kimberly
wee
There’s this heavy, pregnant fog hovering over my head. It’s telling me to be observant and stand up straight. It’s not threatening but it’s very much there and asking me something, asking me what I am waiting for before I notice, notice what exactly it won’t say, but notice something, something quite important and perhaps pertinent to this “era” of uncertainty and restlessness in my life, something about where I am now (or is it who I am now?), something unknown, but of an utmost urgency. I think there’s a part of me that misses chancing upon miracles like I’ve been used to for most of my life. I miss being accountable to nobody. I miss empty nights and yearning so much that it hurts to be alive, maybe I miss control, or the freedom to be unpredictable, or the bliss of ruining every single thing I’ve been pretending to care about.
21 SEP 2025
The night is full of stars, but not the real kind that take billions of years for their lives to unfold. These ones pass over our heads momentarily, just missing each other slightly to avoid collisions and multiple deaths. At least from down here, they look like stars - twinkling, solitary, but way too mobile, betraying their cover. They organise themselves in a regulated dance across the dark night sky, like drones on their way to accomplish something important. After awhile they disappear before you can notice and another identical point of illumination enters the stage to take their place. We lie face up on your picnic mat, or a cloth of miscellaneous purpose. Occasionally it drizzles, but never for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I am very aware of how deep I am breathing even though the sound of waves is coming from all angles, crashing a gentle orchestra. We lie watching the roving stars steadily traverse the sky.
Rifle Range Road
I have come to realise that I despise the phrase “in the grand scheme of things” the most, because it reduces these “things” to mere effects of a larger, cosmic existence that seems to take precedence over the moment. In the grand scheme of things, I will forget how it felt like to see you, and I will forget what it felt like to witness, deep in the forests in Rifle Range Road, a slime mold consuming mushrooms consuming a dead tree. A bouquet of delicate yellow mushrooms; a silverfish, cricket, and spider taking turns to pose on a rotting Ganoderma cap decorated with geometric moss that has found itself embedded in the damp ground of fallen leaves, themselves waiting their turn to be decomposed. A small pair of bioluminescent mushrooms and an even smaller couple of mushrooms we would have missed if we had not stopped to scrutinise the forest ground and tried to commit everything we saw to memory, making every excuse to stay in there for just a while longer. The sole sound of your feet thud on the loosely-packed leaves of the damp forest ground, the massive silence when you stop, with moonlight so strong you can hear it whisper. Because of this thick forest air and our held breath and the quieting of the world’s noise from our bodies being afloat on something intoxicating that I cannot seem to identify, the beating of blood was the only sound — the plotless beating of blood in my (our?) ears and the uninterpretable cool blue of the moonlight. I think, even in the grand scheme of things, this Friday night matters. Maybe the forests were engineered for romance; there’s little of that here. We are but ecosystems in ecosystems and everything seen, touched, held, are all meaningful embraces.
On Sunday we sat at a bookstore which doubled as a cafe—there are many of these concept coffee shops here—and watched as the sky cried down onto the glass windows that protected us from getting drenched. The rain formed this fluid, moiré pattern on the glass that obscured our view of the streets outside. People walking by turned wobbly and cars looked like spaceships from a different galaxy. Everything was melting with the rain along with our sense of reality. I didn’t know if I could trust the world anymore, if all it took was some rain to manipulate the laws of physics. Inside, others like us sat pretending to “work” on various things. Students were typing away on their laptops stringing together essays or chipping away at problem sets, it was the finals season after all. Older, brooding folk sat quietly alone accompanied by a cup of hot coffee, reading. I remembered thinking that everyone took things too seriously here. Even the whispers of college gossip I eavesdropped from the table of students next to me was stale—can you believe that! For that reason the cafe itself was relatively quiet, the only noticeable sounds were of the rain against the glass panels, and even that was muffled by us being indoors. Most of the patrons seemed unbothered by the world melting around them. Maybe even you seem unbothered, I thought, as I observed your face from afar not once looking out or up at the scene of complete visual disorder. Whatever would happen if there was simply no rain at all, and the world outside was really melting? For some unfortunate reason, I doubt you would even notice. Perhaps this is what it means to have faith, a religious desire for peace that comes at the price of a dedication to ignorance.
30 APRIL 2023, NEW HAVEN, CT
We had all thought that when we adopted a cat it meant signing a seven-year lease on the friendship, considering Mo was only 1 when we had found him on the streets. Mo was pathetic when we had spotted him at the lobby of our block. He was so ragged and malnourished he would come running toward us at the click of a tongue thinking we were going to feed him. We had just returned from a swim and Mo would rub his body against our wet legs, his fur dampening from the residual pool water. Our swimsuits were soaking though our shirts as we balanced towels on our shoulders, laughing at the absurdity of this brown-tipped white cat’s appearance at the end of an impossibly exhausting week in all senses of the word—Mo’s arrival was as random as it was necessary. D’s gaze never left Mo. In the midst of discussing where in god forsaken Clementi town at 1145pm we would find cat food, he would grow quiet to stroke Mo softly, a kind of tenderness I rarely observed. An had run up to retrieve some food while D and I took turns clicking our tongues as Mo ping-ponged between us too distracted to wander off. Mo accepted our humble offering of canned tuna fillet in gravy readily, and the rest was history.
The first night we had taken Mo in, he took turns lying in each of our arms, taking great care to ensure we couldn’t argue over who was his favourite. Between the three of our closets, we had amassed a large number of anything soft—blankets, sweaters, comforters, and constructed a makeshift bed for Mo in the middle of our couch in the living room. It was a luxurious cat bed. Almost five blankets thick as a base and two hoodies as a duvet, positioned so the sleeves wrapped around his body like he was sleeping in a perpetual hug. We each kissed him goodnight and A and D lingered a little longer on each side of Mo’s new bed, watching his tired eyes fall into slumber. I remember watching them watch Mo in silence and felt a strong impulse of love—it was a precious image I have yet to erase from my mind. It was never about Mo, and still isn’t.
When they had announced that our school was closing down, and I remember how we sat together in the living room, sharing the news on a Macbook as if every other night when we were just tuning in to a movie, I started to break down for the very first time.
My experience at Yale NUS had become synonymous with my love for the two of you. Living together had naturally forced us into a little family unit. I bought groceries and you washed the dishes and we all love each other, but somehow I still can't explain why even this term "family" seems too small of a word to describe the extent of kinship I've found. Maybe it's the fact that we've cried messily in each other's arms, ruined too many sweaters with snot and left them on the couches to collect like old toys, or that whenever we wanted to frown or wink or stifle a giggle I'd look to you and you'd already be looking back. Or that we get so invested in each other's investments that we all have a profound appreciation for honey dijon mustard and candied bacon now. Or maybe it just simply is that we spend so much time together we now share the exact same laugh.
Not a single time we fight do the slightest doubt of you loving me and me loving you cross my mind. Sometimes we conjure that fantasy ourselves because our friendship almost seems too good to be true, not like other ones, it's about time, maybe they hate me, maybe they are going to get so sick of this, maybe they don’t care. I'm a really really emotional person, I attach myself to people very quickly and then sabotage it because for so long I didn't believe in not being in control, and I've learnt so much about trust and patience and raw unfiltered love from the two of you that I'd never imagine to ever receive had Yale NUS not exist. Maybe I will write a novel about us and our little cat Momo one day, about how we almost died together, jumping from the highest floor of Utown Residences.
19 FEB 2023
It started with a photograph, as it so often does in these precarious conversations. We stay on the phone for a while in a silence like a gaze not hoping to be requited. I feel cold so I reach for my duvet, stretching out my legs and grabbing the corner with my toes to make as little sound as possible — I don’t want you to hear my movements. I try to discern if your nonchalance is genuine or constructed, or perhaps carried by some kind of substance, alchohol. Most of the time it was. I’ve always found casual forms attractive and was impressed by the composure you’ve sought out for yourself that had made this conversation feel slightly different.
It was a croak that broke the silence and it was only then I realise I had subconsciously been holding back tears this whole time. As I lean against the wall, swallowing my spit as silently as I could, you say, “I think I’m going to hang up.” For a moment I could see you, in your own room and sat on the floor, back against a wall. I watch you holding your phone up with your arms resting on your knees. I am reminded of the times we sat staring at each other, not creepily, but light, like a kind of observing akin to a picnic breeze. I say, “Ok,” and after hanging up, I close my eyes to keep seeing your face until I cannot any longer.
5 JULY 2022
“So, how does it end?”
“He spirals into a madness.”
“But what takes it there?”
“She knows for a fact that she cannot love him. Her only understanding of love is through abuse, inextricable from pain, but he doesn’t care about that at all — the whole time they are together, he publicly and proudly remains with her, because he loves her and understands it to be a real love. They get found out and she gets expelled while he loses his job,”
He nodded, “Go on.”
“At a certain point, they move to the mountains and are drinking wine on a terrace one evening. They open a special antique bottle of wine and he takes a sip, remarking that she was like this bottle of wine to him, ‘The most bitter thing I’ve ever tasted’, he says. She smiles because she was surprised that he was able to see her for who she truly was. She caresses his neck, fingers sinking so deep into his skin until it starts bleeding. The both of them weep. Their madness is influential. Her self-loathing feeds his delirium and vice versa. She grows increasingly violent and he, increasingly depressed. One afternoon, she pushes him off a cliff. He dies. She kills him.”
“Was it a murder? Assisted suicide?”
“That’s up to interpretation. But for me, I think, he had to fall off the cliff. It was the only solution to end the madness, he had to be liberated from her.”
“So he wanted liberation. What did she want? Was it masochistic? Why does she kill him?”
“I wanted it to be tragic. For her to be the one who killed him.”
“Why does she kill him?”
“That was the only ending that could create the sort of dialectical tension I wanted.”
“No. Why does she choose to kill him?”
“She... was–No, she wanted... No,” She exhaled, “I think it was her last and only act of love. She was the only one capable of freeing him from a relationship where he would never be loved. She did it... as an act of love. The only love she’s ever known.”
5 JUNE 2022
I haven’t written in a long time, and I am wondering if that means I’m doing well. It seems the best words are the ones strung together by some sort of tangible yearning or misbehavior, dunked in sticky and tired conversation then wrung dry and left to drip out on a taut clothesline. And I’ve been my goodest this year so far. I don’t think you could ever find good images in words that haven’t been abused or words that aren’t grieving loss. Though, of late, I’ve slowly been deciding that I shan’t any longer describe tragedy as compelling as much as it is simply a minor inconvenience, because it is clear that writing has become a haphazard last ditch attempt compelled by some impulsive desire to negotiate control, when I’d like so much more for it to be a conscientious, deliberate act of proccessing. Maybe this is why the happiest people are sometimes the most boring, because the only thing complex about happiness is when it isn’t.
— Now, I cannot imagine what a complex joy would read like, and yet there is a minor emotion for every type of pain—anguish, jealousy, longing, melancholy, heartbreak, self-loathing—sub-feelings of a feeling, things you only unlock when you are cornered to desperation and need to quickly identify and then resolve.
I am writing now because I still don’t know what tragedy has compelled me to this corner, where I find myself picking through what seems to be a pile of damp clothing that simply cannot dry. Damned to stink. Grow mould, even.
6 FEBRUARY 2022
The world has its ways of punishing people for what they feel. It’s nothing as grand as karma, it’s way pettier than that. Like how a fallout between friends means we both pretend to be angry for a couple of days and hopefully hug it out later. For two weeks now, I’ve been holed in my room, confronting the silence that began when I demanded for something I shouldn’t have. I‘ve always secretly thought that everyone else had to grow up. Be less sensitive. Grow a fucking spine – or at least some critical perceptiveness. Nothing is real. How can something like this affect you so much when nothing is real at all. All your suffering is a product of attachment, but all your joy is a result of all your suffering. And so we get to choose what we want to feel, to say fuck it and move on. Most of my friends get it. We fuck it and move on all the time, and maybe that’s why there are infinitely more fuck ups too. Sometimes spending so much time with someone forces you to adapt to their ways of being, and for some of us, we’ve developed a word-less telepathy such that apologies come merely in the form of a knowing eye contact shared. And I love that feeling – to be seen so intrinsically we don’t even have to speak. To know that nothing ill ever comes from anything because the love precedes every single silly thing. And I’ve always thought we were the lucky ones, that we’ve found each other, and that the love was large enough to blanket our hearts when anything happened. I don’t think I’m ready to admit yet that maybe we’re not, that you and you and me are just soft and sensitive mush susceptible to pain. Maybe the ones that strip us of our agency is not a God somewhere out there, but our emotions, like an all-consuming uncontrollable rage, or a deep seated depression that holds us hostage. I underestimate how much our bodies respond to these emotions, completely out of our own will and how much we are made to obey them.
25 NOVEMBER 2021
It's one of those days that I let my mind wander to you, what you're doing, if you've showered, whether you're smiling or crying more these days. It is gut wrenching and unfair that someone can so profoundly alter the course of your life forever, then suddenly cease to occupy that same space and magnitude. Clawed away from your side, muscles grown intertwined now tearing apart in shreds so viscerally red and splotchy wet like split molten rock all over our house we've spent 2 years building so painstakingly. They say time flies when you're having fun, but ironically it felt like a long eternity of knowing you. I was having fun until the sweet started rotting my teeth and you couldn't stop clutching your aching side because of how funny I was. Then 2 years felt like 6, 10 and then forever, and I’m convinced I’ve known you for many lifetimes now.
Dakota Crescent is in the process of being demolished after it was announced a few years ago that it was to be redeveloped for public housing. I can’t help but feel absolutely delusional and slaughtered, thinking the greater world, society, and Singapore’s public landscape parallelled the rise and now fall of our silly relationship. The walls that contained our quiet whispers now torn down and soon I will have nowhere to return whenever I would like a quiet, tortured, silent smoke. I’m pretty certain some of the benches still held your scent, seeped deep into the moulding wood, wrestling time and wear to stay embedded there. If the contractors looked hard enough, they’d also see residual adhesives of the stickers of yourself you’ve drizzled around the estate, as if fighting for territory from the 5 other resident cats. Those stickers were everywhere. If they were lucky, they’d find the room we left a whole duvet in, and maybe the sight of it would compel them to weep uncontrollably like the space often compelled us. They may curl in it themselves and lie in it for awhile and maybe, even decide to leave Dakota Crescent alone after all.
4 NOVEMBER 2021
Recently I find myself joining more and more of these Singapore-based Facebook interest groups. They are mostly flora and fauna related, like SG Wildlife Sightings or just cat adoption pages. My latest membership is in Mushroom Spotters (Singapore) and I’ve been quite happy with the permeation of mushroom images on my regular Facebook feed. I’ve also begun painting the ones I find visually and formally fascinating.
Peanut Buttercup Mushroom
Coprinellus Disseminatus
Agaricus Trisulphuratus (or Similar)
I don’t think I’d ever find mushrooms so captivating if I saw it myself in person. It’s really the experience mediated by Facebook that makes it so communal and democratic, almost. It’s the ability to simultaneously read what other Singaporeans are commenting on the sidebar. Most of the times it’s facts about the mushroom subject. Also most times it’s just snobby Singaporean mushroom connoiseurs who are making snarky jokes when someone asks if a Calvatia Sp. can be eaten (obviously it cannot.).
It’s still interesting to see how many people would ask, alongside posting images of some of the most visually complex, colorful, texturous mushrooms I’ve ever seen, if they are edible.
When not asking if these mushrooms can be eaten, most posts are simply captioned “🍄“ which I find absolutely insulting but also strangely appropriate. It seems hilarious that we have 9 different types of flower emojis, but only one mushroom one and yet it still looks more like Toad the Mario character than Toadstool the actual mushroom. I’d like to understand who determines how useable an emoji is and why their aesthetic realism differ so much depending on the subject of the emoji. Are there emojis surveys? Is there a database that tracks the usage of words on the Internet? Our phones? Do these words all end up in a meta-rank, where the highest ranking words are granted visual bragging rights?
It’s funny because at the end of the day, emojis are just representations. Fantasy. But then you remember that all Apple products distributed in China are ordered by the Chinese government to be programmed to exclude Taiwan’s National Flag emoji, and you wonder why it even matters to the State that there is or is not a representation of the Taiwanese Flag, and then you conclude that emojis are actually very real. It reminds me of this quote by Alex Galloway where he claims that “the true is only created by way of an extended detour through falsity”. It seems that real life must always pass through fantasy in order for it to return to the real.
And so maybe these mushrooms, orange as ever, aren’t real at all. Maybe they aren’t real because they can’t be eaten or touched, unless you want to be poisoned. Maybe they aren’t real because only 4,000 people in a country with 6 million people care about them. But these interactions I see online every few hours, maybe, strangers exchanging geo-tags of the log of ears in Bukit Timah Hill, seem doubly real to me.
OCTOBER 2021
Lately, an orb has taken the place of the fingers on my right hand. I only learnt that this happened when I reached for my pen after a few weeks of not writing, which also meant I couldn’t tell for sure when exactly this happened: if it had just transformed that day, or a few weeks prior. The encounter was strange because reaching for things have become so absentminded for me these days, that when I reached for my pen, I didn’t know my fingers were defunct until I heard the sharp clack of plastic on the white floor tile where the pen fell. I remember feeling angry first – a visceral reaction from feeling like I had been cheated by my body which was probably the only material thing I could count on to be faithful to me. Then I remembered being overwhelmed with panic upon processing this dismemberment. I find it funny now, thinking about how in that moment of disorientation, my first instinct was to reach my hand to my forehead, smacking myself straight on with this glass orb palm.
The orb was the sort of black glass that resembled screens – shiny smooth and completely opaque, which seemed contradictory to me. I didn’t think any naturally-existing surface was this shiny nor black nor opaque. Charcoal, feathers of ravens, olives, some type of grains or beans. They were all almost-black, almost-never shiny. Probably the most authentic black I could cognitively fathom would be a dark night in a deserted forest, or a chasm in the earth so deep that the bottom looks like a pool of black honey. At this point I took a mental note that the color I had thought was the most simple of colors as concepts to grasp (black is an extreme, right? and extremes are much more comprehensible than the in-betweens, like green or gray. Extremes like black or white are one-dimensional – any degree of deviation would tarnish the integrity of its nature. it would seem easier to replicate a black than an aquamarine, for instance) was also the hardest to visualise tangibly. It seemed as though the truest black, was an absence or a void, like nighttime or an empty pit.
Maybe I felt that my natural understanding of the world had been violated, which was why I found the orb so repulsive and needed to explain it away. I could feel the orb the same way I could my fingers, except that the sensation felt unified, no longer separated into 5 slender feeling objects but a small entity of magnetism that was kind of just radiating power and force in the center of the orb. I wonder if it could give me answers.
25 MARCH 2021
Far away from
The teeth, the glass tubes of fluorescent neon gas, the brokers of things that happen, the slash and burn people, who come and go as they please, the gaping crack in the false wall, the layer of stale coffee on every neglected desk, the flowers, plastic, the chattering, incessant, the busking travellers, the fights catalysed from half thought out expressions heard whole, the unripened affection received raw, the 26 letters,
There is
An inland lake surrounded by unknown mass of virgin green - fresh moss and woods, with water as clear as the clearest air, in which violently swims a solitary iridescent carp, within whose belly is heart of all fire.
11 JANUARY 2021
The year started with an endless downpour of torrential rain for 3 days straight. It didn't falter for a second. It could have been a sign of divine solidarity for all the tears we've left behind in 2020 that which became the onset of grief from the skies, or a desperate attempt to graciously cleanse the world of a grave sin committed. The sky was one opaque cloud but it was as apparent as the unrelenting cold that we were beginning this year with a dull pain in our side that could no longer be endured.
It seemed apt to leave my umbrella at home....
7 JANUARY 2021
In the morning I sat on the rooftop and watched the flies play hooky. I cancelled my barre class (again) because the rain convinced me to take another nap, which overran as usual. Shivangi awoke me with her call and I told her I found it ridiculous that she was back in Singapore so soon, but secretly I was beyond elated. It felt like forever since I’d heard her voice, it sounded different now that we’re both speaking in the same time zone. She said she’s going insane and I completely understood the claustrophobia, drowning in this spell of life from home. Had I forgotten how to live with family? I’d been balancing conversations precariously all month. She said the silence in her room is enough to drive one crazy, and I couldn’t help but feel like that was all I wanted. To think in silence. By then, it was 3pm and the noise of traffic was still unrelenting, reminding me of another despisable thing living here. I told her I missed her and promised I’d deliver a pack of cigarettes to the reception of her hotel tomorrow
27 DECEMBER 2020
On such and such a day, at such and such a time, I cannot seem to find my hands. What has come from my knowing and receiving of such a mercy is, strangely, the loss of... focus? I laugh because I see it now, a love triangle – the drama! the novelty! the yearning! And perhaps I cannot escape it. But focus is sweet and fleeting and it may be that I have lost grasp of it entirely with the newfound clarity of this struggle, ironically. I write this as I am illegally dwelling in my room of which I’ve been evacuated from for the winter break: A sheetless bed and empty shelves it is now. I’ve also torn down the calendar I drew but never filled from my walls so they are bare and lacking too. Apparently they audit the taps to weed out illegal trespassers like me, but I didn’t lock my door before I left so for now I am just a vague presence enjoying the quiet in my non-room. This is what I mean: I am thinking and with too many colons and –s, and I cannot focus on my hands – I have no idea where they are! I have so many things, real things, to do right now but all I am is angry – at being distracted; that my thoughts congeal so incoherently these days; that I am unfocused.
16 DECEMBER 2020
I smoothed my hair with the aid of the streetlamp and the mirror of a stationary van parked by the street. I walked the same road, away, but it was different, there was a sense of finality this time. There was another feeling that accompanied this – a type of mounting panic and feeling extremely unqualified. I think it was the realisation that I left more of myself than I’d like to admit with you – disembodied and so innocently trusting. With revulsion and terror I decided to leave the truncation behind into the emptiness. I waited for the thud of it’s landing; it never sounded.
9 DECEMBER 2020
the air is chilly and when I touch your hands, they are icy. we sit, crosslegged, on the grass to absorb the slight warmth of the earth, though we probably conjured the warmth in our heads for it had just showered, and in reality, it was moist and cold. it was thick and humid so I had kept removing my glasses to wipe them after each time I spoke. we didn’t converse much but I was always asking if you were okay, and you always nodded, probably to prevent your glasses from fogging up like mine, or probably because you were not okay. I remember when things were not always this way, days when the sun would make me shrink. but you, who taught me this embracing of loneliness, stillness, of grieving differently. We sit in silence and worship the sound of large toads.
22 NOVEMBER 2020
In any case it seems I will have to resign myself to something like a poised apprehensiveness; befriending phantoms which believe they have bodies and using cups that claim to hold oceans.
19 NOVEMBER 2020
How many times do you walk down this street feeling this way? You think you would have grown to expect the feeling every time you expect yourself to turn that curb, round the street, and so you try and brace yourself for it, but sometimes, a cricket catches your eye and you are momentarily distracted, your mind wandering to the little bug and its seizing of the afternoon, yet the familiar momentum of your feet collapsing over one another catches your mind off guard, triggering this feeling that you’ve felt forever but could never place - somewhere between the sun and where its rays hit you, time-wise less than a split of a millisecond, distance-wise over 100 million kilometers - somewhere between this elastic theoretical space of the sun and its contact with your palm or your eyelash, you are ambushed by this feeling, and maybe it is kind to you that day and you still manage to run for the bus, or maybe, like most days, it engulfs you wholly and you stop mid-step at this very corner of the street and indulge it because you always feel strange walking by here anyways, so, like most days, you search for the cricket, or any other cricket, and stare at it for long, though you do not really pay attention.
12 NOVEMBER 2020
It’s been an average middle-light now for five months straight. The atmosphere simply won’t crest over into some determinant appearance of dawn or dusk. The maddening conditions are not just limited to weather-based instrument dependence either, every person is disappointing and every step is indecisively dull. To break up the monotony I have been climbing down the steep cliff to the narrow strip of beach to swim. The waves usually being quite large, always stirred up the sediment so I could never quite see the bottom — which I had assumed was simply sand and large flat boulders. After my last swim though, the water became quite glassy — and from up high I was able to see that the boulders were not boulders but some sort of giant, flat, very slow maneuvering fishes. Now I daren’t even do that activity anymore. When not worrying about the dread of fish, of movement, of swimming over moving fishes, I nap quietly in my room. Here at least in a state akin to solitude, I can be small and untroubled; occasionally looking up at the distant orange-gray horizon.
7 NOVEMBER 2020
I can say now that I do love you
But only in the sad narcissistic selfish way
Because your pain is my pain, so I guess I love myself
I will go to bed and hide from everyone for you, I promise I will ignore calls for you. You can perform and I will pretend to enjoy it so I don’t hurt your feelings,
hold your hand and squeeze it when you start tearing up. Before you swallow your spit this morning, you will know that I do love you.
3 NOVEMBER 2020
Our thoughts are jumping, their feet on hot coal for brief seconds before they take flight and then descend again. We can barely ruminate before they jerk away, having rested too long on the heat; quick evasions of 3rd degree burns. The resulting sight is spectacular – beads of red are shooting up and down. And this bed of coal, it radiates and glows and at first you think it is comforting and you smile. It consumes your entire body – you cannot do anything about this lack of impulse, you can only wallow. When we want something too much we feel ourselves losing our grip, and whatever it is slips through the crevices between your fingers. Every ounce of hope that falls through doesn’t hurt as much as the bit that you catch. That bit relies on misfortune and it thrives best in suffering.
And such is the depressing state of things - that we all crave visibility, and yet we desire to be anonymous. Nothing in this entrapped consciousness will grant us either. You see an etching on the side of the bus stop and you swear you’ve seen it before. A close friend of a friend passes by and your faces are poised to talk, sometimes you do, but only basic, phatic phrases like how are you? or you look like you could use a vacation. or you can say that again! Words no longer land - the image and the stories are neurologically weightless because your experiences have been rendered fleeting just by repetition. Maybe the only solace is an acceptance that hope may be destitute, that you are forever known, but never seen.
3 NOVEMBER 2020
This morning after waking from who knows where, you dallied a bit, remaining in bed. As is sometimes the case, through a very thin and long vertical slit, between the window edge and blinds, we watched the slightly undulating, furiously intricate overlapping branches of the leaves and the butterfly bushes — their mysterious arterial violence. A few minutes later, staring into yourself at the toilet vanity, you were absently mesmerized by the spectacular moiré pattern caused by the interaction of the drawn shade and the window screen over your face. And on the ceiling, two lizards were circling in dance and so you knew that they must have loved or hated each other.
24 OCTOBER 2020
the door i left ajar i came back to unhinged
held up only by the slightest visiting wind;
i have never seen creaks so loud. long,
comforting, someone must have stayed here
long enough to replace all the grout to grass.
i have never seen a house so lonely
in all its quaint spaces and quiet furniture
everything stood in perfect stillness -
i have yet to take a step inside
to dirty my hands with thousand year old rust
from old wilting gates i used to recognise
it was only a few heavy steps taken until
the house spoke to me, in nostalgic languages
of bleary images and fuzzy sentiments.
i used to be better at recounting a past life before realising that i am the house, the person,
the image i no longer see
if I shouted in this space I don't think it would echo,
I would not want to disturb the dust that have settled -
so snug, cosy, humming softly in deep sleep.
in this space i can cry properly, it comes in quiet shakes
in harmony with the wind. surely the roaming stray cats will join the
orchestra, they were almost always in reach.
i would like to go to a place of less density,
i miss the expanse. is it over-dramatic to despise artificial light?
the thick smell of the room drives me hysterical, vaguely scented
of petty conversation and the wallpaper is flirting with me, but
i don’t think there is anything witty about claustrophobia
WITH FARIZI, 26 APRIL 2020
At this point you have become so closely intertwined with me that I cannot bear to imagine a reality without you. Emptiness is like a closet filled with all your old clothes. It is the mess on my bed, left untouched every morning, because I do not have the patience that you did so tenderly to make sure I came home to warm freshness of a reset day. It is all the times I listen to a song and slowly realise as the lyrics anger me so viscerally that I am just another bolt in this cliche love trope, and that we are nothing special, but I put what is us on a pedestal and I worship it because, because? Maybe I am writing this with the intention of being sickeningly pretentious because maybe that was what we are, fighting against all odds, ignoring every problem because we were too busy being hidden in each others blind rash embrace and fingerlocks. But I do mean it with utmost sincerity when I say that we belong to ourselves. I love you and I love you fiercely because you are soft and wet and sad and I am also wet and sad but I am tough. And I cannot love anyone who isn’t sad, because maybe I don’t know how to empathise with happiness. Maybe we were just meant to exist on different planes of reality and you would have been a mother elephant and I your fierce rider. Maybe it is because everyone tells me you are lovely that I find you unbearably so, and maybe it is because everyone tells me that it is impossible that that I find any other option but being together extremely repulsive. I love you because I don’t think there is anyone else in the world who can understand me and misunderstand me as profoundly as you. I think of you every time my mind wanders to the possibility of a future where nothing else but the sake of simply being matters. Where we can sip on sparkling apple juice and pretend to be exorbitantly rich and funny. Maybe this will be the last I will write about you.
MARCH 2020
A couple of days ago, I had just got off a call with Rui after feeling terrible for a whole week. She didn’t message me right after, but the next morning, I woke up to her text: “Remember to be mindful and present Kimmy!”. I don’t know why I felt instantly nourished at the reminder to be mindful and present. It was such an appropriate and right thing to hear and I felt as though I was snapped out of a certain headspace that governed my entire way of living for so many years. Somewhere down the road I had conditioned myself to think I was always mindful, so much so that it took the very mention of being mindful for me to just know, in a split second, that I had never been mindful in my life. I don’t know where this false consciousness stemmed from, and I don’t want to attempt to psychoanalyse my childhood for answers to questions I have now, thinking they’d alleviate the pain and drain I’m feeling as a young adult, maturing at full force. I did, however, think about it briefly when I was looking at my younger sister blowing out her birthday candles just last week (she had just turned 12). Maybe it was the sight of her soft face being lit by candles – she radiated a pure goodness that I’d never known to exist in myself, ever. I wondered if it was because she had spent her entire life receiving attention and that I had spent a lot of my life fighting for it. It wasn’t a bad thing, it mattered more that I owned whatever state I existed in than it did that everyone around me were pleased with the things I said. And that was simply it, I grew up always striving to be “independent”, or whatever version of independent that I had thought it meant, but that inevitably led to me growing up pretty fucking vicious. I’m starting to understand now that the emotion that stirred in me when I looked at my younger sister was a passive jealousy and an active anger – I want to be so simply good and kind and mindful.
MARCH 2020
I hop off the bus with my dirty toes, wearing the weariness of what felt like 4 hours sitting. Collisions of rain and road/grass/glass/metals because obviously it had to be pouring tonight. The one time I looked outside thick branches reached out – about to touch my face, slamming violently into the window instead, as if punishing me, but at the same time restraining from doing so. So the branches kept not-slapping me repeatedly, and I stared hard at my reflection on the glass, wishing her better days.
The first thing I did was go to the beach and found a seashell. I listened to it but i could not understand what it was saying. Moments later, I realised I had picked up a croissant, not a seashell. I was very unfocused that day and to be honest, I just picked up the first thing I saw because I was eager to find some answers.
I ran home after that, retreating back into covers and sheets. I had, within it, constructed a society of burdened people – all alternatives of myself, each claiming one of every regrettable thing I have ever done. I dream of the same thing again, like always: standing in the centre of this enormous room; a spatial void; an absence of containment. I couldn’t process why I couldn’t run forward. There was an ongoing score playing - so sharply, piano. An endless loop of a classical classic, but in the minor key. It is the sound that you hear when you see an ant running frantically around his dead comrade, the sound that is made whenever you see a plane in the sky, or whenever you look down from a plane in the sky. It was worse when I realised I couldn’t run backward either. Usually when this happens, the sound gets so loud, the sound, blaring, becomes a singular note. The scene transitions – the score cuts off immediately, and then everything dissipates. I know this is how every dream ends, with chirping. It was a blissful sight to witness us sipping water from a creek in my dreams.
MARCH 2020
I am glad that I am here.
Here, the birds almost land on your shoulders and they also wail properly – crude and insulting, forceful, like they mean it. Here, the winds crawl up every pillar to tickle the highest leaf and whistle at you while the leaves wink. How redeeming it can be to be so unproductive.
IN PERTH, FEBRUARY 2020
13 APR 2024
Rifle Range Road
I have come to realise that I despise the phrase “in the grand scheme of things” the most, because it reduces these “things” to mere effects of a larger, cosmic existence that seems to take precedence over the moment. In the grand scheme of things, I will forget how it felt like to see you, and I will forget what it felt like to witness, deep in the forests in Rifle Range Road, a slime mold consuming mushrooms consuming a dead tree. A bouquet of delicate yellow mushrooms; a silverfish, cricket, and spider taking turns to pose on a rotting Ganoderma cap decorated with geometric moss that has found itself embedded in the damp ground of fallen leaves, themselves waiting their turn to be decomposed. A small pair of bioluminescent mushrooms and an even smaller couple of mushrooms we would have missed if we had not stopped to scrutinise the forest ground and tried to commit everything we saw to memory, making every excuse to stay in there for just a while longer. The sole sound of your feet thud on the loosely-packed leaves of the damp forest ground, the massive silence when you stop, with moonlight so strong you can hear it whisper. Because of this thick forest air and our held breath and the quieting of the world’s noise from our bodies being afloat on something intoxicating that I cannot seem to identify, the beating of blood was the only sound — the plotless beating of blood in my (our?) ears and the uninterpretable cool blue of the moonlight. I think, even in the grand scheme of things, this Friday night matters. Maybe the forests were engineered for romance; there’s little of that here. We are but ecosystems in ecosystems and everything seen, touched, held, are all meaningful embraces.
13 JUNE 2023
On Sunday we sat at a bookstore which doubled as a cafe—there are many of these concept coffee shops here—and watched as the sky cried down onto the glass windows that protected us from getting drenched. The rain formed this fluid, moiré pattern on the glass that obscured our view of the streets outside. People walking by turned wobbly and cars looked like spaceships from a different galaxy. Everything was melting with the rain along with our sense of reality. I didn’t know if I could trust the world anymore, if all it took was some rain to manipulate the laws of physics. Inside, others like us sat pretending to “work” on various things. Students were typing away on their laptops stringing together essays or chipping away at problem sets, it was the finals season after all. Older, brooding folk sat quietly alone accompanied by a cup of hot coffee, reading. I remembered thinking that everyone took things too seriously here. Even the whispers of college gossip I eavesdropped from the table of students next to me was stale—can you believe that! For that reason the cafe itself was relatively quiet, the only noticeable sounds were of the rain against the glass panels, and even that was muffled by us being indoors. Most of the patrons seemed unbothered by the world melting around them. Maybe even you seem unbothered, I thought, as I observed your face from afar not once looking out or up at the scene of complete visual disorder. Whatever would happen if there was simply no rain at all, and the world outside was really melting? For some unfortunate reason, I doubt you would even notice. Perhaps this is what it means to have faith, a religious desire for peace that comes at the price of a dedication to ignorance.
30 APRIL 2023, NEW HAVEN, CT
We had all thought that when we adopted a cat it meant signing a seven-year lease on the friendship, considering Mo was only 1 when we had found him on the streets. Mo was pathetic when we had spotted him at the lobby of our block. He was so ragged and malnourished he would come running toward us at the click of a tongue thinking we were going to feed him. We had just returned from a swim and Mo would rub his body against our wet legs, his fur dampening from the residual pool water. Our swimsuits were soaking though our shirts as we balanced towels on our shoulders, laughing at the absurdity of this brown-tipped white cat’s appearance at the end of an impossibly exhausting week in all senses of the word—Mo’s arrival was as random as it was necessary. D’s gaze never left Mo. In the midst of discussing where in god forsaken Clementi town at 1145pm we would find cat food, he would grow quiet to stroke Mo softly, a kind of tenderness I rarely observed. An had run up to retrieve some food while D and I took turns clicking our tongues as Mo ping-ponged between us too distracted to wander off. Mo accepted our humble offering of canned tuna fillet in gravy readily, and the rest was history.
The first night we had taken Mo in, he took turns lying in each of our arms, taking great care to ensure we couldn’t argue over who was his favourite. Between the three of our closets, we had amassed a large number of anything soft—blankets, sweaters, comforters, and constructed a makeshift bed for Mo in the middle of our couch in the living room. It was a luxurious cat bed. Almost five blankets thick as a base and two hoodies as a duvet, positioned so the sleeves wrapped around his body like he was sleeping in a perpetual hug. We each kissed him goodnight and A and D lingered a little longer on each side of Mo’s new bed, watching his tired eyes fall into slumber. I remember watching them watch Mo in silence and felt a strong impulse of love—it was a precious image I have yet to erase from my mind. It was never about Mo, and still isn’t.
When they had announced that our school was closing down, and I remember how we sat together in the living room, sharing the news on a Macbook as if every other night when we were just tuning in to a movie, I started to break down for the very first time.
My experience at Yale NUS had become synonymous with my love for the two of you. Living together had naturally forced us into a little family unit. I bought groceries and you washed the dishes and we all love each other, but somehow I still can't explain why even this term "family" seems too small of a word to describe the extent of kinship I've found. Maybe it's the fact that we've cried messily in each other's arms, ruined too many sweaters with snot and left them on the couches to collect like old toys, or that whenever we wanted to frown or wink or stifle a giggle I'd look to you and you'd already be looking back. Or that we get so invested in each other's investments that we all have a profound appreciation for honey dijon mustard and candied bacon now. Or maybe it just simply is that we spend so much time together we now share the exact same laugh.
Not a single time we fight do the slightest doubt of you loving me and me loving you cross my mind. Sometimes we conjure that fantasy ourselves because our friendship almost seems too good to be true, not like other ones, it's about time, maybe they hate me, maybe they are going to get so sick of this, maybe they don’t care. I'm a really really emotional person, I attach myself to people very quickly and then sabotage it because for so long I didn't believe in not being in control, and I've learnt so much about trust and patience and raw unfiltered love from the two of you that I'd never imagine to ever receive had Yale NUS not exist. Maybe I will write a novel about us and our little cat Momo one day, about how we almost died together, jumping from the highest floor of Utown Residences.
19 FEB 2023
It started with a photograph, as it so often does in these precarious conversations. We stay on the phone for a while in a silence like a gaze not hoping to be requited. I feel cold so I reach for my duvet, stretching out my legs and grabbing the corner with my toes to make as little sound as possible — I don’t want you to hear my movements. I try to discern if your nonchalance is genuine or constructed, or perhaps carried by some kind of substance, alchohol. Most of the time it was. I’ve always found casual forms attractive and was impressed by the composure you’ve sought out for yourself that had made this conversation feel slightly different.
It was a croak that broke the silence and it was only then I realise I had subconsciously been holding back tears this whole time. As I lean against the wall, swallowing my spit as silently as I could, you say, “I think I’m going to hang up.” For a moment I could see you, in your own room and sat on the floor, back against a wall. I watch you holding your phone up with your arms resting on your knees. I am reminded of the times we sat staring at each other, not creepily, but light, like a kind of observing akin to a picnic breeze. I say, “Ok,” and after hanging up, I close my eyes to keep seeing your face until I cannot any longer.
5 JULY 2022
“So, how does it end?”
“He spirals into a madness.”
“But what takes it there?”
“She knows for a fact that she cannot love him. Her only understanding of love is through abuse, inextricable from pain, but he doesn’t care about that at all — the whole time they are together, he publicly and proudly remains with her, because he loves her and understands it to be a real love. They get found out and she gets expelled while he loses his job,”
He nodded, “Go on.”
“At a certain point, they move to the mountains and are drinking wine on a terrace one evening. They open a special antique bottle of wine and he takes a sip, remarking that she was like this bottle of wine to him, ‘The most bitter thing I’ve ever tasted’, he says. She smiles because she was surprised that he was able to see her for who she truly was. She caresses his neck, fingers sinking so deep into his skin until it starts bleeding. The both of them weep. Their madness is influential. Her self-loathing feeds his delirium and vice versa. She grows increasingly violent and he, increasingly depressed. One afternoon, she pushes him off a cliff. He dies. She kills him.”
“Was it a murder? Assisted suicide?”
“That’s up to interpretation. But for me, I think, he had to fall off the cliff. It was the only solution to end the madness, he had to be liberated from her.”
“So he wanted liberation. What did she want? Was it masochistic? Why does she kill him?”
“I wanted it to be tragic. For her to be the one who killed him.”
“Why does she kill him?”
“That was the only ending that could create the sort of dialectical tension I wanted.”
“No. Why does she choose to kill him?”
“She... was–No, she wanted... No,” She exhaled, “I think it was her last and only act of love. She was the only one capable of freeing him from a relationship where he would never be loved. She did it... as an act of love. The only love she’s ever known.”
5 JUNE 2022
I haven’t written in a long time, and I am wondering if that means I’m doing well. It seems the best words are the ones strung together by some sort of tangible yearning or misbehavior, dunked in sticky and tired conversation then wrung dry and left to drip out on a taut clothesline. And I’ve been my goodest this year so far. I don’t think you could ever find good images in words that haven’t been abused or words that aren’t grieving loss. Though, of late, I’ve slowly been deciding that I shan’t any longer describe tragedy as compelling as much as it is simply a minor inconvenience, because it is clear that writing has become a haphazard last ditch attempt compelled by some impulsive desire to negotiate control, when I’d like so much more for it to be a conscientious, deliberate act of proccessing. Maybe this is why the happiest people are sometimes the most boring, because the only thing complex about happiness is when it isn’t.
— Now, I cannot imagine what a complex joy would read like, and yet there is a minor emotion for every type of pain—anguish, jealousy, longing, melancholy, heartbreak, self-loathing—sub-feelings of a feeling, things you only unlock when you are cornered to desperation and need to quickly identify and then resolve.
I am writing now because I still don’t know what tragedy has compelled me to this corner, where I find myself picking through what seems to be a pile of damp clothing that simply cannot dry. Damned to stink. Grow mould, even.
6 FEBRUARY 2022
The world has its ways of punishing people for what they feel. It’s nothing as grand as karma, it’s way pettier than that. Like how a fallout between friends means we both pretend to be angry for a couple of days and hopefully hug it out later. For two weeks now, I’ve been holed in my room, confronting the silence that began when I demanded for something I shouldn’t have. I‘ve always secretly thought that everyone else had to grow up. Be less sensitive. Grow a fucking spine – or at least some critical perceptiveness. Nothing is real. How can something like this affect you so much when nothing is real at all. All your suffering is a product of attachment, but all your joy is a result of all your suffering. And so we get to choose what we want to feel, to say fuck it and move on. Most of my friends get it. We fuck it and move on all the time, and maybe that’s why there are infinitely more fuck ups too. Sometimes spending so much time with someone forces you to adapt to their ways of being, and for some of us, we’ve developed a word-less telepathy such that apologies come merely in the form of a knowing eye contact shared. And I love that feeling – to be seen so intrinsically we don’t even have to speak. To know that nothing ill ever comes from anything because the love precedes every single silly thing. And I’ve always thought we were the lucky ones, that we’ve found each other, and that the love was large enough to blanket our hearts when anything happened. I don’t think I’m ready to admit yet that maybe we’re not, that you and you and me are just soft and sensitive mush susceptible to pain. Maybe the ones that strip us of our agency is not a God somewhere out there, but our emotions, like an all-consuming uncontrollable rage, or a deep seated depression that holds us hostage. I underestimate how much our bodies respond to these emotions, completely out of our own will and how much we are made to obey them.
25 NOVEMBER 2021
It's one of those days that I let my mind wander to you, what you're doing, if you've showered, whether you're smiling or crying more these days. It is gut wrenching and unfair that someone can so profoundly alter the course of your life forever, then suddenly cease to occupy that same space and magnitude. Clawed away from your side, muscles grown intertwined now tearing apart in shreds so viscerally red and splotchy wet like split molten rock all over our house we've spent 2 years building so painstakingly. They say time flies when you're having fun, but ironically it felt like a long eternity of knowing you. I was having fun until the sweet started rotting my teeth and you couldn't stop clutching your aching side because of how funny I was. Then 2 years felt like 6, 10 and then forever, and I’m convinced I’ve known you for many lifetimes now.
Dakota Crescent is in the process of being demolished after it was announced a few years ago that it was to be redeveloped for public housing. I can’t help but feel absolutely delusional and slaughtered, thinking the greater world, society, and Singapore’s public landscape parallelled the rise and now fall of our silly relationship. The walls that contained our quiet whispers now torn down and soon I will have nowhere to return whenever I would like a quiet, tortured, silent smoke. I’m pretty certain some of the benches still held your scent, seeped deep into the moulding wood, wrestling time and wear to stay embedded there. If the contractors looked hard enough, they’d also see residual adhesives of the stickers of yourself you’ve drizzled around the estate, as if fighting for territory from the 5 other resident cats. Those stickers were everywhere. If they were lucky, they’d find the room we left a whole duvet in, and maybe the sight of it would compel them to weep uncontrollably like the space often compelled us. They may curl in it themselves and lie in it for awhile and maybe, even decide to leave Dakota Crescent alone after all.
4 NOVEMBER 2021
Recently I find myself joining more and more of these Singapore-based Facebook interest groups. They are mostly flora and fauna related, like SG Wildlife Sightings or just cat adoption pages. My latest membership is in Mushroom Spotters (Singapore) and I’ve been quite happy with the permeation of mushroom images on my regular Facebook feed. I’ve also begun painting the ones I find visually and formally fascinating.
Peanut Buttercup Mushroom
Coprinellus Disseminatus
Agaricus Trisulphuratus (or Similar)
I don’t think I’d ever find mushrooms so captivating if I saw it myself in person. It’s really the experience mediated by Facebook that makes it so communal and democratic, almost. It’s the ability to simultaneously read what other Singaporeans are commenting on the sidebar. Most of the times it’s facts about the mushroom subject. Also most times it’s just snobby Singaporean mushroom connoiseurs who are making snarky jokes when someone asks if a Calvatia Sp. can be eaten (obviously it cannot.).
It’s still interesting to see how many people would ask, alongside posting images of some of the most visually complex, colorful, texturous mushrooms I’ve ever seen, if they are edible.
When not asking if these mushrooms can be eaten, most posts are simply captioned “🍄“ which I find absolutely insulting but also strangely appropriate. It seems hilarious that we have 9 different types of flower emojis, but only one mushroom one and yet it still looks more like Toad the Mario character than Toadstool the actual mushroom. I’d like to understand who determines how useable an emoji is and why their aesthetic realism differ so much depending on the subject of the emoji. Are there emojis surveys? Is there a database that tracks the usage of words on the Internet? Our phones? Do these words all end up in a meta-rank, where the highest ranking words are granted visual bragging rights?
It’s funny because at the end of the day, emojis are just representations. Fantasy. But then you remember that all Apple products distributed in China are ordered by the Chinese government to be programmed to exclude Taiwan’s National Flag emoji, and you wonder why it even matters to the State that there is or is not a representation of the Taiwanese Flag, and then you conclude that emojis are actually very real. It reminds me of this quote by Alex Galloway where he claims that “the true is only created by way of an extended detour through falsity”. It seems that real life must always pass through fantasy in order for it to return to the real.
And so maybe these mushrooms, orange as ever, aren’t real at all. Maybe they aren’t real because they can’t be eaten or touched, unless you want to be poisoned. Maybe they aren’t real because only 4,000 people in a country with 6 million people care about them. But these interactions I see online every few hours, maybe, strangers exchanging geo-tags of the log of ears in Bukit Timah Hill, seem doubly real to me.
OCTOBER 2021
Lately, an orb has taken the place of the fingers on my right hand. I only learnt that this happened when I reached for my pen after a few weeks of not writing, which also meant I couldn’t tell for sure when exactly this happened: if it had just transformed that day, or a few weeks prior. The encounter was strange because reaching for things have become so absentminded for me these days, that when I reached for my pen, I didn’t know my fingers were defunct until I heard the sharp clack of plastic on the white floor tile where the pen fell. I remember feeling angry first – a visceral reaction from feeling like I had been cheated by my body which was probably the only material thing I could count on to be faithful to me. Then I remembered being overwhelmed with panic upon processing this dismemberment. I find it funny now, thinking about how in that moment of disorientation, my first instinct was to reach my hand to my forehead, smacking myself straight on with this glass orb palm.
The orb was the sort of black glass that resembled screens – shiny smooth and completely opaque, which seemed contradictory to me. I didn’t think any naturally-existing surface was this shiny nor black nor opaque. Charcoal, feathers of ravens, olives, some type of grains or beans. They were all almost-black, almost-never shiny. Probably the most authentic black I could cognitively fathom would be a dark night in a deserted forest, or a chasm in the earth so deep that the bottom looks like a pool of black honey. At this point I took a mental note that the color I had thought was the most simple of colors as concepts to grasp (black is an extreme, right? and extremes are much more comprehensible than the in-betweens, like green or gray. Extremes like black or white are one-dimensional – any degree of deviation would tarnish the integrity of its nature. it would seem easier to replicate a black than an aquamarine, for instance) was also the hardest to visualise tangibly. It seemed as though the truest black, was an absence or a void, like nighttime or an empty pit.
Maybe I felt that my natural understanding of the world had been violated, which was why I found the orb so repulsive and needed to explain it away. I could feel the orb the same way I could my fingers, except that the sensation felt unified, no longer separated into 5 slender feeling objects but a small entity of magnetism that was kind of just radiating power and force in the center of the orb. I wonder if it could give me answers.
25 MARCH 2021
Far away from
The teeth, the glass tubes of fluorescent neon gas, the brokers of things that happen, the slash and burn people, who come and go as they please, the gaping crack in the false wall, the layer of stale coffee on every neglected desk, the flowers, plastic, the chattering, incessant, the busking travellers, the fights catalysed from half thought out expressions heard whole, the unripened affection received raw, the 26 letters,
There is
An inland lake surrounded by unknown mass of virgin green - fresh moss and woods, with water as clear as the clearest air, in which violently swims a solitary iridescent carp, within whose belly is heart of all fire.
11 JANUARY 2021
The year started with an endless downpour of torrential rain for 3 days straight. It didn't falter for a second. It could have been a sign of divine solidarity for all the tears we've left behind in 2020 that which became the onset of grief from the skies, or a desperate attempt to graciously cleanse the world of a grave sin committed. The sky was one opaque cloud but it was as apparent as the unrelenting cold that we were beginning this year with a dull pain in our side that could no longer be endured.
It seemed apt to leave my umbrella at home....
7 JANUARY 2021
In the morning I sat on the rooftop and watched the flies play hooky. I cancelled my barre class (again) because the rain convinced me to take another nap, which overran as usual. Shivangi awoke me with her call and I told her I found it ridiculous that she was back in Singapore so soon, but secretly I was beyond elated. It felt like forever since I’d heard her voice, it sounded different now that we’re both speaking in the same time zone. She said she’s going insane and I completely understood the claustrophobia, drowning in this spell of life from home. Had I forgotten how to live with family? I’d been balancing conversations precariously all month. She said the silence in her room is enough to drive one crazy, and I couldn’t help but feel like that was all I wanted. To think in silence. By then, it was 3pm and the noise of traffic was still unrelenting, reminding me of another despisable thing living here. I told her I missed her and promised I’d deliver a pack of cigarettes to the reception of her hotel tomorrow
27 DECEMBER 2020
On such and such a day, at such and such a time, I cannot seem to find my hands. What has come from my knowing and receiving of such a mercy is, strangely, the loss of... focus? I laugh because I see it now, a love triangle – the drama! the novelty! the yearning! And perhaps I cannot escape it. But focus is sweet and fleeting and it may be that I have lost grasp of it entirely with the newfound clarity of this struggle, ironically. I write this as I am illegally dwelling in my room of which I’ve been evacuated from for the winter break: A sheetless bed and empty shelves it is now. I’ve also torn down the calendar I drew but never filled from my walls so they are bare and lacking too. Apparently they audit the taps to weed out illegal trespassers like me, but I didn’t lock my door before I left so for now I am just a vague presence enjoying the quiet in my non-room. This is what I mean: I am thinking and with too many colons and –s, and I cannot focus on my hands – I have no idea where they are! I have so many things, real things, to do right now but all I am is angry – at being distracted; that my thoughts congeal so incoherently these days; that I am unfocused.
16 DECEMBER 2020
I smoothed my hair with the aid of the streetlamp and the mirror of a stationary van parked by the street. I walked the same road, away, but it was different, there was a sense of finality this time. There was another feeling that accompanied this – a type of mounting panic and feeling extremely unqualified. I think it was the realisation that I left more of myself than I’d like to admit with you – disembodied and so innocently trusting. With revulsion and terror I decided to leave the truncation behind into the emptiness. I waited for the thud of it’s landing; it never sounded.
9 DECEMBER 2020
the air is chilly and when I touch your hands, they are icy. we sit, crosslegged, on the grass to absorb the slight warmth of the earth, though we probably conjured the warmth in our heads for it had just showered, and in reality, it was moist and cold. it was thick and humid so I had kept removing my glasses to wipe them after each time I spoke. we didn’t converse much but I was always asking if you were okay, and you always nodded, probably to prevent your glasses from fogging up like mine, or probably because you were not okay. I remember when things were not always this way, days when the sun would make me shrink. but you, who taught me this embracing of loneliness, stillness, of grieving differently. We sit in silence and worship the sound of large toads.
22 NOVEMBER 2020
In any case it seems I will have to resign myself to something like a poised apprehensiveness; befriending phantoms which believe they have bodies and using cups that claim to hold oceans.
19 NOVEMBER 2020
How many times do you walk down this street feeling this way? You think you would have grown to expect the feeling every time you expect yourself to turn that curb, round the street, and so you try and brace yourself for it, but sometimes, a cricket catches your eye and you are momentarily distracted, your mind wandering to the little bug and its seizing of the afternoon, yet the familiar momentum of your feet collapsing over one another catches your mind off guard, triggering this feeling that you’ve felt forever but could never place - somewhere between the sun and where its rays hit you, time-wise less than a split of a millisecond, distance-wise over 100 million kilometers - somewhere between this elastic theoretical space of the sun and its contact with your palm or your eyelash, you are ambushed by this feeling, and maybe it is kind to you that day and you still manage to run for the bus, or maybe, like most days, it engulfs you wholly and you stop mid-step at this very corner of the street and indulge it because you always feel strange walking by here anyways, so, like most days, you search for the cricket, or any other cricket, and stare at it for long, though you do not really pay attention.
12 NOVEMBER 2020
It’s been an average middle-light now for five months straight. The atmosphere simply won’t crest over into some determinant appearance of dawn or dusk. The maddening conditions are not just limited to weather-based instrument dependence either, every person is disappointing and every step is indecisively dull. To break up the monotony I have been climbing down the steep cliff to the narrow strip of beach to swim. The waves usually being quite large, always stirred up the sediment so I could never quite see the bottom — which I had assumed was simply sand and large flat boulders. After my last swim though, the water became quite glassy — and from up high I was able to see that the boulders were not boulders but some sort of giant, flat, very slow maneuvering fishes. Now I daren’t even do that activity anymore. When not worrying about the dread of fish, of movement, of swimming over moving fishes, I nap quietly in my room. Here at least in a state akin to solitude, I can be small and untroubled; occasionally looking up at the distant orange-gray horizon.
7 NOVEMBER 2020
I can say now that I do love you
But only in the sad narcissistic selfish way
Because your pain is my pain, so I guess I love myself
I will go to bed and hide from everyone for you, I promise I will ignore calls for you. You can perform and I will pretend to enjoy it so I don’t hurt your feelings,
hold your hand and squeeze it when you start tearing up. Before you swallow your spit this morning, you will know that I do love you.
3 NOVEMBER 2020
Our thoughts are jumping, their feet on hot coal for brief seconds before they take flight and then descend again. We can barely ruminate before they jerk away, having rested too long on the heat; quick evasions of 3rd degree burns. The resulting sight is spectacular – beads of red are shooting up and down. And this bed of coal, it radiates and glows and at first you think it is comforting and you smile. It consumes your entire body – you cannot do anything about this lack of impulse, you can only wallow. When we want something too much we feel ourselves losing our grip, and whatever it is slips through the crevices between your fingers. Every ounce of hope that falls through doesn’t hurt as much as the bit that you catch. That bit relies on misfortune and it thrives best in suffering.
And such is the depressing state of things - that we all crave visibility, and yet we desire to be anonymous. Nothing in this entrapped consciousness will grant us either. You see an etching on the side of the bus stop and you swear you’ve seen it before. A close friend of a friend passes by and your faces are poised to talk, sometimes you do, but only basic, phatic phrases like how are you? or you look like you could use a vacation. or you can say that again! Words no longer land - the image and the stories are neurologically weightless because your experiences have been rendered fleeting just by repetition. Maybe the only solace is an acceptance that hope may be destitute, that you are forever known, but never seen.
3 NOVEMBER 2020
This morning after waking from who knows where, you dallied a bit, remaining in bed. As is sometimes the case, through a very thin and long vertical slit, between the window edge and blinds, we watched the slightly undulating, furiously intricate overlapping branches of the leaves and the butterfly bushes — their mysterious arterial violence. A few minutes later, staring into yourself at the toilet vanity, you were absently mesmerized by the spectacular moiré pattern caused by the interaction of the drawn shade and the window screen over your face. And on the ceiling, two lizards were circling in dance and so you knew that they must have loved or hated each other.
24 OCTOBER 2020
the door i left ajar i came back to unhinged
held up only by the slightest visiting wind;
i have never seen creaks so loud. long,
comforting, someone must have stayed here
long enough to replace all the grout to grass.
i have never seen a house so lonely
in all its quaint spaces and quiet furniture
everything stood in perfect stillness -
i have yet to take a step inside
to dirty my hands with thousand year old rust
from old wilting gates i used to recognise
it was only a few heavy steps taken until
the house spoke to me, in nostalgic languages
of bleary images and fuzzy sentiments.
i used to be better at recounting a past life before realising that i am the house, the person,
the image i no longer see
if I shouted in this space I don't think it would echo,
I would not want to disturb the dust that have settled -
so snug, cosy, humming softly in deep sleep.
in this space i can cry properly, it comes in quiet shakes
in harmony with the wind. surely the roaming stray cats will join the
orchestra, they were almost always in reach.
i would like to go to a place of less density,
i miss the expanse. is it over-dramatic to despise artificial light?
the thick smell of the room drives me hysterical, vaguely scented
of petty conversation and the wallpaper is flirting with me, but
i don’t think there is anything witty about claustrophobia
WITH FARIZI, 26 APRIL 2020
At this point you have become so closely intertwined with me that I cannot bear to imagine a reality without you. Emptiness is like a closet filled with all your old clothes. It is the mess on my bed, left untouched every morning, because I do not have the patience that you did so tenderly to make sure I came home to warm freshness of a reset day. It is all the times I listen to a song and slowly realise as the lyrics anger me so viscerally that I am just another bolt in this cliche love trope, and that we are nothing special, but I put what is us on a pedestal and I worship it because, because? Maybe I am writing this with the intention of being sickeningly pretentious because maybe that was what we are, fighting against all odds, ignoring every problem because we were too busy being hidden in each others blind rash embrace and fingerlocks. But I do mean it with utmost sincerity when I say that we belong to ourselves. I love you and I love you fiercely because you are soft and wet and sad and I am also wet and sad but I am tough. And I cannot love anyone who isn’t sad, because maybe I don’t know how to empathise with happiness. Maybe we were just meant to exist on different planes of reality and you would have been a mother elephant and I your fierce rider. Maybe it is because everyone tells me you are lovely that I find you unbearably so, and maybe it is because everyone tells me that it is impossible that that I find any other option but being together extremely repulsive. I love you because I don’t think there is anyone else in the world who can understand me and misunderstand me as profoundly as you. I think of you every time my mind wanders to the possibility of a future where nothing else but the sake of simply being matters. Where we can sip on sparkling apple juice and pretend to be exorbitantly rich and funny. Maybe this will be the last I will write about you.
MARCH 2020
A couple of days ago, I had just got off a call with Rui after feeling terrible for a whole week. She didn’t message me right after, but the next morning, I woke up to her text: “Remember to be mindful and present Kimmy!”. I don’t know why I felt instantly nourished at the reminder to be mindful and present. It was such an appropriate and right thing to hear and I felt as though I was snapped out of a certain headspace that governed my entire way of living for so many years. Somewhere down the road I had conditioned myself to think I was always mindful, so much so that it took the very mention of being mindful for me to just know, in a split second, that I had never been mindful in my life. I don’t know where this false consciousness stemmed from, and I don’t want to attempt to psychoanalyse my childhood for answers to questions I have now, thinking they’d alleviate the pain and drain I’m feeling as a young adult, maturing at full force. I did, however, think about it briefly when I was looking at my younger sister blowing out her birthday candles just last week (she had just turned 12). Maybe it was the sight of her soft face being lit by candles – she radiated a pure goodness that I’d never known to exist in myself, ever. I wondered if it was because she had spent her entire life receiving attention and that I had spent a lot of my life fighting for it. It wasn’t a bad thing, it mattered more that I owned whatever state I existed in than it did that everyone around me were pleased with the things I said. And that was simply it, I grew up always striving to be “independent”, or whatever version of independent that I had thought it meant, but that inevitably led to me growing up pretty fucking vicious. I’m starting to understand now that the emotion that stirred in me when I looked at my younger sister was a passive jealousy and an active anger – I want to be so simply good and kind and mindful.
MARCH 2020
I hop off the bus with my dirty toes, wearing the weariness of what felt like 4 hours sitting. Collisions of rain and road/grass/glass/metals because obviously it had to be pouring tonight. The one time I looked outside thick branches reached out – about to touch my face, slamming violently into the window instead, as if punishing me, but at the same time restraining from doing so. So the branches kept not-slapping me repeatedly, and I stared hard at my reflection on the glass, wishing her better days.
The first thing I did was go to the beach and found a seashell. I listened to it but i could not understand what it was saying. Moments later, I realised I had picked up a croissant, not a seashell. I was very unfocused that day and to be honest, I just picked up the first thing I saw because I was eager to find some answers.
I ran home after that, retreating back into covers and sheets. I had, within it, constructed a society of burdened people – all alternatives of myself, each claiming one of every regrettable thing I have ever done. I dream of the same thing again, like always: standing in the centre of this enormous room; a spatial void; an absence of containment. I couldn’t process why I couldn’t run forward. There was an ongoing score playing - so sharply, piano. An endless loop of a classical classic, but in the minor key. It is the sound that you hear when you see an ant running frantically around his dead comrade, the sound that is made whenever you see a plane in the sky, or whenever you look down from a plane in the sky. It was worse when I realised I couldn’t run backward either. Usually when this happens, the sound gets so loud, the sound, blaring, becomes a singular note. The scene transitions – the score cuts off immediately, and then everything dissipates. I know this is how every dream ends, with chirping. It was a blissful sight to witness us sipping water from a creek in my dreams.
MARCH 2020
I am glad that I am here.
Here, the birds almost land on your shoulders and they also wail properly – crude and insulting, forceful, like they mean it. Here, the winds crawl up every pillar to tickle the highest leaf and whistle at you while the leaves wink. How redeeming it can be to be so unproductive.
IN PERTH, FEBRUARY 2020