Reflect in the Reservoirs

I had some wild idea to call you up and have one final meet with you next Tuesday or Wednesday evening for the cusp of my 23rd year. I thought it’d be like peeking into an alternate life, seeing how you have changed and grown some more and moved on since I am slightly curious with what you’ve been doing with yourself since things were upended in July. I hope you’re still doing what you love and I’m quite sure you are. You’re true to your passions — that’s part of what made me fall. I thought it’d be nice to just spend an hour or two distracted from my own life and its convolutions to hear about yours, and I do still owe you your Christmas and birthday present from last year and this one respectively. (My mum points out how my strange boy and you are both Arians, and I’m gobsmacked but you two do fit the sign quite closely somehow.) I thought it’d comfort me somewhat, to remember what kind of man I really want to spend my life with, even though you’re not so close to that image anymore.

My father’s vehemently against it though since he thinks it’ll accomplish nothing. A part of me is beginning to think maybe it’s not so wise as well. I guess most of it’s motivated by that Zee Avi cover of Morissey’s “First of the Gang to Die” where there’s the opening line that goes,

“You have never been in love

till you’ve seen the stars

reflect in the reservoirs.”

You should still be living near a very lovely reservoir. I always kind of did want to go sit there one evening and take in the smells of somewhat open water, fresh grass and the peace of the stillness of waters. On a cool, dark, deep night, what tranquility can be found. And even if my father alleges I can’t say I’ve been in love with you because it was an unrequited thing, I still know what I felt for all that time, and maybe I wasn’t properly in love with you since I couldn’t know who you really were, but I know I was in love even with the image of you I’d found.

Chivalrous

It suddenly crosses my mind that generally you, of all the men and boys I have ever had to deal with or spend time with late into the night, would always try to ensure that I was sent home, cabbed home or at least got home safely.

Mother would have approved tremendously of this rare sort of chivalry. A full year on, I thank you for this.

About A Boy

flor ありがとう

先月彼と初めてここに近づいていく。今彼との関係は終わらせなければならない。甘い物は確かに人生の痛みを治せる。

ー18.12.2010 1550h

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We walked thereafter, from Duxton Hill all the way to Mount Sophia, constantly talking, me asking him question upon question without returning what he asked, the tart taste of my bittersweet (how appropriate, he might have remarked) hibiscus tea still lingering in my mouth. I brought him up that eternal flight of stairs up, up to that place of refuge looking out over Dhoby (we almost didn’t find it until he pointed out where it eventually was), that open space with an aluminium sheet roof I discovered three years ago, three years ago now. We sat there and talked as I gazed in serenity at the view (two bright yellow birds, a squirrel, a lizard twisting in a perfect round, the sparse sort of pseudo fir trees which let in the sky, and Christmas lights from the tree in a home glittering through obscuring foliage) and he stared nigh unblinking at my face (reminded him of Damien Rice’s The Blower’s Daughter he said) and later, when he proved his sincerity, when he softened my heart (sitting silently and preparing tissue as I sat silently refusing to look at him, thinking to say he did not deserve to see my tears), I gave him a gift, of watching the sunset together (though his unspectacled eyes were blurred so I described my sights to him) and feeling what it’s like to be a young couple in love (my head on his shoulder, our arms entertwined then our fingers, embracing me twice and my running commentary when we had one standing up). We left at around 8.15pm when it finally became fully dark. He put back his glasses, walking out I attempted to entwine our arms for a last time then gave up at the oddity of it and pointed out the clouded moon (sharing my love for observing it) instead as a distraction for my gaffe, I remarked how I felt like asking him for another last embrace again, loving the slight vertigo rush from leaning up to him, so tall, and then at the foot of the forever stairs, telling him emphatically bye and walking away without ever looking back or wondering why.

But I miss him now. I miss him in this barren aftermath.  I might grow to miss him quite, quite bad and quite rough.

Liminalities between ‘weird’ and ‘good’

“:) / maybe you do see me a bit more clearly”

It is yet good with the new objet trouvé now. I am not too involved yet to be hurt, and considering everything else, he wouldn’t be a good fit at all. Anyway, he deserves to be a shiny happy Mormon young adult bound for a sparkling, many-splendored mission with a life and glimmering future in which I have no significant part. But re-reading our conversation, there is really no hint I could pick up that might have given me in this, my melancholy, up.

He tells me I’m “one interesting person”, but it’s all so simple really, this parlour trick I’ve conjured up:

I’m simply achingly lonely, and trying hard not to show how.

/

How much to reveal? How much to hide? How much vulnerability to entrust to such a boy?

Perhaps none at all.

You’re old enough to know the tangible saviour never comes when you call.

It is 02.10.2010. The end of another year will be upon us in under three brief months.

How are you doing now? How has this year thus far been to you?

I’ve mentioned before that I record my thoughts here almost exclusively now. Although you will surely never cross here anymore, you still present a voice to talk to. And this is a place where I can be completely honest with somebody, a hypothetical worldwide audience, and myself.

I don’t know a lot of myself anymore. Some years back I’d done a sort of consolidation of my leanings, preferences, opinions and beliefs. But they seem markedly divergent — my perspectives have once again shifted, some for the better and some not. So much has changed in the time with you and without you. Who is the young woman who loved you now?

There is a lot that is still familiar, perhaps more on the outer parts. My public face, if not a mask, has not deviated much. But inside, is there a different animal now? And what of my environment, the faces and names and ties that people my existence? My shifting responsibilities and short-term wants? Have I simply displaced myself in the vagaries of having to grow up?

How I wish, how I wish I could talk to someone. How I long, how I long for the advent of that tangible saviour to come. How I dream, how I dream of passion and the bittersweet entwining of minds, limbs and hearts. My eternal goals persist in their distance and indistinctness because of the failings of this fallen one who tries to hide from God. A heart so hungry, so yearning, so blighted — where is the peace that was lost?

I still flawlessly recall that perfect picture of you 91 Sundays ago, sitting alone upon the dark polished stone bordering the flat green lawn outside an uncharacteristically silent Raffles Place station, just waiting for me to come out. (Do I blame you too much, my poor Peter?)

These bearings remain constant. I suppose that should come as a comfort, somewhat.

\

You see, in mere moments, three weeks’ worth of careful, hard-fought light was compromised. I have become persona non grata once more; I have lost the hard-won lilies in my spastic, grasping hand.

How badly I want to run away to a place where no one knows me and I can finally begin anew and refreshed. Peter, does our renaissance come now?

Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?

I thought I’d use, “Hello stranger,” as a semi-pick up line today.

In the end, I didn’t even have the chance to. Is it the jinx of you? How my months of successful aversion and embarkation on a shining new endeavour finally crumbled after just one chance encounter with you.

/

I’d run into two other people last Friday when, stepping into the waterfront library, espied your bald friend and wondered fleetingly if you too might be there. But he was with two women and the coast appeared clear.

I stepped to the film stacks, picking up discs filled with hours of escapism for my mother, made a round, and on the way back, passed the screening rooms and found the crown of your head bent, poring over a book. (I think you were taking photos of it.) My body swiveled, as if the axis were that upon which I’d fixed my sights, and as each nerve tensed into the action of calling your name, I cut it off and padded soundlessly to the theatre corner to sit by the window in an imitation of reading, though all I managed to do was skim a few incomprehensible lines, look out the drizzle-specked window and sigh. I made myself leave you there, the rim of your black Perspex spectacles looming over the tome. Undisturbed, lay your universe.

From a narrow angle to the borrowing counter, there was a strip between the bookshelves through which I saw you stride over to make your business, the now-worn strap of your black leather messenger we bought together two years ago heavy on your shoulder. Others came and meandered by, obscuring my view of you but like a stark white flag you bore forth past my horizon and I thought in my heart, “You leave me, you leave me, you leave me,” and told myself that that was well.

Brief moments later, my friend’s call came and I too fled the solace of the window seat where I’d arranged myself so properly like a doll awaiting its master to catch a serendipitous glimpse of it on the off-chance of wanting to come over to play. You were by the librarian’s counter, I hurried past hoping you wouldn’t notice me, hear my harried voice projecting above the shuffling ponderous footsteps of so many casual browsers, across the otherwise hushed enclave. You waited for the lift right by the entrance looking straight into its mouth, I tried to lose myself in a huddle of incoming visitors. I met the friend, we flowed back into the heart of the crowd’s surges and you came drifting towards us suddenly head-on. I ran to the ladies in my attempt to escape you. You saw him, exchanged perfunctory greetings. Then once more, you slid from my side.

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I cannot move forward or back.

Did you know, just nights before I’d cried myself to sleep, sick with fear this new endeavour would end up like my last, like my saga with you, where I, this one party was generating all this emotion and feeling, a vast galaxy churning and churning, while the other party carried on uncaring, not merely oblivious. I’d sobbed myself to sleep and prayed that God wouldn’t let me curse myself like that again.

Tonight, I followed him, behind him several paces as he made off with his petite, olive-skinned beau of the recent week, undeniably besotted, the two. (I’d let down my hair, I’d worn his favourite colour — black.) I walked until it was too painful to view and diverting to another path, caught one final glimpse of their backs like birds of two different plumes. I’d wanted to be the one walking beside him, after just one hours-long homecoming bus ride conversation twelve days ago. I’d so wanted and dreamed…

/

Peter, you tire me. Your sex drain my youth.

“Why do I fall in love with every [man] I see that shows me the least bit of attention?“

I should be free from want of you, perverse creatures.

“If love would come“

I’m still the alien, still that lone orbiting satellite sending out desperate, futile signals to an unresponsive universe.

“Because love by its nature desires a future.“

\

I am able, you see, to expel the breath within my nostrils.

But of the hope festering in my hungry, yearning heart, leaping up and quickening my blood with every il/elusive glimmer of a connection,

I have no account.

The End

On Tuesday, a friend suddenly mentions having sighted you. For a little bit, I recount you to her though the memories have already fragmented.

On Wednesday, it is my mother and yet another friend. The latter calls me, saying he saw you in town and wondered if I was going to meet you. Of course not, I assert. Silently I wonder if perchance all these are a building up by the universe.

On Thursday, I receive no more signals.

Till Friday morning, the shocking notice that you have resigned, first from the news report and hours later, from your own skimping email. I marvel inside me.

There are no words to say.

Of Significance

Someone asked me recently,

Have you had your first love?

I replied,

Yes, he just didn’t love me back.

Would it still count though? A first love all on my own. But that hardly matters – one day a man who will love me fiercely will come and subsume you from my mind. And then there will be no fussing over first or last loves.

Only the person who stands by my side, entwining his fate with mine, bears any meaning.

Stay with me

This is my favourite song on the soundtrack of the movie I got for you last Christmas. You haven’t received it yet and perhaps never will but at least I can still share it with you this way. I hadn’t been so deeply moved by the film until I watched it again after getting it for you. I wanted to give it to you because it has a cinematic tree with the most beautiful meaning I have yet to chance upon. Look at the scene with the hairs on the tree that are attuned to his questing fingertips — this tree was born out of the withered body of his beloved.

This post comes from listening to the soundtrack again as I try to prepare for my final college exam (as you can see I have become distracted). The music is transcendental and gives me a sense of hope and deep, pure yearning for a love that can reach beyond the bounds of time and space much like the one portrayed in the story. Two souls who are magnetized throughout eternity.

I may yet have a story like this.

真っ白

It’s so quiet here, but that kind of makes me relaxed. (Have you ever come here since that first stumbling time?)

I’d been thinking if I should remove that last post of mine, the one about five lives, because having everything conclude on your birthday would have been rather poetic (and I rather abhor sometimes how raw my ravings here let loosed become).

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I’m posting again on a whim here. Over dinner I was thinking of ‘halcyon days’ and how in this quarter of my life, those earlier times in the spring/summer of 2009 would define them because I had then given myself over to love and could experience no greater harmony or joy. No shard of doubt seems able to penetrate my fixed mind on this note — and I have already attempted to question my insides out on its veracity. Even if this skeptic’s reason cannot give credence that I could have truly felt my pirouette with a mostly unglimpsed, not to say unrequited, love were my best days yet, this heart overpowers all sense. It declaims that I have never felt so secularly fulfilled, and it mourns that those halcyon days have fled.

It really hardly makes sense.

The memory that the younger, slightly more impressionable me had had the audacity to steal a peck on your cheek in a crowded taxi sends me first into reflexive disbelief and then warm, bubbling giggles. That you allowed it, and with such good humour at that, renders me a tipple bemused all over again. Peter, it really hardly makes sense.

/

Things get better now and then. I’m a little more at peace with myself right now and comfortable enough with life to think that I reside in a state of happiness once more. I think, surely halcyon days will come again.

I go back to the place where my best memories lie next month and will yet walk the paths the two of us, I in my haze of attachment and yourself still (imperturbable) unopened to me, trod. But I look forward to further unfoldments and lucidities.

Surely halcyon days will come again.

I thought I was done with this place

It’s been a while.

Now and then you pop up in my dreams, which disturbs me upon waking, and that once you sent a handful of weak messages while I was overseas, which bemused yet stirred me in a secret unavowable way. I should have just turned a blind eye on them.

I’m here again now after three months of keeping myself safe from you. I fully believe I’ve moved on from that time, although friends say if that’s the case I wouldn’t bother with going out of my way not to see you, that I would be simply indifferent instead. I can’t disagree. I’ve folded the hundred cranes for your belated birthday project though I have yet to string them up and finally complete that. Part of me is afraid of what will happen to them once that’s done and I have no way of conveying them to the one they were meant for.

Maybe this post was merely a matter of time after I glimpsed your profile descending the escalator at that second screening last Saturday. But this is what really prompted it:

ダメだ It’s no good

… ダメだねあたし It’s no good for me

最後のに Even though it’s the end

こんな事をして Doing something like this

あたしね、したい事はいっぱいだ You know, I want to do a whole lot of things

(…)

ああ Sigh

人生が五回くらいあったらいいのにな It’d be good if I could have had five or so lives

そうしたらあたし… Like that, I

五回とも… all five times

五回とも… all five times

… 五回とも、同じ人を好きに成る all five times, could come to love the same person

ありがとう Thank you

サヨナラ Goodbye

(Goodbyes always tear me up inside)

Those damned lines actually made me think of you and cry.

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If I had five different lives, five different chances to meet you and try to win you even in five different circumstances, I believe I too would still know you somehow and be drawn to you if I’d ever glimpsed your heart.

And maybe, just maybe, fall in love five times with five different manifestations of you. (And hopefully even just once, had the connection ring true.)

Happy Birthday Peter

(I can’t give you anything officially but this sanctum of mine here, and each lexical brick that shaped it.)

It is peaceful going home tonight. The bus is swift in its pursuit of midnight. You are now another year older.

My feet tingle from an overflow of blood that comes from too much strain and the rawness of shed trappings. But my world is in harmony and my heart is humbled. I have learned something infinitely precious about myself today.

Some things don’t change even after the passing of much time (a quick time tracking input states 1071 days). I still don’t look at you when I bid a group goodbye, and yet I still worry that you have no birthday cake.

In the end, that too is taken off my hands as many other things have been in relation to you. But it is good. That is how things are (I still feel it best to slip away soundlessly), and I have finally become someone who can smile and nod with unforced serenity at that.

Knowing this brings fresh tears to my eyes – how far we have come, Peter, how achingly far, and from the bottom of my heart I thank you for taking me along this fond ride. Through you, I have met so many wonderful people and not simply tonight. Through you, I have unlocked a new world.

On today’s big journey, I’m merely a passenger parked in the furthermost seat of this large vessel you steer but how happy am I. For twelve hours, I walk and watch and work with the dear team that make up your bulwark. What I give today is as much for them as it is for you, and it is an honour to have served alongside these three abundant years.

So while I am still unable to understand fully or read you, converse decently with you or look you for long in the eye (perhaps in another time when I return from the future), my heart is so full tonight and the tears that come are as cleansing and pure as the emotion that compels them. I have done little or nothing overt for you in the dawning of your thirty-second year, but Peter, let my heart be the moon, let my tears be the rain that fell insistently to bathe this eventide, and let my wish be this feeling as crystalline as a smile that the beautiful peace of being cradled by the universe is transmitted to you by the music of the spheres.

Happy birthday, Peter. Happy birthday, my once beloved Peter. May you always be comforted by arms like the ones tonight that wished perchance to felicitously embrace you.

A Song I Will Dedicate to Someone Else