The fear

There's been a bit of upheaval in my life, and I only just decided that I would start blogging again.  I don't know if anyone still reads here or even remembers it, but I thought it would be cathartic and besides, I'm starting to get back into taking photos regularly and this is as good as place as any to display them.

Six months ago, I went and met someone and lost my head.  Again.  

I didn't see it coming.  A year of painful, unsuccessful online dating (one guy emailed me about the female orgasm after the first date) was enough to make me swear off men forever.  And just as I was starting to appreciate the solitude, my whole life tilted violently on its axis.

Of my last relationship, the one that ended in a heartbreak I thought I would never recover from, I talked constantly.  After years of having my guard up, I was so determined to experience and live it fully that I waxed lyrical to anyone who would listen.

This time, I am frightened beyond words.  In six months, I don't think I've truly talked about any of this with more than a couple of friends.  I am dumbfounded by the thought of explaining things to my family in detail.  My standard answer whenever people ask me things is, "I can't answer that right now."  Because there are a lot of things that I don't dare to say but I will say this: against my will and better judgement, I'm in love.  And if you've ever been in love second, third, tenth time around, you know just how terrifying it is.  You understand what it's like to worry that it's going to sour or disappear any second, just like the fourth time, the fifth, the seventh.  You've felt the way your heart quickens in the late night darkness when doubt is your only bedfellow.  You know just what I mean.

The thought of having to get to know someone new and growing and learning together all over again can be anxiety-inducing.  This isn't my first go-round.  I know what happens at the end and how difficult things can be.

What can I say though?  It happened.  I'm in love, and he is wonderful.  He was single for a long time too, and things took some getting used to.  After all, we're both older, more wary and all too aware of how things could go.  But that also makes us more careful, more gentle, more willing to try.  In the last half year, we've managed to weather death, job issues, disappointment.  Every day, I'm working on being more practical too, teaching my head to balance out my heart.

Unlike the last time, when I naïvely trumpeted the idea that things would spin out into a dream future, I am now more circumspect, the caginess of a dog kicked one too many times.  But you know what they say: if it's worth having, it's worth fighting for.  And something tells me this is absolutely worth fighting for.

I know that he understands.  "I'm scared," he said suddenly to me one night.  He tucked his chin into my shoulder and I felt the kind of butterflies I had forgotten even existed.  I took his hand, large and warm in mine.

"It's okay.  I'm scared too.  We can be scared together."

The first on the first

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art."

      -- Virginia Woolf's journal                      

This year: more writing, more learning and more sight.

Hobonichi wisdom

"Everything I've seen and heard in my life.

The things I've done.  The people I've met.

I'm now going over it all, counting it up.

That's what ageing is all about."

                                                      -- "The Silver Words of Safety Match

I am so lucky.

I live in a world where people are mostly kind; where friends and family are always thoughtful, always giving and always have my back.  In my part of town, we always love and are loved in return, even when we least expect it.  

This year, I had the privilege of spending time with all those I love and then some.  This Christmas, friends gave me the heavens and earth and hope and I stood, in the middle of the night, too stunned by gratitude to weep.  This New Year, my cup runneth over.  

Thank you, Universe, for showing me the peace that's been there waiting all along. 

Happy Holidays, everyone. 

All I needed

Life's been full of false starts and stops recently.  I'm not upset or depressed - far from it, in fact - but I am a little bit stressed with the O levels and A levels on my tail.  

The students are jittery and I remember, with sympathy, sleepwalking through those exams; so exhausted that all I did when I came home was fall into deep and dreamless naps and wake, horrified and guilty that I wasn't studying.  Now, I was starting to feel guilty that they weren't and the relentless grind wasn't giving any of us much chance to recalibrate.  

At the end of a week of a lot of running around and very little sleep, I was invited by my good friend Sindhu to her theatre showcase.  Sindhu (or Sid to us) was part of an incubation group for young theatre practitioners for a year and for their final showcase, the group put on an interpretation of the T.S. Eliot poem, The Wasteland.  

Before Sunday, Sid told Amanda, Bear and I that we might find the production too avant garde and experimental.  She needn't have worried.  It was pretty unorthodox, but we enjoyed ourselves and I was inordinately moved at points.  

At the door, one of the ladies told us that one of the ideas behind the piece was that the actors had discovered their meanings of life.  We were to try and find ours.  I was tired, having run down from eight hours of work, and not completely ready to think deep thoughts just then, but the doors opened, and we ran with it.  

The set, scented with a smoke machine and perfumed oils, was split into sections for the performers to build little nests within.  One fragment was hung with embroidery and knitted pieces and another had books and marigolds hanging from the ceiling.  One of the actors had even filled the floor of her space with grey sand and desert rocks.  Sindhu's corner, a velvet den glowing with candles, fairy lights and a mosaic of drapes and mementos, was at once beautiful and sad, a tribute to times and people gone by.  

We were allowed to walk around the set during the performance and Amanda and I found ourselves touching things and standing, fascinated, under fishing line hung with apples and naked bulbs that pulsed and glowed.  

Throughout, I kept feeling snatches of something unfathomable.  Sure, it seemed uncomfortably experimental and possibly inaccessible, but there was also something deep and real winding beneath the surface that kept slipping through my fingers.  It was as if the stories and thoughts of real souls were woven in with the acting and if you only felt your way, you would touch something incredibly poignant. 

Sid, dressed as a faded, desperate Cleopatra, sobbed on a chair under a rich canopy of silks.  She didn't appear to see us, that is, until the end.

As the performance drew to a close, the actors picked up brown envelopes that they had secreted in corners and started to give them to the audience.  All around us, people were unfolding white pieces of paper with various "meanings of life" scribbled on them - things about giving yourself away or holding on tightly.  The sound was rising to a crescendo and people were speaking unintelligibly, tasting lines from the poem on the incensed air. 

Just as I was feeling left out, I saw Sindhu coming in our direction.  As she neared us, we made eye contact and her face lit up with a smile that felt like it was meant just for me.  In character, she knelt before us and gently pushed a letter into my hand.   

Then in a deep greeting of peace, Sid pressed her palms together and with tears streaming down her face, whispered against the backdrop of noise, "Shantih.  Shantih.  Shantih."  Startled, I felt my own eyes start to well, but before I could say anything, she sprang up, catlike, and was gone. 

In the silence that followed, with Amanda looking over my shoulder, I peeled away the envelope to find a solitary word:

And just like that, I understood.

Europe: Life should be

Where we would have once spent our days rushing around, trying to see every single landmark each city had to offer, we now preferred long hours of sitting in the shade, watching the world go by, and eating chocolate.

Lots and lots of chocolate.

Cube upon cube of melt-in-the-mouth praline or smooth truffle globes, cups of hot chocolate so thick they snatched our breath back from the cold, cakes and tarts with dense, dark underlayers capped by airy, whipped peaks, we ate it all.

Every two days, we would pass by a chocolatier in some hidden, cobblestoned alley and despite complaining about how much weight we thought we were putting on not five minutes before, our eyes would meet and without a word, we'd duck right in.  

After an agonising twenty minutes or so choosing flavours and box sizes, we slid back onto the street, blinking in the sunshine, our secret tucked under an arm.  And then, we'd search for the perfect cafe.

I'd order a latte, Bear a cappucino.  She ate her chocolate reverently, eyes closed as she smoothed the flavours over her palate.  I'd wait, and we'd give it a score.

Although I can't recall every little bit of cocoa we tasted, I have fond memories of an explosively delicious sea salt caramel in Nice, perfectly smooth Giandujas in Florence and the familiar slide of Leonidas pralines in the chill basement of Harrods.

But my favourite one of our chocolate moments was the first big box we shared on a hilltop in Avignon in the late afternoon.  The table was a little rickety on the uneven ground.  Water bubbled in a pond filled with absurdly wagging ducks, and children flashed along the banks, throwing bread and flying kisses.  I threw my head back and watched the sun's interminable summer crawl toward the horizon.

Bear and I took turns reading from the pamphlet and carefully tasting each dark square.  Like a food critic, I scribbled our ridiculous comments.  Over one glorious hour, to the sound of quacking and the breeze in the trees, we finished every piece in the box.

I gave Bear the brochure to take home, but I still like reading, every now and then, what I wrote beside each one.

It is a reminder of every other afternoon we spent guilty and giggling, chocolate melting between our fingertips.  Of how life should be.

Revolution 19

Sometimes, I think that until I can listen to this song without feeling any pain, any sadness, anything at all, my karmic debt to the Universe remains unpaid.

Chinese New Year

Before my grandparents died, Chinese New Year was my favourite holiday in the whole world.  It meant piling into our car for the 10-hour drive up to Terengganu where my grandmother would let us cook food on a huge bonfire fuelled by trash and gasoline.  She'd drag out old magazines, newspapers and even furniture and while it was burning and her back was turned, we scented the fire with stolen kaffir lime leaves. 

We camped in her garden and played with sparklers, and we even got our very own lion dance (my relatives own a shophouse and the lion stops by annually).  I loved lying on the sticky leather couches with my cousins and watching movies in a food coma.  Once, we sat through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy just so we could make fun of the whole thing.  

Things change.  My cousins and I have grown up and we are scattered round the world now.  Chinese New Year no longer means gathering at the matriarch's house and paying our respects.  After missing a few years' worth of celebrations, however, the whole family decided to meet up in Singapore this time round and I was psyched beyond belief.  

We've never hosted the Chinese New Year celebrations before, so we decided to pull out all the stops.

The red and yellow plants are cockscombs.  I objected on the grounds that the colours were tacky, but my brother, Shen, pointed out that there is no Chinese New Year without tacky so we got two pots.  And yes, we had real live pussy willows in our house and they freakin' bloomed.  As fuzzy little buds, they're cute and all but very soon it looked like we had a sheaf of branches draped with hairy yellow caterpillars. 

After all my relatives (with the exception of my other brother, Wei) rolled up just in time for the reunion dinner, there was a shitload of feasting.  And I mean, a shitload.

I don't think we've ever fed this many people in our house before.

Best of all that night, we had yusheng.  My family is remarkably un-Chinese in some ways and I don't think we've lo-heid together in years.  Standing on top of a chair with my camera and watching everyone laugh, tease and fling food about, I was filled with an unspeakable happiness.

My cousins have grown up but they're as playful as ever and we had fun tossing the salad and shouting "hot stallion!  Hot stallion!" together. 

Chinese New Year morning was laidback, but just as enjoyable.  I don't know when we'll meet like this again and so drove my family to distraction, following them around with the camera and demanding that they pose for photos.  Luckily, my mum's two sisters are pretty sporting.

I made Shen and Yen pose like one of them was secretly disgusted with the other.  That face is too good for words.

I wore a red peplum top I'd snatched off the Forever21 discount racks two days before.  It cost me all of $13.  Now that, my friends, is what we call "huat".

The angbaos were exceptionally pretty this year (and not particularly "ang").

For lunch, we had Terengganu's famous fish keropok and spicy salad.  I'd forgotten what it was like to have a house filled with noise and love with relatives round every corner and I was enjoying it thoroughly.  Even without the infamous bonfire, New Year in Singapore didn't feel lonely or sterile.

We even had the time to curl up on the couch with a few good movies.  Any night with Blades of Glory is a good night for me!

It's not the same as when my grandmother and grandfather were around.  It'll likely never be again.  

But life necessitates both nostalgia and adaptation.  These are new traditions, loving and wonderful, and I'd like to think that wherever my grandparents are, they feel it and are proud.

A cup of kindness

Unlike Christmas, which I am rather ambivalent towards, I like New Year because it feels like a new beginning for me.  Sure, it's arbitrary and man-made but an artificial chance is still a chance. 

From the age of 12 I've been making resolutions (some absurd and most not kept) but this year I got to thinking about the resolutions early.  At lunch with Edie, Sindhu and Shirin the other day, Sindhu put forward the idea that if you cannot genuinely be happy for people, the Universe takes things away from you and I was greatly struck by it.

I felt like the principle extended to a kind of general niceness - if I couldn't genuinely try my best to be kind, then maybe there would be some kind of seriously negative energy generated. 

The more I thought about it in conjunction with my resolutions, the more I realised that all the mean, unkind, inappropriate things that I do, say or think have to do with temptation.  Anger and irritation tempt me to mean thoughts or unnecessarily sarcastic words.  Delight in gossip tempts me to see the worst in people.  

And while I don't really think people should eschew wicked humour and view each other with a sugary piousness, I do feel that I could try harder to understand where people are coming from or to walk a mile in their shoes rather than judging them in my head right off the bat. 

I happened to run out of pages in my old journal several days before 2014 and so, with the theme of fresh starts in mind, I put this C.S. Lewis quote on the first page of my new one.  

In the New Year, I plan to practice holding off the temptation to be nasty... for an hour each time, at least.

Neverland

Today, while randomly scrambling around in drawers at home, I found this instax of my late grandma and my brother.

And now, I miss them both.

Papercuts

Sometimes I think that rather than growing, people are diminished.  That we are all chiselled, or whittled down, by the experiences of life and that what is left right at the end - the shapes, the dark hollows - is what makes the man.

We are only who we are in the moment, until another piece is cut away.

This evening, my mother pulled down a stack of my old notebooks and photos and made me pore through them and decide what to throw away.  They were cluttering shelves we needed for my brothers, she said.

There were pictures of me, a nineteen year old bridesmaid at my best friend's wedding, seventeen and awkwardly smiling next to a crush at a class barbecue, twenty four and pretending to be worldly far away from home.  

There were old planners in which I had made tiny, confessional notes in the margins of the day:

"In which the cab driver looked in the rearview mirror, told D and I 

that we made a nice couple, and I couldn't answer for laughing.  

Later though, at work, he sent me a message that said, "I think he's right".  

There were old letters pieced together from quotes from Beatles songs and catchphrases that I used to throw around with friends that I don't see anymore. 

And there were photos such as this one, of a girl who knew what it was to be loved and held and to be loving, and holding. 

Whenever I'm faced with memories like this, I experience a strange mixed feeling.  One part of me wants to drink them in, absorb them, scatter them on the floor like shards of glass and lie in them so they become imprinted forever; hundreds of tiny cuts on my skin.  Desperate, I want to gather them in armfuls and kneel and weep for everything gone by.

Another part of me can't get away from them fast enough.

At first I wonder if I should save the photos, every last one of them, then wonder what I'm saving them for, if anyone will ever care as much as I did.  I start throwing them out indiscriminately; who cares what I looked like in my prom dress?  Who cares who my best friends were if they're now just shavings on a woodshop floor?

In every photo I see a woman in a new phase of life - a friend, a girlfriend, a first time lover, a newly-minted wanderer - and I see the face of someone who thinks she's finally found her place.  But I put the pictures down and it's back to me, just me, whose priorities and centres of gravity have changed yet again.

The thing about life is that we move through so many experiences so quickly that we have to try and keep something from each one.  And so we think we know who we are and each time, we are wrong the moment we lose something else.

I don't want to juggle rusty razor blades.

What does it matter, I think, if the memories go forgotten?  I don't need reminders of what's been cut away, of who I am not anymore. 

I think that's why I was a serial monogamist, once upon a time.  Each time you move on to someone new, it's easy to forget about what has been left behind.  Now though, there is no dulling the sensation of each cut.  At least I'm finally feeling honest. 

I threw away a great deal tonight.  But I kept that photo. 

Maybe something in me still believes - looking at that picture of a girl who was once loved with a joyful, almost obsessive abandon before it all went sour - that not everything has been lost in vain.

Pink Dot 2013

Pink Dot 2013 was huge.  Several thousand people more than the year before and several thousand more than the year before that.  I remember when it first started and there was enough space for attendees to perform elaborate dances and blow human-sized bubbles.  The dot was still literally a dot in a field of green.

This time it was packed to the sweaty gills with good-natured pink-wearers who had come to stand against bigtory.

To be honest, it was so uncomfortably hot that it occurred to me that I needn't have gone; I could've stayed at home and continued expressing my support and living my beliefs.  Being there moved me anyway.

Some part of me found new affirmation in humanity.  A beautiful man with a gauze rose on his head offered me snacks when he saw me panting through the throng.  People brought their children, dressed fat babies in fuchsia, started teaching them about acceptance so that they would grow up never using the word "gay" as an insult again.  I ran into Nina and Sson, sang songs and ate cheese with Wai Kit, Edie, Shirin and Jia Min.  Watched people loved and be loved; smiled at couples embracing openly where they couldn't do so elsewhere.  

A different part of me though, felt down.  As the sun set, we all stood up to sing the national anthem.  There was a ripple through the younger people in the crowd, snickers of disdain and eye-rolling.   But I always sing the national anthem with gusto and off we went.  A few bars in, I realised that there was someone singing even more loudly than me.  I turned around and saw a middle-aged woman standing with her partner.  She had her eyes squeezed shut, fingers locked in prayer and was belting the words about togetherness and progress as if her life depended on it.

And I thought: she loves Singapore as much as anyone does.  Maybe even more.  And despite that, she's probably going to be treated like a second class citizen all her life.  She'll never be able to live openly with the person she loves, never be able to have a family and bring them up and show them the city that she clearly adores.  I was overcome with a wave of sadness, and I had to look away. 

Despite the heat and the overwhelming press of people, I'm glad I went.  It was good to spend an afternoon in what felt like an alternate universe where anyone and everyone had the freedom to be in love, if only for a little while.