“On 20″

And meanwhile, I still like him in an odd, not, sort of way.
He still puts an undefinable smile on my face,
and I’m wondering if maybe,
just maybe,
all this might just be okay.

“”To catch a love” / Don’t fail me, net”

He came

and

I went.

(And that was the end of things.)

\

To catch a love,
you must not use the splintered
cup of your hands, but fling open

the net of an entire life
sewn from the cicatrix of every
secret loss and wrecked desire.

- Vivace, ‘Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light’, Cyril Wong

I have a net that is
20 years rich
20 years deep
20 years vast and
20 years wide.

Don’t fail me.

“Con Te Partirò”

It is a quiet day today.

I woke up feeling inexplicably happy.

On my way to work I stayed unnaturally dandy.

All alone at work I try to stay driven enough to accomplish something.

I’m still trying to stay happy-dandy now.

The silence can be rather stifling.

Think
happydandyhappydandyhappy

“milling about aimlessly”

I’m really glad for E-bum-bums today.

He helped me perkify my day

and amply distracted me from the

absence of the one who is still unreachable

even though he returned today.

“It is no crime to want him.”

Talking with KY yesterday, mostly the snippets of smses that came after, has made me realise something about love:

Love is enduring.
Love means waiting, for however long you have to wait.
Even if it’s futile, love will carry on waiting,
because who knows the end until it’s all over?

So if I love him, I will wait for him.
Even if everyday, he grows a little less tender.
Even if after the end of this year, I never see or talk to him again.

Lovers exult in the giving, not receiving, of their love.

So I think when he comes back, I can
bring myself to look at him for longer than is necessary
greet and welcome him back with a little less breath
and smile with a genuine twinkle in my eye.

(And most importantly, not berate myself to death for my transparency.)

\

And I wonder why I’ve never fallen in love.

I’ve always given up at a sign of distress,
so afraid of the portent of rejection
that I’d rather let go first.

That is not love,
that is self-preservation crippling oneself.

“-imagined- part two \ I’ve decided to christen him Peter.”

‘Do you like me?’

She turns in a flash, a whiplash of ponytail flying. Her face is astonished.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I’m not certain.’ Or he gives a shrug, perhaps.

Her eyes go to half-mast. Her gaze is both cynical and weighing.

‘And why might you think that?’

An eternal pause.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well,’ she says with a sigh that resounds through the ages (and it is unclear if she tells truth or lies), ‘Well, I don’t know either.’

“When drifting…”

It’s like you’re drifting.
It’s like you’re drifting and suddenly you see a line,
and you think, Maybe this line will finally bring me to shore.
Maybe finally, I can come to the shore of this.

So you grab on to it.
And you don’t just grab on to it, you cling to it.
And you think, this is a very fine line indeed.
It looks firm and sturdy.
If it wanted to,
this line could bear me
ashore.

But it doesn’t lead you ashore.
It leaves you adrift.
It teases you with its comings and goings,
its shimmerings and flickerings,
and you really aren’t sure if it’s
really there or just your imagining.

You just don’t know.

And you don’t know what to do now either.
Do you hang on to it?
Do you let go and continue to drift?

It slips through your fingers so quickly,
with such ease.
You think perhaps you should stop believing in it.

That way, when it finally slips,
you won’t feel so heartbroken about it -
that one more missed chance to the shore.

You’ll have to wait an eternity for the next one now.
(And just think, you were beginning to so love it.)

“Persisting”

From C:
“But if you love him and he loves you I will understand because your
father and i love you very much and want you to be happy.

I dunno, do you really like him? Or is it just because he’s there,
he’s the someone who’s there at this time so all your affections and
longings become concentrated on him.”

And from me:
“But no, again, no love at all. Maybe no more like as well in the near future. Maybe nothing at all, just a flickering briefly. :) You know how it always is for me.

I would talk on it more but I don’t even know how I feel now. So I can’t even talk about the longevity of my feeling. Can I point you to my blog instead please? I don’t know what to feel anyhow. Better not to feel anyway. Just let things peter out naturally. (I’m trying to extinguish all hope, you see.)”

I am trying not to let this make me feel unhappy.

“When drowning…”

I’m here again at my secret spot @ Sinema Old School!

I’m seeing the same things I saw on Monday night (#2 posts ago) except the sky is not so violet and much darker, plus there are rather noisy construction sounds now.

Something has changed since Monday.

I wonder if I can now write again.

\

I guess I should go into the intricacies of what I am feeling:

Well, I’m feeling pretty indefinable now.

The concrete step I’m seated on is hard and unrelenting and I want to push myself backwards to rest on the grungy brick wall but it’s rather dirty and there’s the carcass of an insect stuck on it somewhere so I don’t want to be near that.

My skin is breaking out so I’m rather conscious of that and don’t really want to be seen by all and sundry. I have my 200 grams of Famous Amos No-Nut Chocolate Chip cookies beside me on my bag and I’m rather afraid the big ants (and what big ants!) that populate this area will get to them.

I think I need to sit here for about an hour and a half more, what for I too do not know. I mean, it’s not important to wait for KY, E and Pr to come out of the theatre to go. I wonder what else I’m lingering here for.

I’m afraid of turning into someone who can only appreciate the beauty of humanity in the cinema. I’m afraid that he’s turned into someone like that. Everything’s always so much more moving on the screen, when you’ve been taken out of the equation and can be a voyeur to it. But what can beat having yourself experience it?

I don’t want my life to always be a proxy. To always feed on the dreams and livings of others. I’m tired of knowing nothing for my very self.

/

I wanted to go in actually. I wanted to watch ’12 Storeys’ with all of them. I wanted to have my -imagined- scene which I might very well have in a movie like this.

But I’d forgotten about what I’d -imagined-. And I don’t particularly want to be seen, and I can always watch, will have to watch that film in office.

The truth is,
an iota of me won’t stop hoping that he might, could, maybe would come after me. Bother about where I am. Worry about how I’m being.

But I know better, of course, than to pay even the slightest more attention to it -
this vacant dream.

There are noises in the stairwell behind me. A man, a man with a woman (oh, the possibilities).

I am alone now.

I hope they don’t find me.

“-imagined- part one”

The lights in the cinema hall have been turned up but would still be considered dim.

In the semi-darkness, the chiaroscuro play of light and shadow upon her face brings into stark contrast the trail of tears on her stained skin.

“What’s wrong?” he asks in consternation, and perhaps a little fear.

“I am lonely,” is her shocked reply. Her eyes are luminous and limpid.

“I thought I wasn’t, but now I realise that I have been lonely all these years.”

“ILLUSORY”

I’m not sad.
I’m not tearing.

\

So I went with him to the place with all the others just so I could be close to him, bask in his presence, breathe the air that he breathed and maybe, just maybe, even earn a few words, or even a smile from him.

I stood apart from the group (never a part) and watched the walls as everyone’s eyes fell on everything but me. I became the definition of invisibility.

So I went away. I know better than to stay in a place where I don’t belong. (I’ve had so much of that already, too much) I wandered away and no one saw me or cared that I would leave.

Earlier on, I’d told him, I’d told him I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know anybody and so he had to talk to me and he didn’t promise to talk to me, just gave me a laugh, and then, and then I should have known.

It was as I’d expected, silence from all four corners but the thudding of the rain on the roofs. So I wandered away and explored by myself and it was alright, and it was dandy. And at some point, he called and perhaps, was a little disappointed that I couldn’t do what he expected of me (what did he expect of me?) and cajole as he might, I wouldn’t go back to being wallpaper, I’d rather be alone than a pariah.

And still I was alright. I peeped into windows and glass on doors and saw many magical things, things I would have liked to put my hands on, things I would have wanted to visit.

Till I came to this place, with a peace like sitting on the steps of the Cultural Hall in the old Bukit Timah chapel and staring at the sky above the fence had given me. (compare the views below)

And once more it was raining, and there was no one, and I was dandy.

So I sat and talked to Vv then tried to write, tried so hard to write but always, was coming up empty, scrawling strings that made no sense, that lacked coherence of feeling. And I wondered why, and I wondered if it was maybe because I didn’t love anybody, or maybe because I didn’t have him beside me.

/

At a certain point, I felt, it would be good now to leave. So I took a final video of my surroundings so as to commit the scene always in my memory then got up, sent him a message saying, ‘I am going to leave now, goodbye’, then walked half in the rain, half in shade, out the building, down its winding road to the bottom of the hill, walking, walking and humming to myself intermittently.

As I neared the foot of the hill, he called and wanted me to hail a taxi back and to let him know when I was home and he asked if I had an umbrella and said that it was raining but I chirpily told him it was only drizzling and that I was nearing the train station already. Then swiftly bid him goodbye again.

And when I reached the foot of the hill and realised that I was not at the place I had meant to be going, that I was lost – I somehow really, really, really felt like crying.

But I made my way around, found a familiar landmark and two and finally made it back home and sent him this,
‘I’m back home now. I’m sorry if I troubled or disappointed you.’

And this was his reply,
‘Good good. Nah, dun worry about it.’

And somehow, somehow, something in me cried indeed.

“After Fumigating Abortively”

It’s funny.

When he’s away and not here to do damage control in the office, to make the decisions we need him to make and order us all into a functioning little group like the leader he is, (you could say, when he’s being irresponsible?) I keep thinking -

I want to be a source of strength to that person.
I want to be here always to support him.

How bizarre, indeed.

“(I’ll get my kicks wherever they’ll be had.)”

I suppose it would be mild distressing to think:
I want some part of my life to revolve around him,
I want some part of myself to touch his.

And even worse:
I want for him to come to mean something more to me,
I want for him to want the same thing.

So I don’t think.
I pile myself with work and dull living and
laugh into the spaces between.
(I get high on a glimpse of his smile or profile,
and explode after dealings with him.)

(I’ll get my kicks wherever they’ll be had.)

It is not an unhappy existence.
You just need to remind yourself never to dream.