hothouse flowers

This is a memory.

 

I’m dating a boy who might be a douchebag. He’s got a soft side to him that is kind to animals and grandmothers, of which he will tell me one 3am morning to the point of teariness while we’re keeping the cold out with flavourless white broth. At the next table are two ajummas who hate me– because I’m Asian but cross my chopsticks, because I’m eating with a boy whose Asian blood evades his white, white complexion.

 

Let’s not stray, put the facts as they are. So! He might not be a douchebag, simply insistent and snickety in his interactions, too quick to assume his version is truer, stronger, better, rather enthusiastic about frat boy status. And these might not be dates, they seep away faster than slush on a mat, and at the end of the day, I’m too ruthless and unpredictable to be good for anyone on the dating floor and he becomes another casualty. Maybe the ajummas don’t hate me. They just worry.

 

The memory is not about this boy.

 

It’s about while I’m waiting for him to don his coat in the dormitory, and you are there, obnoxious thing, looking into my eyes to see if you can push your boyish charm out of its boundaries. You succeed, because you’re adorable and we’re both hungry for ocular proof of connection. It’s funny how the eyes are described as the mirror of the soul. Most of the time they underachieve, stopping short at vanity and desperation. The other boy comes downstairs, regards us briefly and shoves his discontent into coat pockets along with a ledger of women as pain and trouble. Some months later a mishap occurs in the first ten minutes of Memento while we’re temporarily unoccupied by other forces. I’m too soused to remember it, apart from your breathy excitable accent and consideration with the toilet paper. I get angry, rightfully so, but only for awhile, and we become good friends matching each other’s best points to other people. The incident alters for good my outlook on intimacy. Another few months later, I shoot myself in the foot: setting up blunt and limiting dividers around a boy who might have been willing to read into me and be happy. I can’t tell, my dear, when you’re joking, because I’ve been nothing but blunt around you and it’s been my undoing. So I don’t know if it means anything that you still tell me your exhilarations and worries, only when I ask, only when I ask first.

 

For all the advice I dispense, freely, sternly, chop chop– I don’t take my own. I wonder if I’m going to keep turning down people who could give me quiet nights by the river (like K might have) and promises that don’t need to be said. Looking at myself now, I run headlong into the worst kind of trouble. Boys who pair my name with experiments or rest stops, who don’t leave a seat, who flit out of range, unnamed and untameable.

 

Parachute

Do you think I don’t remember? Lightning in your window, a seizure of blue and purple, forever still and spreadeagled on the apartment buildings by the will of your lens. From a thousand thousand screens away I pried your sight to my eyes, the way one sups on dripping fruit. I’d found your blog before I’d found you (a sleek boy at the museum, skittery and intense), and loved your way of seeing before ever I had seen you. 

 

I said I had a habit of looking at the view from people’s windows, a routine inspection, ethnography of bedrooms. This was a lie; really I faked the obsession the moment we flounced onto your bed so I wouldn’t hurt you with my eyes, my deer in the headlights, didn’t want your blood on my tires. Still you were the one coaxing me, a little bit of bait as you stroked the patch between heel and calf, rustling the comfortable net as you tickled me into your lap, your palpable heated lips, unknown but so very alive, insistent fingers flicking me open so that I lay prone and obedient on the chopping board of the future. As you loved me I thought of the past like data, overwritten in increments on a navy blue bar, pixelated rubbish leaping into pixelated bin. As you left me he unbuttoned your shirt from my torso, without my permission, and I thought of the time someone knocked water over my painting while I sat in disbelief. Afterwards he said I’m sorry, I knew you didn’t want it, but I said it’s fine it’s what I needed, but into the air came more tears in jerks and hiccups like a car stalling, the young driver in a panic, the instructor pretending there are no such things as urgent stoplights.

 

It sounds like blame but you know I chose every moment of it, and hope that you did too.

answers

“… And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? 

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

Does it matter? Between polar possibilities, individual truths lie on a continuum. 

 

Resting my head on your body, I dream of the pulse beneath your muscles and imperceptible cities beneath your pulse. Beyond the bushes orange beams swerve urgently, motors berate, the highway is too busy to notice the little road slumbering. It is hard to see and be seen in this something darker some place dark, but all the attention I need is your hand grasping mine unconsciously.

 

If I didn’t understand before, all the clarity I need is a scent between your hairline and ear. Sense rounds out into satisfaction. It’s a sudden flurry of peace, waking up one morning to find you are mad happy after two weeks of burden.

 

The lights are snuffed in the playground but I don’t need them to find you as you’re sleepily trudging to the car. My arms trap you, you keep walking, but where I would have assumed indifference in past weeks today I find an indulgent acceptance of me in all my erratic, silly, hungry ways.

 

“You’re eating this at home?”

“You look very sad. Ok we’ll go somewhere.”

:) “Ok I shall steal your fries.”

 

I had been hoping for itineraries, headlines. They are irrelevant, too dictative. And so too that because there is no stated beginning, I’m not going to state an end. 

 

In front of other people, we don’t hold hands, I thought maybe this was a sign of incompleteness. No, simply that we are not each other’s leashes. 

 

I had been looking for myself in your behaviour, the answer to the question, are you as fond of me as I am of you?  I didn’t realise you had answered me already. “Look,” you pointed out an extra hand in the photo, a detail I hadn’t noticed. It released the composition from banal symmetry, replaced the trite with a wry and gentle humour, caught the moment wholly unaware and stuck on it a wordless glory. 

 

The other dilemma? It’s resolved too. :3

x

Meeting you like this, I reject orthodoxy. We not blush over the menu at a reserved table, we do not pay attention to the milimetres between skin and skin on a movie seat armrest, we do not orbit round Orchard Road’s sartorial offerings with the giddy aimlessness of satellites learning to reflect the other. 

 

Sure I hesitated half a second when I recognized, with too much ease, the outline of your back in the ground floor of the museum. But I did not check for caking makeup or dry lips. I was myself in need of a haircut, bare legs boasting every scar for disapproval. You were not surprised. I was a matter of fact, eclipsed by the swaying red lamps on the ceiling and other photographers with their burly cameras. The background not the subject. I think I dropped the use of ‘I’ around you.

 

If there was any discomfiture, it was purely mine.

 

And even then I can’t be sure. This is a chemistry I can’t quite distill, images tumble in pebbles of mercury and to grasp them seems dully poisonous. Part of me considers binding this to the formulae it never followed to begin with. The rest of me realizes it isn’t possible. Or desirable. For all my lows, this is what I need– plasticity.  

 

I don’t know where we started. I don’t know where we abbreviate or ramble, if you ever say anything between the lines. I don’t really want to know unless your narrative spells it out. For now, you bracket me with your arms when you feel like it.

 

Phantom pains glow where my jawline meets my ears and at the base of my neck though you’ve been gentle with me. In the fading night, in the back of your car, I touched my lips to the dips and rises of your face as you dozed, thinking that this too was a kind of braille. You only smiled and kept your eyes closed, so in order not to appear idle and foolish I sat up and puzzled like a watchdog at headlights beyond the window. 

 

You are most abrupt even though there are bales and bales of you I’d like to roll out, slowly, with all the reverence one reserves for tracing the whorls of ancient trees. You are mixing my metaphors. I want to be hungry around you but a cool chill takes over and I euphemise everything. I haven’t any plans or bright ideas, so I just sit in the passenger seat beside you and wait for the ride to drive itself.

resolution

I said I have two years to become a woman, to place my hand on your chest and make promises I can actually keep. I have no idea if you’ll still be where I think I’ll find you, or if you’ll inhabit this name, this smile, this voice that’s already speckled with static and rusting memory. Lust and ambition, as bodysnatchers they’ve never settled and perhaps they won’t start with you.

 

I left Korea and never told you what I thought of you; I had nothing to offer, I was just a child taking up your bed. The words would have hovered, anomaly in the air, mute advertisement for a missing person.

 

Less and less that matters. It was sufficient to have had the evening when I thought, I could stop here and be happy and then realized what a selfish notion it was, my indolent desire for the security by your side, ignoring the elements that would make your life what you wanted. It was enough to realize I’d already been a small animal in a hole under a rock, dozing into a soft and vulnerable bundle for the two years that Andrew protected me.

 

Maybe I’ve met someone new, and maybe I haven’t, I’m not so hasty with my assumptions now and I know you’d approve, you with your flagging hands that kept me in line. It’s ok. I don’t need to be rash, only honest.

 

At 17 I knew hunger and the invincibility of youth, had these rules for a destined future, woke at 6.20am and didn’t hesitate to run through the bell, drew like a fiend and cried when my paintings were not what I wanted, tore apart poems and put together my raving love for them in loopy cursive essays. I’m terribly out of shape and my mind is a pond skipper, there’s a glass wall to scale to get where I want but hell I’ll do it, better than I ever have.

 

There’s no point being aloof or snobby. No one is any better than anyone else. Going by the flipside, there’s no way I should let my high regard for anyone intimidate me.

 

I only need one vice at a time. Don’t think my wallet or waistline would like it, anyway. 

 

I won’t stop walking. Won’t stop seeing, sniffing, and getting seduced by everything this year’s got to offer.

 

Ironically, for me, I should dream less. Lower my wheels, get my flight grounded. It doesn’t mean I should dream any less vibrantly. The past as a departure point, houndstooth and flower prints to grow this patchwork with.

 

I’ll do this for myself, not merely for the imagined safehaven of these peeling memories.

this could be the moment but it isn’t.

 

I hope you know how unsettling that was for me; tonight you looked like you belong to me.

 

In the jacket I bought in Perth for you which used to be too large though you are even skinnier now. I am subtly stunned (let’s just say it is a surprise that threatens to fill, then stops short) by the way it meets your current hair just right, same way I coo at the faultless lines in a Bottega Veneta catalog. “I feel like things have come full circle, this keeping you warm in uni after sitting around so long unused.” And you look faintly distant when I say this, I don’t know if it is simply school on your mind.

 

In the ceiling rats tick and tumble, in sounds that make me think of silica beads spilling, siphoning moisture till they are stale pink. Our baby is dead, so oddly stiff after he fell dramatically to one side, twitching, his twin eyes swollen shut, poor love, a soft theatricality of sleep that brought tears to my eyes. And I sobbed and gulped and on the phone, you decided you would come over and see our poor surrogate child one last time.

 

“He’s like a paperweight.” So stiff after only an hour of being a sad, sweet furball never to scuttle or chew carrots again. Part of me wanted to hold the thought of an eternal sleep, but we put him in a box and closed the memory. 

 

I almost unlock the door for you, then remember you’re well accustomed to doing it yourself. As you’re going out my gate you say, “Did I ever tell you how much I hate those dogs?” which is not a hatred of the neighbours’ dogs themselves, I know, moreso the hatred of a noise that seizes silence, scrunging it up alongside all your walk out could be. I’m crushing this moment myself, I’m clumsy, a racket inside my chest, I smile too readily and look away too fast. Without meaning to, when you lean towards me for a hug you ask for a kiss instead, and I soundlessly press into your cheek and you do the same. It is almost intimate, short of admitting it. Not a drawing of you, just a tracing, but dangerous enough for you to slink away a fraction too quickly.  

 

My heart is breaking for a variety of reasons, but none more than that things die, and parts of people too.

 

I love you, I say, and laugh at your silence that indicates a shuffling of papers in the studio or an abstracted frown at some errant groupmate instead of me, me, me. Unexpectedly you come a little closer to the phone, and say so softly, so seriously, “you know I love you too, right”. 

 

 

***

My hamster Blueberry is gone. He had an eye infection and deteriorated so quickly over the weekend even though I gently applied eye drops. Goodbye little guy. I miss you already. At least, there’s definitely no pain for you now. Eat lots of nomnoms for me.

SNAFU is an acronym meaning roughly…

Sometimes I get wordy and snarkily pretentious in my essays, which appalls me to no end. There I go again. The abuse of words that curl the tongue and upturn the nose when really I could linguistically bob a humble curtsey. You can be sure that’s what’s happening whenever I bomb this place with three trivial posts in one day, all fribble and no finesse. Yeah you can tell someone’s been writing a 3000 word essay, I get possessed by the semiotic spirit of a confounding and pernicious Victorian schoolmarm. Yah! I just need to Personify some Concepts now. Oh Lady Sleep why do you bashfully turn your cheek from my Exhaustion. 

 

Did you know another word for ‘trivial’ is ‘yeasty’? As is ‘hoity toity’ so says the free thesaurus. Man this bread is trivial. Ants in your pants or a hoity toity infection.

 

I have a huge distaste for words like ’snafu’ (sounds like a snack with Chinese dairy content) and phrases like ‘double edged sword’. I tried paraphrasing the latter but the first thing that came to mind was ‘two headed hydra’, not really what I was looking for. So I turned it to polycephaly, bicephaly, dicephaly and diprosopus but none of these were going to add value (‘add value’– another phrase I hate except in set meal menus) to my technology report:

… an ideal working model for freedom of speech, the ebb and flow of information left to the devices of demand and supply. But one must remember that Web 2.0 can be a congenital cephalic disorder/two headed hydra/while we’re on this mythical thread let’s talk three headed dogs and two faced deities…” 

Concluding things is hard unless you’ve got a stick-in-your-tummy-like-a-chicken-pot-pie type awesome phrase or perhaps a crate of beer, whereupon everything ends with an exclamation mark, a song, or a neat plop into bed.

 

NOTE: I really did go with two headed hydra in the end. It’s 3am! I’m tired! This is why I’m not a journalist!

flotsam

I’ve got an urge to boil things. In my mind I’m filling a pot, chopping the seafood and ginger like I did for tom yam soup one night, lamenting a lack of lemongrass and eager for the smell to wallop my friends in the doorway. Outside the sky is emptying its ingredients. Rain rain rain. Beautiful night to be a duckling.

 

I take a detour to the evenings of liquid and light, wine for 25000won, soju and beer married in a hollowed watermelon, suspiciously glowing green tea bath. Fishes nibbling yelps and giggles from our feet as they dart through phosphorence. His impeccable body in the shower, waiting for the water to warm. Swimming instructor, how many girls drowned themselves over you?

 

On the radio Donald Fagen sings, 

Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

The bus I took home cut from a moist night to a shrieking downpour that stung my back, making me regret the decision to sit in front of the gaping exit. Beside me was a dashing exchange student with hints of Elad around the eyes and mouth, though no charm or quirky humour. His hands ran from slingbag to Human Resource Management notes to itching eyebrow to pulsating nose (I didn’t want to confirm if he was scratching or… excavating it). All the way home I peered wide-eyed at streets dissolving into trees and furry blurs of red, green, orange. Men who stomped to lighten the discomfort of wet leather, girls stretching long legs to match long umbrellas. I wondered if any of these people would talk, to complement each other on the flush they’d gotten running in the rain. 

 

I’d like to be married in a drizzle, a sort of baptism, no need for further confetti. A bright, hot and drizzly day for rainbows to dazzle in raised glasses. My groom will dunk me in the swimming pool or sea because he’ll fancy the weather is goading him. And I won’t care because my gown won’t be a thing of decorum and delicacy, I’ll make it myself, to suit a dash on the beach and jig on the grand piano.

 

But tonight I’m not thinking of faceless, astonishing boys who’ll clasp my paws and kiss me goodnight (though one did share his dinner, letting me steal the beef slices and belachan eggplant; did let me too, morbidly scrutinize his leg hairs; did rub out the knots in my back till I smiled catlike and grateful; and did too smell so sweetly of shampoo it pinched me to think he wasn’t mine). 

 

An amazing girl whose fancies coursed like a network of canals. I’m thinking of our jittery first meeting where she stripped off her orange hoodie and graceful jeans, and we bobbed awkwardly in the bubbling hot water diverting our eyes from the multitude of breasts and belly strolling nonchalantly. Afterwards we’d sat on the sofa in the lobby of the bathhouse, all Ziggy Stardust and ebbing childhoods, and this flowed into Breakfast at Tiffany’s, unidentifiable salty smells in her dorm room, furtive intimacies in bars where we were hopelessly, hesitantly, beautifully young together. He played you the guitar in the rain. And I’m thinking of thirst, and us tipping, with the perfect fit of water, into that strange and depthless world again.

 

It’s an odd year. So much flotsam, all the beautiful baubles and broken glass the tide brings in.

‘Midnight train going anywhere’

My dear Marijn, maybe I never made it clear to you but even when the bedbugs struck, I was thankful for the bed in which we shared a blanket. What a harmonious arrangement it was, no questions, no worries, just warmth and a sizzling pan of bacon and mushrooms in the morning or middle of the night. We would creep down to that Resident Evil-like basement, deposit the laundry, and pick at the lazy hours of the day.

 

The morning after Club Mass, I shut my purse, dropped the room key at the deserted counter, spilled into an alien street. I was utterly incongruous: flimsy cream dress versus a stern road of hardware shops and pragmatically-dressed citizens. Eyes bugged at me. I wanted clean hair and to tear my lenses out. It was one and a half hours of squinted eyes, long standing waits and counting off subway stops before I fell through our doorstep, completely beat. There you were, passed out, still hidden from the hangover that would sell us another slow and restful day. At that moment I felt home.

 

I would have been lonely without our happy household those last weeks. Marijn trawling Youtube for MIA’s Paper Planes, Ruth efficiently conquering dirty dishes, Papa Leo’s written naggings to us careless, sleepy children. Jason charging through the door at 4am and claiming his (disproportionate) share of sleeping space. Did Boa ever get her iron? Do the girlfriends of losing Starcraft players still cry? Marijn held my umbrella and Leo kicked up loads of puddles in his green hi-tops.

 

It’s hard to imagine all of us, you, me, Ruth, Leo, the Jasons, Hanna, the Chrises, Julie and Julienne, Jin, Elad, Terry, Rachel– separate lives in our separate cities. Ordering pizza, snoozing in class, early morning metro. Here I am with Seoul burning up moisture in my retinas while at the back of my mind I remember I should be studying 6 chapters for International Econs.

 

“Don’t Stop Believing”– I listen to Journey and remember Julie cajoling me to get my kisses from Chris Bowen (it was hard, not for lack of attraction but because I am gutless). Afterwards we stopped on the 5am maroon route to the ihouse, where J&J constantly renewed their stash of Eclipse gum. He leaned closer and I always thought thereafter about the brownness of his hair, uncertainty in his eyes and reassuring height. I thought also about kisses for the sake of love, kisses for nothing, and kisses given for the moment or the simple uncluttered appreciation of a person.

 

A person, persons. There’s that one I didn’t do anything to, with, and that was that till I see him again if I ever see him again, God willing, but it’s wiser this way, I need to grow up in the mean time anyway.

 

Don’t think too much. Though I do it all the time.

 

It’s so humid here in Singapore. Some of my best clothes I reject because they aren’t from the Clan of Cotton. And still, I’m the coldest I’ve been this year, alone in this bed no hands to grab, no neon nights of hunting for faces. Soju and pineapple, depthless orange shimmer on a summer Han River.

 

*Photos by Leo Drescher. Actually Woo Jin Kim must have taken the first shot since Leo’s in the picture.

Renovations.

What I didn’t tell anyone was that on Tuesday I went to your old home.

 

This was the place where I learnt to be reckless, or rather to take calculated risks with someone who might lean in once and retreat forever. The place where, for the first time afraid of being seen unpeeled, life as I knew it fell away in one spiralling piece till I was just a pounding sliver of muscle thankful for the dark that closed in like a tide.

 

Somewhere in that dusty room I was buried beneath swarthy, vague emotions. Bubbles, sparklers, home-made soup– without meaning to, you were becoming associated with comfort, you were assimilating into my life. Your earthy scent dripped into my pores and I welcomed it. For better or worse, I could not be without you.

 

Fast forward to the present. That thick black dusk, the lavendar light that preceded it, my devil-may-care atttitude preceding that, became something I would sporadically write about through these 30 months. It was a milestone, an addiction, the release of a sigh at an old photo album. Every entry I wrote gave a different outline to the hazy shapes that moved in those hours.

 

Now I am done. When I flung myself into that room again, Tuesday afternoon, the bare walls and busted desk stared at me voicelessly. You came through the door with a sudden twinge of sentiment or regret, and leaned crookedly a tiny scrap of your weight upon me. I tried, tentatively, to feel for the person I had so raged, wept and laughed elatedly over. Then we went back to our peculiar friendship.

 

I don’t know if anyone looks at us and imagines we are in love. It is a little more than that- you always ask, “What?” because I stare at you with my eyebrows raised a degree and my lips moist with amusement. I don’t want to say, I am admiring the look of your 21 year old face; what will it look like at 29, 45, 70? so I just say something frivolous: “Haha, your triangle-shaped nose, pine marten eyebrows.” 

 

I adore you. But it is a best friend adoration, motherly pride, and your pain blindsides me and your joy gives me a guardian’s relief.

 

“You don’t want to be with me, do you babe?”

“No, I don’t.”

And we laugh tiny laughs, temporarily relieved of the tension, looking for all the world like conspirators in love. There is a conspiracy here. We keep lighting the candles and setting the table, holding the doors and biting our lips. I am waiting for someone to love you. You are waiting for me to love someone without fear. We look out at the obscure stars, somewhere nebulous and milky-wayed lie the coordinates to pin and mark x: this is the place to rest our weary feet.