along. the sun goes up, the heat beats down, discomfort sets in. the road too, starts to misbehave - it becomes uneven, rocky, and bends at the strangest of places, at times so close to that other side you could brush past it with your nosetip and drink in its soft, pastel fragrance. the peek you stole of this tantalising other-world for that half-second, now turned into a precious slice of memory that seems would escape the moment you stop thinking about it, constrains and tempts and vexes your senses no end. you wish for this to stop so normality of mind can return and when it does as it invariably, eventually will, you long so much for it again because that is the few snatches of time when you truly did not know a worry for a while.

duel against the rain

rain, light initially and grew heavy, fell for the longest time yesterday. entranced by the millions of silver blades piercing into my view and onto the asphalt through the huge window panes, i pounded on the treadmill with extra might, racing the rain to the ground, mocking those dying, vanishing millions - its death toll doubling every milli-second - as i emerged victor, again, again, and again. a survivor one in a million. my heavy gasps, drenching, dripping sweat, and a raging heart that fiercely threatened to shatter my ribs were like a trebled victoria cross deliciously decorated on the smiling curl of my lips; the sweet, wet aftertaste of conquest, resting on the lofty tip of my tongue.

i relished the glistening swordplay in my mind for a while afterwards; a duel against rain - but can it be won, ever? or was i merely deceiving myself.

the games we whimsically play.

stubborn raindrops in september are like merrily bewining amidst wounded, desperate soldiers in unthinkable pain and anguish, tightly clinging on for their dear souls, wondering what it would have been if their breaths really expired, wondering why they had come here so arduous and far, only to be thrusted there evanishing, praying for deliverance. and from what - life, or death? but we know, that they wouldve been better off departed. at least a tranquil smile could nestle, finally and to eternity, on those wretched, wrecked lives withdrawn.

the wars we frivolously wage.

when soldiers finally lie down, knowing they wont get up again, most of them smile. theres a comfort in falling asleep in the snow.

ks to columbia

20 august 05. i went up to the departure hall, found an empty seat, and sent her a message. it occurred to me that i should maybe write something for her, so i started on my notepad: "my dear baby:" ... then she called, saying she was having dinner at the other terminal, and asked me to join her. i said i would, even though i was half-unsure, but continued writing anyway. i cannot remember the details - i'm not a very details person - but i said it was very difficult to imagine how we had come through the past thirteen years, through the many highs and lows - with and without each other, but always with us in our minds. i couldnt be wrong on this one. the amazing, crisp anecdotes she related, that even i had forgotten, was testimony to how far back we traced and how much our lives had resided in each other's. and there were things i didnt know until for a long time afterwards. like how my mum called her and asked if she would like to marry me. like how the same mother complained to c over the phone that she had the nerves to bring her boyfriend (and who was not to be me) to this same mother's house. how i could tear at her ebullient narratives. three years ago she was at this same spot sending me off, and we bade farewell with as much certainty that we would see each other again, certain that when i returned there would be even more stories to regale - and indeed there were; and where we were now would be where we would be in 3 years' time - only then, with even more stories of our lives, with and without each other, to tell, to add to a shared lifetime of friendship that i'm sure would survive the both of us long after we depart, be it in our diaries, in the stories we tell our friends, in the footprints that would have long disappeared but nonetheless would indelibly remain in a happy soul, or an aggrieved heart, in an annonymous consciousness, somewhere. i didnt mean to sign off with a heavy heart and so deliberately pared down the emotions. but re-reading it just now i thought what i felt in me had spilt and splashed on their own onto the page that was totally removed from those black-inked cursive scribbles that purported to represent them. i could only hope that she would not read it the same way i had.

it was after she crossed the gates into the other side, when i entered the toilet and stood at the urinal, that the depressing, heavy overhang let loose its weight as i released my pee. i felt as if i was going to be standing there for hours on end, because that depressing, heavy feeling didnt seem to want to go away anytime soon. when i was finally relieved and went out, a kind of loneliness i had never felt before in my entire life sank in, sliding into my marrows, and i could just feel it snuggling comfortably in those marrow-nooks, stretching out cosily, languidly smiling to the pallid world outside, to the part of me that had abdicated with her.

Here we are all, by day; by night we're hurled

By dreams, each one, into a several world.

-- Robert Herrick

her tristan her isolde

you drank too, and fell to the floor; and i went to catch you and hold you as the men dropped anchor and the ship lurched.

you were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'tristan.'

i answered you: 'isolde.'

isolde. the world became a word. -- winterson

back to where i never was

so much shared in an alacritous span of time, our most veracious thoughts, only that we have never heard our own voices, and i mean the real ones, never heard them speak to each other at all. amid this epileptic war dance and shadow-play we got lost in this heady smokescreen our conversations and their images conjured, and wandered so astray we lost each other as well as ourselves among the incessant chatter of sounds. it must be time to find our way back, because it will have to occur sooner or later, and better it be sooner, get this whole suspending plot over, and get on with what's out awaiting. but this time, by ourselves, separately, without perfidious words accompanying us, without those glib chicanery. it makes for lesser indulgences, pretense, and duress. so i shall leave you alone, and in so doing, hopefully leave myself alone too, where i can then start finding my way back, to where i never was.

whose god is dead?

there was a brief period earlier on when all my smses, msn messages, and emails went unanswered. it was quite a surreal moment because more than once i wondered if i really existed - in the existential and not petulant sense. it's somehow akin to when you stare at a word: any common word like 'watch', or 'phone', or 'rag' so long and hard, that the word becomes mere letters, the quintessence of it fuzzy before your eyes, and you are abruptly unable to pronounce it; and indeed you start to wonder if you had even been acquainted with it before.

marxist luddite

hello mrs c.,

how've you been doing? two months into my job and i'm convinced of my incompatibility with full-time work. the mind and body simply refuse to adhere to the disciplines of regular working hours (how ridiculous, this artificial constraint), professional rules, norms, and practices (socialising into corporatism's evil agendas), and of course, the various totalitarian accoutrements like the boss, the damn deadlines, and such onerous things like job-tasks. argh. it seems a contradiction that i love my job nature, but i abhor having to work. maybe in the general scheme of things i am just rebellious; i dont know for sure yet, though past experience seems to confirm this streak - and maybe you can tell me, given your traumatic experience with my mischevious past. i seem to have an instinctive resistance toward any forms of authority. another aspect is probably physiological - but once again, i cannot be sure and perhaps might need professional opinion - my predilection for doing work at night (or study, as i used to) essentially means i kinda switch off in the day. no problems with that apart from the obvious fact that i am expected to be in the office for a good part of daylight, daily, from now till i resign (or get fired, whichever comes first haah). and being around and about in this panopticon of an office also means that i have to socialise and make small-talk. i like people, i really do, though once again these days i'm not very sure, for recent developments seems to detect in me strains of misanthropy - that is on top of my pre-existing misogyny (sorry mrs chan no offence meant, i make exceptions for those who deserve it and you clearly do hahaha). this, no thanks to my increasing dislike for things capitalist, technological, and modern. that other day i was strolling down orchard road and i couldnt stop sneering at those monstrous buildings adorned with cartier and chanel heraldry (beautiful people included). someone gotta save me before i really and truly become a marxist luddite, which in singapore's context effectively confers (or condemns) me persona non grata - or worse, living under that holy thing called detention-without-trial [till-god-knows-when]. you know i'm just a normal citizen who happens to be the quiet sort; rather curl up with a cup of coffee and a good book and to hell with the rest of the world than to curl my tongue and go OH DEARRRRRRRRRIE HOW ARRRRRRRRE YOUUUUUUUUU!!! and planting fake smiles along the way. urgh. i disgust at that phoney scene. but well, things happen, and i happen to live in that kind of phoney world right now.

me.

these nittygritty bites of memories

jin would have turned 17 yesterday. the moment i remembered it was reminiscent of how i was similarly reminded of it 2 years ago. i was holidaying on santorini (or was it naxos already) and quite urgently needed her help back in singapore, so i entered an internet cafe and caught her on icq. then having remembered that her birthday was coming, i asked her if she'd like something. it was only much later, when i read her blog, that she was so surprised and delighted that i had asked that she wrote, "wah, my big brother leh" to end that entry. pity that the first time i asked was also my last. i dont wish to be unnecessarily maudlin here and now but in a way i'm glad i've written this down because honestly, i dont think i'd still remember these nittygritty bites of memories come a few more years.

p.s. ks was so thrilled with the ferragamo bag we gave her she was on the verge of violent tearing. that look on her face was just priceless.

one yesterday too many

and then i received my master's degree yesterday. almost forgot about it; it was such a mechanistic non-event that it did not feel like i was receiving something so dear as a testamur. and it's not a mere piece of paper. it delicately holds the smiles and tears of endless classes, essays, exams, conversations, one brilliant thesis, and many a treasured friendship. the memories. as i had mentioned a while ago, a rewarding path it certainly has been, it nonetheless had its moments of anguish. yet it is this tapestry of sentiments that has rendered my little journey all the more extraordinary, all the more memorable. and it is only after everything has been said and done, testamur in hand, that i could truly, truly feel what i had written then.

for now, i've had a suit made - my first ever. people say that getting the first suit is an important event - somewhat of becoming a grown man (but i'm still young, naturally). i guess the overall occasion - that of commencing work for the first time proper, that of receiving my testamur, that of graduation in general, does befit the momentous, inaugural ablution of slipping on those dark, woollen lapels.

infinities of the world in
a grain of sand, render nowhere too far
strange workings of Providence win
those hearts like a captured star

her voice her songs

her classics always give me this inexplicable feeling, where i will get a little soppy and overawed with thoughts and images from the ten years passed, as if time had found an anchor in a song, and its indolent melody, lambent beats, and the languid, ethereal voice slowly, and gently extract those fond moments to accompany the stolen four minutes of aural debauchery.

there, darkness is darkness

i miss her terribly too, but oftentimes i realised that the longing, or even grief that had manifested themselves in physical, conscious reality always lacked the kind of intensity that existed within my visceral realms - the very nooks in me that is rarely articulated and never intruded upon. it's also only at night that i think of jin, and of my grandmother too. i remember how in the first few years after granny's death i would be perfectly alright in the day and then start missing her when i was tucked in bed. of course, the darkness of night lends itself easily to the musings and ruminations of death, to draw our gaze unto the latent spectres of it. maybe it's just that only night could pause us - if just for a few short hours, in between our harried races of mortal, quotidian life - to reflect on the things otherwise darkened and concealed by the blinding lights of day. and it's upon these nocturnal reminiscences that a strangely restful sanctuary is created, providing a brief respite for the remembrance of things and people passed, and even perhaps, a bulwark for our atrophying souls. until of course dawn cracks and the night ends, hurling us back into breathing life's callous machinery. this it repeats, until our own lights in us fizzle into still, silent opacity. there, darkness is darkness. i like to think that by missing and thinking of jin, i'm bringing a little light into that darkness, bringing a little smile to her lips. inevitably then, i too, smile through my tears.

and in another time

i've been taciturn in thoughts and words of late. something, of what i have no inkling, is holding me back. and also, it doesn't do when whatever possible introspective remnants still lurking between my ears more often than not dissipate at the very point of articulation - pen and tongue alike. but we all try, don't we? just as we all try our utmost to look good, to get rich, to get ahead of our fellow minnows, to grab as much as our plebeian lives can accomodate. sometimes, we masochistically gorge ourselves to the nth in the deluded wish that our happiness would be thus satiated, only to spend nth spewing our guts into the sewage. oh how we hate our guts, and they rightly should be condemned to the newater plant. this chimera of bravado is what drives us to pursue unattainable dreams, to try to be ourselves by losing ourselves. and then we wonder why we are unhappy? naturally from here, we either wear a cloak of cynicism and sneer and smirk. or we slip on a smiling countenance and think we are actually really happy people. but the worst is to descend ourselves into spouting hackneyed aphorisms in a masturbatory fantasy of alleviating our banal existence. because it doesn't, and we can do without such pseudo-philosophical pretensions. to start with, they are not even originals. and before an august audience start rolling eyes and sharpening your feline tongues at me, i'd better hold my own. i really wanted to just say i had been rather quiet of late. and looking at this verbal diarrhoea, perhaps, taciturn thoughts and laconic words aren't really a bad thing after all.

present tense

there will eventually come this day we bid farewell, and i refer to you thenceforth in the past tense. like, 'she used to do this...', 'she used to do that...', 'she was like this...', 'she was like that...'. i know when that happens i'd live with much regrets of what-could-have-beens. it's not about doing enough or not. there are many ways of doing things, many of which may be incomprehensible to outsiders, and what's considered enough is too relative and general as to be relevant here. but what i will not know is the way you, or fate, or god choose to remove your present tense from the both of us, and everyone else. i certainly hope it will be the most normal and painless of partings - though a most wishful thinking. i also hope you'd learn to look after yourself properly, sometimes be a bit more selfish than you prefer to be, for it do you good. and finally, if it's not too late to tell you, that i love you. i always do.

if for nothing else but to not live a life unlived

when the inevitable detractions come into our lives, they scar us. sometimes we recover, sometimes not. when they gradually lighten as they usually do, they might also fade from our memory. but the scars nonetheless remain, perhaps taking different forms - seeping into our fears, apprehensions, hate; getting deeper as they lighten, until, like blades diving into a wishing-well of supple flesh and then twirling in the blood, and then disappear - they remain, completely lost in our minds, for ever, haunting us, taunting us. yet somehow, beneath the unquestionable tears and hurt and wounds, i suspect we really do yearn for them, and relish them, if for nothing else but to not live a life unlived.

in another time in another land

autumn is coming, and the maple leaves have started turning tangerine. soon, daylight will shorten, the leaves will fall, and there will be no more auburn skies at dusk. i can't wait to pull out my woolies. i can't wait to sip my coffee amidst the wintry air. they taste different, and it is romantic. i can't wait to bid this year farewell so that i can peer through hindsight under the summer sun. yet, i dread the moments that hatch them - they bear the demise of my curious anticipations.

... then, i held different hopes and thoughts. but some things rarely change. a year turns old and a new one beckons. hindsight excoriates my curious anticipations still, though this time, i'm not sure which carries more foreboding. hindsight gives a finality to events past, leaving me to rationalise, to accept, to look to a newer, better future. anticipations on the other hand cradle hopes for the present still, at the same time inspiring me to look to a newer, better future too. but i'm not sure if i can live a life of anticipations without revelations. what if, even before the teeny epiphanies the tiresome anticipations have already enervated those hopes. would i thus be left with nothing, and nothing to hope for?

that new one

sitting in a cafe at one of my favourite spots, i had a nice view of the busy intersection. the kaleidoscope of vehicles in their metallic hues and aerodynamic imbrications, resembled shoals of multi-hued fish in a clear water tank. it was always a little game and distraction to wonder about the people behind those wheels - where had they come from, where their destinations were, what they did for a living, and also perhaps, what were some of their thoughts about life, about love. at first i thought i was the uninhibited observer, freely and audaciously speculating, heaping assumptions upon foreign bodies that did not even qualify as strangers. but it wasnt before long that the full-length windows of the cafe put me right - instead it was i who was confined into an enclosed space. it was i, presumptious and none the wiser, a fish in a tank.