instead-questions

 

Very rarely do we say what we mean. Isn't that one of the unique traits of being a human? -- the species that not only wages war against our own... but the species most skilled at lying. But it's not the malicious lie that I am referring to, not even the white lie if for a more innocent counterpart.

I am thinking of a kind of indirectness in-built, the kind of foggy that is DNA-like... one could say, the lies that we tell because we don't know, and the not knowing that grows out of the utter complexity of personality. The 'lies' we tell in the questions we ask, "How was your day?" for instance, and the answer we seek not being the quality of said day --"Good, Fine, Could be Better'--, nor the details of it... The answer we seek instead being whether or not we were thought of that day, what was keeping you so occupied that day that you couldn't call, what was the particular event that etched this smile on your face, what can I do to make you laugh so hard– 

a series of infinite instead-questions.

This almost feels like a no-brainer. We know we do this, we do it all the time. 

But isn't the depth of each moment, each question, each etymology so shallow? Too shallow to capture all this multitude of what we actually mean... What we actually mean becomes a maze in space and time, also a constant back and forth of "does uncovering what we actually mean even matter?"

 dear you,

my mind is foggy and i consider crawling back into bed for a semi-sleep

too tired to arise and too awake to fall

i am afraid because i always end up thinking about him. 

it has been 3 years now, can you believe it?

3 years of love, 3 years of pain, 3 years of avoidance only to run circles around him.

this relationship has unfurled so much of what i thought i knew

what i thought i had a grasp on

and it is true when i say this process has been so excruciating i don't know how to continue on living.

how could it be, that a singular person becomes my entire world?

how could it be, that I will let everything fall just for him?

he goes on living

occasionally reaches out to me again and I grab his hands thanking him for oxygen.

but he is doing alright, 

he works better by forgetting and that has always been a better route than begging.

in my clearer times I know he's only a drop in the ocean

that there will be others, 

kind of. 

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to have.

but other times I think about how rich he makes me feel just by holding my hand

I think about how the stars led us

I think about how this is not your ordinary, and just as quickly I think I am arrogant and naive.

But is it so crazy? if someone else could exist in my body when I am next to him,

will they come out of it saying, "I see"?

but does that really matter?

he has grown accustomed to my begging

almost lives off it from time to time;

it does not break his heart that I am breaking on my knees

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to have.

it does not hurt him to leave me crying

maybe it does but it seems easier for him to turn away

and come back the next morning hoping I should be okay

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to have.

i know people have to move on

i know distance and forgetting is necessary

yet I reach out my hands to him and though it stings him, he kisses them

in my clearer times I know if this is love it is not the kind I want to give.

apr16

 hello, stranger.

so much has changed - for one, I feel particularly constipated to the thought of writing. I seem to remember times ago when writing came to me like an arrival of a calm sea, when symbolism curled into the central dip on my tongue and low murmurs pieced words together inside my head. Now, I sit and attempt to summon them. 

Nothing much makes sense: the 10 tabs I have for that presentation next week, that language dossier, that reading I have to do. Moments of confusion, a feeling of a distant memory that these were once important. I grow more and more convinced that we live within an illusory world we have to fight to emerge from with our own will. We tread a deceptive line where the daily endeavour is to reach such recognition. I don't know whether to be sympathetic to myself and the people around me. I don't know whether it is naive to hold hope that we know, that in our own ways we will supplant it.

As for now, we are still caught. Day in and day out, the same worries and frustrations. I struggle to find a voice to drown out those loudest, amplified by the very things that I have grown accustomed to believing. 

oil and water

 Dear you,

The environment seems to have become averse to me. In places where I had found most support and stability now present threats and sources of disconcertion - in worse cases, agony. There is a feeling that I hold which I am not sure whether can be simply called stubbornness. There is a feeling that they, their opinions and preferences, do not matter. That they are simply in passing, and that they have not gone through as much consideration as I do. 

The rain begins to patter and I wonder if hope it's in reassurance.

Of course, I steady myself. Caution not to become ungrateful and selfish. These are the people who care... But I also have to set my own boundaries, conquer my own battles and learn for myself. And this is where I am at. Such an uncomfortable position, so tenuous that the very ground which I place my feet seems to beg me to find someplace else. 

Is Love worth this? Is Love manifested in such fickle and transient a thing as a fellow human being worth some things that might never return? Worth poor impressions and waning relationships. I suppose now it is to ask, which ones? Whose impressions and which relationships? I ought to say more to my mother. But it seems to take so much from me. Vulnerability has been ringed to its maximum, bravery finds 'better days'. More than once it feels like my blood has become only a dilution, everything has lost its density. I float and hope for somebody to hold me. 

 the child evades responsibility

is let off on ignorance, know-no-betters and some snacks

is not held to account... 

when does personality meet with society?

a rip through my sail

 writing seems foreign and forced, I have come to the stage of having too little time, energy and bravery to traverse the limitations of language and thus put all my thoughts and waves into script. here, tonight I try again. I am thinking about wild abandon, about short-livedness and youth, and about the way in which I want to live. 

from the kitchen I hear my mother speak of her angel, sensible and unproblematic, me, and tears arise with as much thought as when my body convulses on its own will. how fright and vulnerability overtake me, the kind which I can no longer rationalise away or at least alleviate through a next course of action. I lay there sprawled out and naked, as the grey seeps and colours over and as my heart swells such as to be felt as far as to my left hand. so different and yet so similar, and I understand more clearly the disjunct between life and heart. the latter does not seem enough. a year ago I argued otherwise, and today I seek reasons to support this wavering conviction.

i have learnt a little more about the present moment, about listening to my body, and about doing away with the impressions of others. and with it it seems that the notion of forever is fading. the things we do that secure this illusion of forever strikes me as tenuous, almost frivolous now. for instance, marriage seems to be a convenient settling, or a dulling of some sort, the attempt to hold on when everything is meant only to pass. why keep it in your grasp only for it to wilt between your fingers? it strikes as a forced delineation around something as vast and as irrepressible as love. it assumes that people cannot change beyond recognition, if not that then beyond what your love can tolerate, or beyond what your own needs can be neglected for.

is this an inescapable human dilemma? we have learnt about utility and self-preservation, but there is something about society, empathy and a love for others that has not yet been expounded enough, in my personal knowledge and experience. I had never before realised the extent to which one can love and forgive as to run contrary to the self. where another can supersede the self to such degree, and internal conflict can so arise. sometimes when that seems too much, when it feels like the self is such an impenetrable and formidable barrier, i wish to collapse into myself, fade into oblivion. i wish for ignorance, a stubborn resistance to the future, for my body to be a mere rag doll thrown and flung along with the whims of life, for my thoughts to dissipate as fast as they form, without a trace.

but i am not so. the times i am able to pretend, i rise again. "i'm weak from all the things that i know," - how things ought to be, what about the self to protect and preserve, what to accept and what to object to, they flood my mind and do not seem so instinctive anymore. what defines a human being? everything seems to be getting thinner and less substantial. what can be counted on? 

oceans

lovers, side by side

in bed with fingers curled around the others

inching ever so closely to the poignancy of a pain that we cannot take away,

questions that we wish we could answer for each other

things we wish could be made simpler with a gentle kiss.

he caresses my face

i realise after a while when everything else boils over 

all the spark and passion simmers down into the slight shake of the hand as it slides over skin

an exploration of terrain we often think already familiar.

But no, you don't know the earthquakes

I didn't know until it shook through my body and made my nerves jolt out of character.

I say "oh dear, oh dear" 

how deep the wreckage,

i try to turn away to save you from drowning. 

xx

Possibility

 I miss you - 

I really only miss a possibility. Servants, we are, to possibility.

What I said was true, I will always love you. I will always love you for the fact that you are human, that I saw and understood. I will always love you for the fact that I cannot separate the layers of fear, ego, trauma, selfishness, awareness, chosen ignorance, love, selfishness - the layers of the things that I forgive and those that I cannot. Too much they are to decipher and say for certain, too many conditions to hating you so instead, I choose love. A product of confusion and resignation, cowardice and fatigue.

I'd like to be there for you. To an extent I see that there is a saviour complex of mine that I seek through you, I will not kid myself. I think I am strong, mature enough to help you in the capacity that I hope I can, with a dynamic between us that will be a constant struggle for us to maintain, 'friends'. But the truth is I will hurt to see you with someone else. That now, as long as I am by your side, I will want you to myself. What in this world can we really own? Not even ourselves.

So you are figment. My capacity for imagination in full swing. I grasp onto you in my dreams -literally-, my heart aches and I inhale smoke for a void that I deceive myself into thinking is only the absence of You. I think all the questions will be answered and all the pain erased if only I could hold your face and be in your embrace. How absurd a thought. Dancing in your bedroom, soon I'd melt into the floor and soon you'd look through me just like you did when you got what you wanted, when we want only what we can't have. 

xx

nicotine stains

I

 everytime i want to smoke but have run out of cigarettes my heart skips a beat just like the second time i met you.

it is quiet, begs no attention from the unacquainted, for a moment fools me into thinking I could be ignorant.

but the gaping sits and leers the way the smoke curls around unseen drafts of air

its lightness and translucency so easily mistaken

look closely – the two ends of a noose.

It descends and tightens around my windpipe,

sends my heart into shatters,

dances among them, veering in and between.

a celebration of their diurnal work

a ceremony of deadly love

to me, their king

II

this time there are none and I exhale only the stale air that has caressed my lungs

i resolve to the touch that will never have the warmth of yours

i resolve to the disillusionment that has made that warmth only of your mortal blood.

my heart skips a beat and i try to hold ground as something tremors,

excruciating,

white-knuckle sobriety.

III

it is true you have defiled even the lightest parts of my body

with your nicotine stains and all your mind games

I, a willing participant.

from your parted lips I mistook the smoke for life force

an exchange of gaseous hopes

Ingestion did not happen. I had wondered why I still felt empty.

But I sit with the stale air,

And now, let the words flicker and curl 

the beginning of healing

xx

 you were afraid of the intensity of my love

 the night comes and the midriff becomes the instigator

i walk around the playground so he will not see me

another! and i curve inwards only to walk into a post

for a split second i think he is not the sort, not tonight, not one after another

but on his bicycle he does not look down, only straight at me.

i recover from the concrete pressed into my toes

just as he murmurs a suggestive hello.

does my knit cardigan have too many holes?

i wish to disappear

to deny a gaze, to be seen any longer

who do i think i am? 

what flattery you give yourself.

moments after

and i am still contorted 

limbs crossed over each other as if that would help force me into non-existence.

foggy morning

 yes, a fogginess. one that has persisted for almost this whole semester, and I am so conscious of my measurement of time by the school calendar. 

i imagine it is like a dot of concentrated ink, while the rest of the diluted colours and textures fade into insignificance. a moment of climatic intensity enough to stop the earth's orbit short and refuse Time into mythology. no, not Love. I've moved past this nebulous concept and reserved it for more luminescent moments. but i think, the meeting of two beings, in all their complexity; a willing undertaking of mutual reckoning and recognition. a striking awareness of the human hope and insecurity. 

indeed, to experience such and to lose it - as it must have its season -, is to rediscover Time again. questioning what it means for each break of day and fall of night, each task and responsibility of this point of life. is to have new vocabulary and imagery etched into the mind's archives, to describe every subsequent thing in the language that has been so tinged with the life force of another. 

so forgive me, if i am living in a fog. i don't quite know who i am seeking forgiveness from. but i believe that with time the fog will clear, even if just enough to see the path in front of me. the words will learn to reconcile, the heart will loosen its grip on the past. and i will be my new person, not fearing nor regretting, only being what Nature is.

 there's an aimlessness that wafts in and around me, one that I've never quite experienced before. i think if it is conviction that has faded, try to pinpoint whatever it was that made it all okay.

up and out

 Dear you,

it's 4:36am and I have slept for about 3.5 hours. But my mind flips and tosses over so many thoughts. I suppose it might be because of the sheer amount of stimuli I received yesterday - a whole afternoon of dance camp (1.5h of Jazzfunk and Dancehall, back to back), and a wonderful night with my tusduh mates in our Halloween makeup. I think about Dawn; I recently got to eating a spontaneous lunch with her (Sodexo's Halloween Lunch - nubbad but my burger was cold :')) and was so taken by her. I'd never properly spoken to her before but we'd always known of each other's existence. I think once last year I complimented her shirt and we are in the same Intro to the Philosophy of Art class. During lunch, she spoke about a bar that she liked, about trusting time and your growth along with it such that you will naturally move on from things that cease to be useful or have meaning from your life. It was nice. The kind of open-hearted release of thoughts you know have been brooded upon and been in marination. That kind of introspection. I'd like to get to know her more! In some ways I'd like emulate her too! Idk. She's a really good dancer, and I saw her help take videos and photos for dance camp. And there was that sort of you could say transcendent movement (in the Existentialist sense) that she exhibited which spurs the same aspiration in me. 

Yes - that's it - that transcendent movement. An aspiration that I suppose I've always had, and which has been encouraged by my environment. Qiutong working on her resin cast of faces (ok many of Ivan's face), Sunwoo drawing almost everyday and creating a website to sell his art and learning how to stick-and-poke. Düny's forward-thinking, her looking at houses and comparing prices, looking at semester abroad opportunities and considering her options. Sofie's becoming a vocal coach, literally counting the number of roles she could audition for as a queer female, confronting her lecturer about typecasting. Tammie's achieving the Dean's list! Ivan and Lea applying for the NUS Museum Internship...

All these things. And I realise I seek less for the achievements than that general hope to surpass myself, and also just to have a 'firmer grasp on things'. I don't know how to best explain it, but I do realise that many things I do simply to pass the motions, to get it done. But I'd like start to in some ways do it 'right', to consider the art and science behind each thing more. Whether it's the way I chop vegetables and cut a melon, the way I make coffee (I want to make better coffee for myself), the way I approach what happens in school and what I learn, knowing the names and how best to care for my plant babies. I want to be able to answer people more confidently, to be more sure that I have processed and considered these things before, and to put across my views on them with assurance of their validity. There's definitely been progress in that since the last year, and my conversations with friends have been proof of that. But the hope to continue still stands.

I have also been thinking about my past few weeks as being some of immanence (deviating from the full definition in Existentialism but similar concept). They have been necessary and part of my process of healing. But I think there's a fire in my heart that is slowly growing again, burning and seeking. 

xx

'the last word'

 who are you when you cease to be who you thought you were? and so maybe what one is is never transfixed, ever in motion, and we can never expect ourselves of anything.

 I am still trying to find my words. But i have none left to say

you have hurt me beyond measure

& i can only hope that in time you'll understand

because i'm spent, trying to verify myself to you.

 I am still trying to find my words. You see, you had taken them away for a while. You had me breathless, reckless, led by the heart and sprung off by impulse. Within that small month and a half, when I did write, the dimness kissed my skin in the same way you do, and I wrote about you- your lips and your hands around my waist. There was no need for words, only you. And the things more complicated and which I thought about as I navigated your whirlpool of a mind, I didn't know quite how to write about either. So words were left on the back-burner   while I was all over you.

Even now, the act still occurs to me as unnecessary. If I do not have you to hold I know the curves of each letter do not either. You are a wisp of purple and blue light dancing with the dust, an enigma that is of my own more than anything. Although I know you too are a complex creature whose habits and tendencies I've only managed to prod and observe the surface of. 

It is already murky there. Ashy and littered with solid things, stubborn and unbudging. I had a sense of that by the third time we met. I say the third time although I can't remember what was the third time or what we did or where we went -SQ that's it-. Maybe not so precisely the third time but nonetheless a sense that accumulated in strength from early on. I felt it: first, the particles that disturbed the course - the apparent red flags I should've heeded. But that was when I realised that that quality did not diminish my adoration. I was not a mere hopeless romantic with a constructed ideal. I was aware of the ways you limped but I still thought you wonderful. The parts of you that my theorising self was averse to did not repulse me. I wonder if it was hope that smoothed its rough surface. Hope appears to reveal its strength more and more as time goes by. 

Aug 20

loneliness blurs so many lines--
do you need me for me, and I, you for you?
or are we just two bodies looking for some warmth
and kisses in places long neglected?