Echoes of Mine

Il est tard. Je cherche mon autre chez-moi, et je prends un chemin que je ne connais pas : un petit sentier qui longe les usines et la ville entre-coupant par la forêt. Je commence à peine à entrevoir la nature, lorsque tout d’un coup, la nuit tombe. Je suis plongée dans un monde de silence, pourtant je n’ai pas peur. Je m’endors quelques minutes, tout au plus, et quand je me réveille, le soleil est là et la forêt brille d’une lumière éclatante.

Je reconnais cette forêt. Ce n’est pas une forêt ordinaire, c’est une forêt de souvenirs. Mes souvenirs. Cette rivière blanche et sonore, mon adolescence. Ces grands arbres, les hommes que j’ai aimés. Ces oiseaux qui volent, au loin, mon père disparu. Mes souvenirs ne sont plus des souvenirs. Ils sont là, vivants, près de moi, ils dansent et m’enlacent, chantent et me sourient.

Je regarde mes mains. Je caresse mon visage, et j’ai 20 ans. Et j’aime comme je n’ai jamais aimé.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Model Alumnus

The cemented roundabout, which unambiguously laid flat under the blazing Singapore sun, was sopping wet, as though drenched in its own perspiration. As I was ogling at the seemingly odd and random occurrence, I heard a hissing noise coming from a nearby tap in which an elongated plastic gardening hose was loosely fixed. It took a bit more of common sense and time to mentally process and understand what the hell was going on, although I would admit that there came a certain point where I simply questioned my own sanity, thinking that the water leak was just an ordinary mirage, an aquatic apparition, or a soggy figment of my imagination.

I scouted the vicinity with my two eyes and found no sign of human existence. At two in the afternoon, under a weather as blistering as a rope burn or hot as a scantily-clad group of college undergrads by the beach, it was understandable that even the most highly-pigmented human beings had to take refuge inside the air-conditioned rooms. Being the most environtment-conscious ex-student/die-hard-alumnus that I am and have always been, I crossed the sea of precious water like Moses – the only difference being that I simply stepped and walked over it with my four year-old Chucks while he had to part a huge ass body of water with his wooden staff – and closed the regurgitating tap until not a single tiny drop leaked out from the mouth of the hose which appeared – to my lewd fascination – to have lost its turgidity the moment the gushing water came to a standstill. I stooped up straight, folded my hands, looked up, and beamed a smile of satisfaction at Saint Jean-Baptiste de la Salle who happily stood with two little children up on the gleaming white façade of the school building.

Manila Street

It wasn’t at all like what one would have imagined it would be. On the street there were no bickering sounds of traffic, no family-owned pick-up trucks, no smoke-belching public transport buses, not even flamboyantly decorated jeepneys. There was hardly anybody within the vicinity. The sidewalk was as placid, pristine and crystal-clear as a mountain lake; unobstructed by public commuters, jaywalkers, pickpockets, high-school dropout gangs; free from the wrath of noisy vendors who usually sell cheap cigarettes and bubblegums apiece, unleaded gasoline in graduated Coca-Cola bottles, disheveled tabloid papers hung on metallic alambres, charcoal wrapped in overused rice-mill sacks, and pirated DVDs of films still waiting to be released on cinemas, among many others.

And the air smelled of cleanliness. Garbage cans placed across the road in perfect order, like Buckingham Palace foot guards on duty. There were no landfills, no shanty towns, no one squatting under bridges or flyovers, no one urinating by the roadside. No political posters. There were no humongous billboards of sexy dim-witted celebrities. The buildings were equally ordinary, yet exuded an atmosphere of classy, sophisticated modernity. High-rise windows reflected the immaculate sky, as if entirely pasted on the surfaces, cumulus clouds swimming from one glass panel to another, while the ground, humbled by gravity and elevation, was carpeted in asphalt and cement and some tiny patches of green where tall angsana trees stood in all their restricted majesty.

After standing under the sweltering sun for as long as I could imagine, in the midst of all awkward seemliness and civility before my very eyes: it dawned on me, like the bland aftertaste of an initially shocking revelation – like a watered-down realization – that Manila was simply just a name.

Silence

The familiar smell of afternoon slowly wafted away with the setting sun. As the bus continued to drive along the autobahn, the street lamps spectacularly lit up in unison, stationed above tall posts which, on the other hand, unmajestically spaced themselves apart by the roadside. Traffic started building up, clogging up the river of asphalt and cement, sufficiently drowning the evening in city lights. With the now dark evening sky as a backdrop: the window pane, in its subpellucid state, fresh from a momentary drizzle, smudged and smoothened out the street lamps, headlights and stop lights into one interblended array of colours, unexplainably calming and soothing their tired senses.

“Glad you’re back. I missed you,”  he said.

“You haven’t changed a bit; still horrible as ever,” she replied, while brushing three-quarters of his hair to the left using her fingers, causing them to feel slightly oily and sticky.

She immediately wiped them on the frills of her skirt, one by one, until he could not take it anymore and burst into his infectious laugh. He took a tissue from his bag, then held her hand and cleaned her fingers as though their edges were made of gold.

She wanted him to stop. She didn’t care about his oil-slicked hair or even her fingers at the moment. She simply wanted him to tell him her experiences, what she did, the kinds of people she met, the places she visited and how they looked like, but instead she found herself trapped all over again in his gentlemanly gesture, his enchanting caress. His ravishing, captivating romance.

He stared at her. Ran his hand up her thigh. Kissed her. Smiled.

Shifting her gaze to the window pane beside them, listening to the boisterous engine of the bus, the busy evening traffic, feeling the coldness of the night slowly seeping in her vêtements she finally realized that all she simply needed was his comforting silence.

On Heat Island

People like to say “another day” in reference not to the renewed interest of the Earth to spin on its axis or to the immediate (oftentimes unwanted) ascertainment of one’s peripheral consciousness after a long and tiring dream, but to the circadian and chronological motion of their day-to-day activities at the workplace, in school, at home, or wherever they may constantly find themselves having to sort of fulfill some substantial obligation to an endless litany of drudgery – paid or unpaid that’s another issue. Be it a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or financial aspect or state of affairs, an average person’s life is nothing but a complex string of routines, rituals and repetitions, each designed to test his patience, perseverance – and to some of us born with the will and intellect of a human being and the despicable stain of sin – the capacity to hold on to any metaphysical locus, of which the religious folk would usually refer to as God, Allah, Buddha, Shiva – a few of many other fancy, catchy, fearsome names.

Nevertheless, however seemingly repetitious and monotonous the day is, we cannot deny that no day is the same as the ones that had already passed. We don’t always wake up on the same side of the bed, and even if we do, we don’t always wake up to the same fetal position or hairstyle even. Crumpled bedsheets need to be washed after some time and replaced by a new one, while mattresses have to be flipped every six months at the very least. We get tired of cooking sunny side ups and sometimes opt for a scrambled egg or an omelette instead (if the attempt to flip it on the pan is successful), or simply skip the first meal of the day and head straight to work with an empty, grumbling stomach. Sometimes we start the day with a cup of hot coffee; some other times with something else. We all subconsciously thrive on endless combinations, in a limited range of permutations of space and time.

We might be confronted with the same day-to-day cycle of activities, but we never face them the same way twice, or thrice, or more: unexpected things always happen along the way. An evening news weatherman could dance around the television screen for as long as he wants, tell us about his prediction – sunny all throughout – and leave us running for the nearest shelter on our way to work the next day when it suddenly begins to rain. We may anticipate more rainfall for the rest of the week, forcing us to carry our umbrellas everywhere we go, but we can never know when heavy-duty plastic boots or just the simple tactic of staying at home would start to come in handy. Never can we ever be one hundred prepared for every unknown second that looms ahead of us. If we could, then lotteries, casinos, stock markets and churches and weathermen would cease to exist.

Nevertheless, we wake up to the dismal truth that we have to go through another day; that we have to work to pay our bills at the end of every month; that we have write essays with more substance, more clarity, with a better flow of ideas to get the grades we want; that we have to feed ourselves with the right nutrients and avoid whatever has become or could become detrimental to our health; that we have to always go through a cycle of joy and sadness, with the latter always seeming to have a more profound and longer duration in virtually any type of situation; that we have to go through every single hour, minute and second of the day only to realise at night right before we close our eyes that once we open them again and see the morning light pierce through the windows and into the depths of our skin we are instinctively going to require ourselves to get out of bed and try again to go through another vicious cycle of staying alive and making it through another day. To do the same things all over again.

From Dawn Till Dusk

You are lying in bed, and the crisp smell of morning begins to fill the air. Burying myself under the sheets, I find you there steadfastly asleep, looking tired from the night we had spent together, with a soft pillow tucked in nicely between your arms. As I trace the length of your arms with my hands, and brush my lips against the soft knuckles on your hands and gently kiss your fingertips one by one, I begin to wonder to myself. Am I – perhaps symbolically – the pillow that your arms embrace, that you hold so close to your body while you sleep? Do you, by any chance, constantly think of me – of us even – even in the deepest purviews and farthest peripheries of your dreams? Can I, if possible, get to be a part of your day today? Will you, if you don’t mind, let me prepare breakfast for you, at the very least?

I look at you and the questions in my head just keep spinning around, restless and relentless, looking and asking for answers.

**

You are taking a shower, and I could see your entirety through the glass partition. I sit on the toilet seat and light up a cigarette, letting out a puff of smoke and letting it fill the air as I watch you lather yourself with soap. We look at each other, and we both smile. You ask me to come over and help scrub your back, and due to some weird predilection for the scent of papaya I take off my clothes and join you. I gently scrub your back, your arms, your thighs, and before I realise it, I am already fervently kissing your lips, tasting you tongue, holding your body close to mine, both of us pretending like we’re back somewhere in the past, back to zero, starting from scratch, kissing and falling in love all over again under a cold evening rain.

**

It is afternoon and you are sitting on the couch; channel surfing like it’s nobody’s business. You like to do that, because you don’t particularly like watching TV anyway. You just like sitting on the couch, eating cookies and drowning then down your throat with a glass of fresh and pulpy orange juice. And for some weird reason that cannot be logically explained,  I’m really glad I bought that furniture.

**

You are there standing by the open window as though you deliberately esconced yourself right at the edge of a tall cliff or at the far edge of the universe (about the validity of its existence, that I will never know), while the colours of the setting sun unconscientiously paint themselves all over your skin. You take off the ruby-studded butterfly clip from your neatly parted hair and the wind brushes them away as they fall down, like how tall grasses in an open field sway to the afternoon breeze, or how tree branches undulate and leaves rustle in unison when zephyrs pass through. Watching your eyes pierce through the infiniteness of the sky, drowned in your white translucent dress, glowing with a radiance that’s slowly drifting away with time, I walk towards you and hold you tight in my arms, for I fear that when darkness finally takes over and that great ball of fire on the horizon finally disappears, you would too.

e horizon finally disappears, you would too.

From an ordinary fan’s point of view

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011)

If all these news about the world ending next year are true, then you really have to thank Warner Bros. for releasing the movie this year. It is indeed a glorious, well-deserved culmination of a worldwide phenomenon, but the eighth installment of the Harry Potter franchise felt quite leaning more towards the spectacle display of cutting-edge visual and special effects and the slap-in-your-face manifestation of groundbreaking cinematography. Watch it in 2D or IMAX.

Perhaps such a daunting task was deemed inevitable, for movies – summer movies in particular – have always, unfailingly, been made primarily for pleasuring the moviegoer’s eyes. If one is not looking for the benefit of visual imagery then he might as well forget about heading to the theatres for some big-budgeted cinematic adaptation and simply read all the seven books while sitting on a comfortable chair on a lovely afternoon, leaving all of J.K. Rowling’s exquisite world to the surest of hands he will find: his own imagination.

But it has always been a huge sunk cost for the author herself and the production team – an insurmountable undertaking on their part – of having to forgo bits of narrative and dialogue here and there to allow more room for wand-wielding witches and wizards and magic spells flying from one end of the movie screen to the other, knowing how the final part of the story unfolds. In fairness to the cast and crew, there was an overall good depiction and fairly substantial examination of the story’s main characters, i.e. Harry and Voldemort; but any huge fan of the series would not be able to deny that it was a painful disappointment to see how some of Rowling’s elaborate creations were utterly left with little screen time to be vindicated and given the attention that they truly deserve. Fred Weasley, Nymphadora Tonks, Remus Lupin, and Bellatrix Lestrange are just few of the many other characters whose presence on the silver screen seemed too inadequate and abrupt that moviegoers who might decide to watch the film without having any prior knowledge of the books would probably find themselves unable to emotionally relate to the intricacies and complexities of these relatively smaller yet equally important characters.

Although it has its particular weaknesses just like any other mainstream blockbuster installment, overall it is a worthy film to end this epic finale to the multibillion-dollar series. To those of us who have grown up with and grown to love Harry, his friends and even his enemies, we might think of taking it as more than just a two-hour movie: Deathly Hallows Part 2 is, by all means, albeit heart-wrenching to think about, a strikingly emotional and symbolic end to the literary comforts of our childhood days.

Charade

Summer nights, we made our love in the sand
And at the tide, we held our love hand in hand
And we listened to music. The ocean was playing
The words that our two hearts were saying,
That only two lovers can hear

Let us ride on the wind while this moment is real
You’re the light of my life
You are welcome to my Charade
And this feeling, knowing you blessed me forever
And believing I have been touched by your love

And the pleasure of knowing the evening won’t tear us apart,
We can follow the sun till the day light is gone,
We can gaze at the sky till the night is over –
Light of my life
You are welcome to my Charade

And this feeling, knowing you blessed me forever;
We can follow the sun till the day light is gone,
We can gaze at the sky till the night is over –
Light of my life
You are welcome to my Charade

By the window

Every day, the street a few floors below my apartment window is filled with people, ostensibly from all walks of life. I look at those who pass by the roadside and – always consequently much to my overwrought amazement – I wonder, what are they up to? Where are they going? Who are they meeting? What did they have for lunch? Who might be getting married tomorrow, or next week, or who just had liberated themselves out of an incarcerating relationship? You know, all the possible random questions that might pop out of your head like a probable mathematical model for a strange-looking origami on any given day. On any day when you’re alone and sitting on a broken chair and have no one to talk with.

It is also on these days where I frequently find myself trying to make sense of the world around me. There was once when I spent two hours in the shower trying to figure out why facial expressions such as a smile tend to be universal in nature, whereas other physical gestures such as kisses or handshakes or bows of varying degrees of posture signal different meanings, depending on the sociocultural or geographic setting. In some places, they might not even exist at all. I turned off the shower, dried myself with a clean towel, sat on the toilet seat for a few minutes, and eventually came into the conclusion that although there the are varying levels of social indexicality found in non-verbal means of communication such as body language, eye contact and sign language, we must take the physiology of the human head into consideration. So a smile, as much as it is a form of expression that promotes positive interpersonal relationships, or a sophisticated biological process of muscular contraction and relaxation, is suprasegmentally a part of the human body that helps keep a positive outlook in one’s life, which is crucial in maintaining good health. A smile is, quintessentially, a tool for survival. That’s why everybody knows how to do it. That’s why everybody has the capacity to understand the meaning behind every smile.

But what is a smile, when there is nothing to be happy about? This city is crammed with people and here I am sitting by the window pane whose edges have turned opaque with dirt and hard water. Here I am watching them pass by as if all that the world has to offer me are potholes and dim lights and cold winter snow, bicycles and Sunday newspapers, fire hoses and telephone booths, brisk walks and the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of white-collared workers at the end of a long day from their offices. I look at all of these from the comforts of my room and I feel alone, more alone every day.

Life is a barren desert, a hollow cylindrical container, an empty cup, and the questions and complexities of the world I live in are my daily dose of hot coffee that wakes up my senses in the wee hours of morning – but only strong enough to do just that. No matter how much I try and keep myself busy or make my life productive and worthwhile, the days in general feel just like an endless and dreamless sleep. The existential questions and mysteries of the world accumulate and drift away somewhere else, like clouds in the sky that form overhead and fall down down as rain on a faraway, distant town. Time passes by sometimes, though (when luck decides to strike me a little), when a day feels like a timely refuge to the nostalgic past. Some other times, time passes by and offers me a lofty escape to whatever the distant future might hold.

Time offers me a lot of things. And time is what takes them all away from me.

I sit on the broken chair by the window, and smile.

Sunday

Morning. Cigarettes for breakfast. I find myself craving for liquor, but my feet are too lazy to move. This couch feels great; the tender softness I feel brushing against my back somehow calms my senses. The sun feels warm and cold at the same time. The chirping birds remind me of the beginning of a new day.

Afternoon. The ashtray is almost full. The air is hot and I feel my body dripping in cold sweat. I look at myself in the mirror and I notice that I’ve gained a considerable amount of weight. The room smells of cigarette smoke; just the way I like it. I hear my neighbours watching TV. A drama, definitely a sad drama. Nobody’s laughing. Nobody laughs at a tragic story. I guess that’s the reason why I don’t watch comedies. I hate comedies. Humour is short-lived, temporary, oftentimes a sensation forced upon oneself for immediate pleasure. Like sexually stimulating yourself to a porno magazine, but not quite close. I fall asleep on the reclining chair.

Evening. The doorbell rings and a young man greets me a wonderful evening and adds “and that would be thirty dollars, sir”. Thirty dollars for greeting me? I ask. No Sir, for that one, pointing to the box of pizza and a bag of hot sauce packets, grated cheese packets and tissue napkins he handed me not so long ago. Sorry, please wait here. I put the box on the coffee table and grab a coin purse from the room and give it to him. I tell him that there are forty-five one-dollar coins inside and he can keep the change if he wants. The purse was really heavy and I guess no delivery man likes getting a bag of coins as payment. Off he goes with a wry smile. How fake and superficial. I liked it better the other day when the KFC delivery boy came in two hours late and didn’t get any tip from me. At least he genuinely looked sad and disappointed. It was his fault anyway. Not mine.

Midnight. The weekend is finally over. It’s Monday now and I have to be at the firm in a few hours. Shirt, pants, tie, and black leather shoes. My leather suitcase. Driving my car. Taking calls, signing papers, making huge deals for people I do not even know. Meetings, presentations. Smoking at the patio on breaks. Working overtime. Getting paid. Just the way I want it.

What the world looks like on a Friday afternoon

   

Sans Rival

 

I find it amazing how the process of adding some customary suffixes at the end of masculine names makes it almost immediately fitting for any member of the female race to adopt them. Add –tine to Chris and he produces a Christine. An –ia to Victor and he suddenly finds himself a Victoria. A Gabriel could become a Gabrielle or Gabriela or even a Gabriella, ultimately depending on the parents’ discretion. It may not seem original, but it sure is economical.

Although there might not be any striking phonetic differences between that of the male and female varieties of her name, there was nothing particular in that phone conversation the other day that caused me to suspect her as a man who somehow suffered from a failed pubertal development. “Alright, See you on Saturday afternoon then!” Her voice was too gorgeous to be a man’s.

And it wasn’t just her voice. Chef Adrianne Sakuramoto was blooming, blossoming, someone living at the peak of her womanhood, someone who probably never knew that she was once a timely goddess who fell from the heavens because of her jealous mother and sisters. “I see that you’ve already lined the undersides of those baking pans with aluminum foil,” she told me. “Good. But shouldn’t you be preparing the meringue now? We won’t be eating those foils, you know.”

The cold orange sun penetrated through the windows, the foil I just wrapped on those baking pans glinting like a deep sea. She looked at me in the eyes, and I looked back, and gave me a laugh that made my groin cringe a little, and then told me to beat the eggs and cream of tartar together at medium speed. That was something I already learned from my mother whom I always used to watch bake cakes and cookies and other pastries on Sunday afternoons, but I continued beating them as if I’d never worked in a kitchen before.

“No, no, no. You should do it like this. Let me hold your hand. You hold the bowl with that other hand of yours like this. There. There. Medium speed. Just nice.”

Do you have like, umm.. a step-by-step list of what to do? I asked. In fact she had one placed on the table when I arrived at her house, which I cunningly hid in my attache-case, leading her to think that she had never actually written one or she had probably lost it somewhere.

“300 degrees F for 45 minutes to an hour, or until it turns golden brown.” “Cook until the syrup spins a thread – you might want to use my candy thermometer, it’s on the lower cupboard!” “Sprinkle with lots of cashews alright – do you love cashews? You’re not allergic to them are you? I love cashews so you gotta put lots of them.” “Oh and don’t forget to spread some buttercream on it.”

And some love too. Ha-ha.

She smiled. “That’s great; buttercream will suffice.”

*

I took the sans rival out of the freezer after we had finished eating the dinner she prepared. I put the dessert on the table. She stood and grabbed a silverware – a forkette – and took a small piece into her mouth.

“Wow. Very delicious. Very, very good job. Sweet and rich, thick and tasty, never expected the baker in you to come this early.” She smiled.

So what’s the menu for next week, Adrianne?

“I can teach you how to make different kinds of sushi.”

That sounds nice. Japanese. I’d like some of that.

“Tomorrow, if you want,” she added, as I started drawing my body closer to hers.

Excess baggage

 

Saturday morning, daylight. An old alarm clock rings by the bedside. An arm erupts like a geyser from under the sheets. Stop. A picture frame falls to the floor. A bang, a bump, a thump, a thud – and a cracking sound of glass. A woman rolls heavily out of the bed.

She looks first into the bathroom mirror, scanning herself with her eyes like they had laser lights beaming off into her reflection. With a disgruntled look, she pulls out a weighing scale from one of the cabinet drawers and takes off her slippers. She steps on it and watches the small dial swing left and right until it stops right in the middle of what looks like a plastic elementary protractor jammed on a pink rectangular plastic casing. Two hundred and sixty-six pounds.

She sits on the toilet seat, mulling over things, thinking of this new day as a bowl of hot Singapore laksa that she has never tasted before, convincing herself to try it out because everything about it is okay, everything is good, and everything is just fine. She tells herself that she just has to try it and see how her body responds to something new, something different, something unusual and exotic and unfamiliar to her senses.

This has to go.

She stares at the bathroom mirror once more and convinces herself that she doesn’t care about how she looks or how people stare at her when she’s walking down the street with gigantic layers of her belly protruding under her blouse, or how she is made fun of by her family members because of her insanely large breasts, or how her physical presence triggers the overload sensors of all the elevator shafts in the office building where she works. That she is beautiful in her own way, she knows very well. Whatever people say, she doesn’t really give a damn. She’s like that – and that is something people have to deal with and accept as a fact of life. Like gay people and marijuana.

A walk across her bedroom. A look out into the window. A catch of the sunlight on her palms.

I am beautiful the way I am.

But with this? I might just live until fifty.

 

So Many Stars

The dark is filled with dreams
So many dreams –  which one is mine?
One must be right for me.

Which dream, of all the dreams,
When there’s a dream for every star?
And there are oh so many stars, so many stars.

The wind is filled with songs
So many songs – which one is mine?
One must be right for me.

Which song, of all the songs,
When there’s a song for every star?
And there are oh so many stars, so many stars.

Along the countless days, the endless nights
That I have searched: so many eyes,
So many hearts, so many smiles –
Which one to choose, which way to go, how can I tell?
How will I know, out of, oh
So many stars, so many stars.

Some call it the point of no return

For whatever reason, the moment I was stripped bare it felt as if the entire bed fell into a narrow hole, free-falling like there’s no tomorrow. And there I was falling too, naked and wrapped in bed sheets and trapped in another person’s arms, plunging down into an emotional and psychological void, feeling so extremely vulnerable my bones could have just easily snapped out of the joints like wilted leaves under the midday sun.  Nonetheless, what started as a dispassionate urge of the senses eventually turned into a sweltering exchange of wordless tongues, of kisses that were made to be understood at the slightest touch of the lips; into a smoldering rhythm of bodies to the tune of each other’s moans; into a fiery moment fueled by each others’ hidden yet burning frustrations and desires. Somehow it almost seemed like the flames of hell ascended from beneath the sea and burned my soul, with guilt tightly clutched around me, leaving me neither able to retaliate nor defend myself. But outside this conscience of mine, I knew what I truly wanted. As I fought back, as my tongue dug in deeper, as I felt the tightness now completely surrounding me, I consequently realized that the only thing I couldn’t bear to put myself through was to stop halfway through.

La femme dans la bibliothèque

Why, the book that you hold with your feeble hands hides your nose and your lips from mine eyes. As you douse your worldly troubles and insecurities with timeless writings printed on yellowing, aging pieces of paper, I witness how those eyes veer from one page to another in a way almost quite menacing and mesmerizing at the same time; how they seem to persistently chase after words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs as if these are the only things in life that truly matter to you. As you rise up from what seems to be an awfully wrong attempt to slouch on a very unaccommodating chair, long strands of black hair vaguely glimmer like a deep ocean under the overcast sky, wrapping around the edges of a freckled face like a slightly illuminated veil of silk. You, possibly suppressed by the deafening silence and punctiliousness of this ancient repository, awkwardly – almost reluctantly – stretch your hands high up in the air, (before a long line of bookshelves that silently tower from a distance, before book enthusiasts in search for possibly hidden treasures while walking on the wooden floor with incredibly muffled feet), and heave a sigh of what came to me as a small fragment of a satisfaction.

Is something wrong? How can I help you? Tough paperwork? Good day! Hi, it may not be any of your concern but I was wondering if you would like me to introduce myself to you because I would really like to do so: my name is…

No! I think of the perfect sentence to spark a timely conversation, but the pressure of providing you the rightfully adequate and fitting first impression is currently leaving me on a verbal squander that could invite only a disheartening rejection. Should I write a speech? Get a coffee? Send a note via the librarian walking towards my direction? What the hell am I doing. Think! Think! What sentence… words, words…

I look at you again, amazed at your unconventionally tall nose; at your crimson lips that pout like a fresh bud in the morning light; at your face that could, in reference to a song, launch a thousand ships; and at your eyes, so weak and small, squinting against the now bright and clear midday sky. So amazed at the sight of them that I now suddenly have a feeling. A feeling that causes me to believe that the universe isn’t so big after all. That flowers can bloom in the driest of deserts, even in the darkest of winter evenings. That time, although irreversible, does make up for the mistakes of the past and unwaveringly presents us with new opportunities.

But I stand up, push my chair aside, and return my books to the library counter, and walk out the revolving doors, as if I had seen nothing. As if I had seen none.

Germaine

Although she wore a white belt around her waist, it was fat and it had the kind of white that sparkled like opal under the sun. Who could blame her for showing up in school strapped in what almost seemed like a glinting girdle, a loose elastic band that could only possibly have buckled up nicely on a thirty-four inch belly? We just moved in to a new house and everything is still in a terrible mess. She woke up late and to the bitter realization that her belt was drowned in a mountain pile of knickerboxers and trousers and pantaloons, over-sized handkerchiefs and colossal comforters, her mother’s inexpressibles and faux animal coats and stockings and her father’s collection of basketball jerseys which he only wears to sleep, and my favourite set of costumes for the annual talent show back in Queenstown; and so there was no other choice but to borrow her mother’s, which was already on her belly, struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, her dark blue pinafore which usually looks fresh from the iron board, smooth and wrinkle-free and crisp along the creases and edges, now looks like it had never even ventured into the washing machine at all. The starfish sticker her brother secretly put behind her dress last week was still there.

Her hair looked like a bunch of cables that hung on electric posts, forced into a mishmash that no one in her household could comprehend on a sleazy early Monday morning. How she managed to do that to herself still remains a mystery to me. It was clear that she took a bath before she went downstairs, for it was not difficult to detect the scent of her favourite shampoo from the balcony where I stood waiting for her school bus to arrive. Her mother tried to resolve her problem in the bathroom, although I did not know how she did it, for I was never allowed to enter the bathroom. Well, she came out with her hair looking less fizzy, good enough not to get scolded by her homeroom teacher or worse, made fun of by her classmates. A few of her fancy lollipop hairpins would have done the trick, I thought. But no one has ever heard or understood my suggestions anyway. It kind of bums me but oh well. I guess they can’t hear me sometimes.

But you know, no matter how disgruntled or disfigured her uniform or her hairstyle looks, she always manages to pull off a pretty face and a pretty smile. I like how she stares at me straight into my eyes and smiles, fondling the back of my ears and running her fingers back and forth my belly in a gentle streamlined fashion, how she tries her utmost care not to hit my nozzle when I come close to her or step on my tail when she passes by the narrow foyer in front of the backyard where I usually take my afternoon naps. I like how she volunteers to put my meals on my plate, and how she lets me sit beside her on the couch when she watches her favourite weekend cartoon shows. I like watching her sleep on her bed at night, and I like how the deafening noises in her room turn into peaceful and lucid silence as she resigns on her bed with her eyes and mouth closed, hands folded as if submitting a prayer, fragile body tucked underneath the sheets, her mind dreaming away into places only she could reach. And I like it most when she wakes up in the morning, the air billowing with the noises of a young girl complaining, crying, getting excited, getting annoyed, talking about the dreams she had last night, fighting with her brother on the kitchen table, eating breakfast and staring at her orange juice and then at her father’s half-filled pot of cold coffee wondering what makes it smell so good, getting ready, waving goodbye to me and watching her walk out of the gate and leave for school, eagerly waiting for the time I’d see her again.

The Window on to the Street

by Franz Kafka

Whoever lives in solitude and yet would nevertheless find some form of contact, whoever in view of the changing hours, the weather, the circumstances of his job and so forth, seeks some arm or other to cling on to – such a man will not be able to get by for very long without a window on to the street. And even if he isn’t looking for anything in particular, and is just tired, letting his eyes drift in between the public and the sky as he steps up to his window, head back, apathetically, even then the horses will take him away with them in their retinue of their waggons and clatter, off in the end to some human participation.

j’suis

I am a defective manufacture. A diseconomy of scale. A heinous grammatical error buried deep inside a long-winded sentence. A researcher’s statistically anomalous datum of a tedious lab experiment. The pathetic tail-end of a heavily left-skewed bell curve. A failure.

I am the germ that dirts the skin of this society. A virus that kills for its own survival. I am an incurable disease that no one hopes to suffer from. I am enemy.

I am a catastrophe in this world. A deathly chemical that scours the rivers and streams. A poison in the air that you breathe. A pollution. I am the tremor that shakes the ground, the rain that floods the earth, the wind that obliterates everything on its path. I am a pestilence, a plague, a natural disaster. I am inevitable.

I am a sin; a cavity that eats away the righteousness of life. I am the tail of the moral coin. I am the loss of hope, the lack of grace, the absence of love. I am me.