I want you.

I want to chase you, I want to hold you by the hand and let you know with a kiss, how much I want you to be by my side. I want to feel my heart racing, pounding vociferously under my cage of my chest; and the rushing force of crimson, dilating my arteries, heating up my skin as if a sun thrives inside me. I want it so badly I dream of you all day and night, lying beside me, filling the empty space on my bed. Filling the room with the smell of your hair, the scent of your perfume. Feeling your skin brush with mine; tasting your kiss, wet as the rain. Gently feeling you from the inside, like walking back and forth through an unexplored territory in the vast wilderness. Listening to you whisper in my ears words that drive me crazy. Nose to nose, chest to chest, our bodies tighly locked, intertwined, fluid, eternally moving, meandering like rivers and streams through valleys and mountains. Charting the bright constellations in the evening sky with our hands held together, us sharing each other’s warmth in the cold of the night.

But that’s all there is to it. A distraction. Diversion. A beautiful release of temptations, of frustrations – and as lyrically portrayed in a song, of memories seeping from the veins. The body longs for things the heart does not. The mind thinks of things the heart can not. The eyes are not blind; they’re simply struggling to make sense of a space and place in time that is simply too dark. You think you’re traveling on a straight path but deep within you a soul knows that you’re just going around in circles. It has not yet come to a point where desire has become impossible to calculate or to a point where madness could directly translate into love.

I only want you.

I want only you.

I jumble them up and this nonchalant, cold, cold heart begins to tremble.

Sunless as the moon

Another day marked the end of its life with a swansong of bright afternoon colours painted across the sky, through the flocculent clouds and even a few miles beneath on the still, grey waters of the nearby sea. What seemed like an eternally sun-lit sky a while ago had eventually turned into a perennial blanket of mystery. The brand new sky that I saw from my window, sparsely adorned with the faint traces of stars from light-years away, felt empty and denseless as the moon – usually seen glowing from an appreciable distance and magnitude – was nowhere to be found.

On the ground, the world lit up itself with countless light bulbs of countless shapes and sizes, independently surviving under a dark abyss extending outwardly and endlessly throughout space. Under these artificial lights I carried on with my activities: my homework, my online networking, my random day – or shall I say, sunless – dreaming; as if the dark evening sky simply became an accessory of time, a causative effect of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, not to mention a natural inducement for a human being like me to rest and fall asleep shortly afterwards.

But no, it doesn’t simply work that way. The evenings are never that simple. With darkness uncertainty looms just about everywhere – will there be another tomorrow? Will I make it through the night? What lies ahead this evening, what lies beneath the dark corners of my room? Where is the Sun, where is the warmness that I need to make me feel that I’m not alone?  The dark cold nights, they are the moments in my life when I feel most isolated and afraid. The nocturnal seas that surround me become a reflection – or rather, a realization – of my lonely thoughts; the empty walls, the hollow beatings of my heart; the ghastly remnants of my past, lurking behind my eyes, swimming inside my mind, continuously stabbing me,  reluctant to go away, unwilling to hide beneath the depths of my existence.

I stare at the yellow light before me, waiting for the next day to come, hoping for either love or happiness – or both – to finally come my way.

Books/

this is why the library is always my favourite hangout place

The beginning part is always the hardest part

Monday evening. It was raining outside and I was sipping coffee at a Starbucks outlet down town. As I was trying to write a story about Monday evenings, I soon began to notice the light from my computer screen being reflected on my fingernails, and I realized, hey, why have I never written anything about my fingernails? The bizarre realization fascinated me, and so I started writing about them in descriptive fashion. Like, for instance, how my nails grow so fast I always have to carry with me a nail clipper everywhere I go, or how tiny soil particles get caught underneath them whenever I was bullied and pushed to the ground back in elementary school. Or how I try to maintain their lengthwise measurement to a specific one so that I could scratch myself whenever I feel itchy somewhere.

I sipped some more coffee and I suddenly became conscious of how much I’ve wasted my time writing about them. I was already five pages back-to-back writing about them and there was no progress and nothing more exciting to write. The whole aspiring writer writing in a coffeehouse attempt suddenly became a painfully monotonous and uninspired sideline profession and before I knew it, I’d already dunked the paper into the now empty cup of coffee. I grabbed my suitcase and fiddled with the security code until the lock snapped open and revealed a week’s worth of numbers to key into the machine. Oh, the mediocre joys of a permanent job.

Got myself another cup of coffee.

Might as well fall in

I don’t know about my dreams.
I don’t know about my dreamin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m fallin, fallin, fallin, fallin.
Might as well fall in.

I don’t know about my love.
I don’t know about my lovin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m fallin, fallin, fallin, fallin.
Might as well fall in.

I don’t know about my dreams.
I don’t know about my dreamin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m fallin, fallin, fallin, fallin.
Fallin.

I don’t know about my love.
I don’t know about my lovin anymore.
All that I know is
I’m lovin, fallin, lovin, lovin.
Might as well love you.

The vicious cycle of good and bad

It almost seems that our lives are constantly subjected to balances and checks, our troughs and peaks flattened out into fine lines that stretch horizontally, irrevocably with time. It is as if there are invisible forces of nature that can sense an imbalance of sorts in our lives, fixing them by chronologically cancelling out their effects with their reciprocals, deliberately establishing a highly deterministic universe where probabilities do not and cannot work.

Good and evil, black and white, push and pull, question and answer, dead and alive. Like two sides of the same coin, the choices are limited, so much so that even if you favour one over the other, a part of your existence will inevitably gravitate towards the other side of the coin. As such, dualism appears to be an inseparable thread of life. Under such an assumption, that life cannot explicitly be either happy or sad is almost a violation of nature’s design. That a beautiful woman cannot have the intelligence of equal calibre, for it is a physical and moral transgression to have the best of both worlds. When something good happens, a bad event is almost certainly inevitable. It is as if dualism was the only structural framework of life that can exist, and so absolutely nothing else in between the two extremes could be perceived, let alone materialized. There is no spectrum, no variation, just pure opposites, which happen on an alternating fashion.

But it is during moments like this – when one good thing is immediately followed by a bad one, and becomes a cycle so vicious that it inevitably erodes a person’s sense of hope and faith – that one begins to commit the grave mistake of conflating causation and correlation, and start sliding down the obscured path between reality and make-believe, where dreams and realities transfuse into a poisonous blood that seeps through the deepest trenches of the human mind, heart, body and soul.

Autumn

Trouble seeped through her garments like ice-cold water. For the longest time imaginable she fixated her line of sight towards nothing but the blank ceiling, frantically lacerating the innocent air with her long manicured nails, her toes autogenetically quivering at the edges of her feet – like they had their own consterning feelings to worry about. Although she was as silent as his empty bedroom, the disquietude inside her head – the grief-stricken noise, the emotional conflict, the painful cries of regret – were all echoed by the tears that fell from her eyes. He wiped her tears with his fingers; beamed a smile; kissed her lips; and wrapped her body with his. And then he stood up, half-resolutely walked across the room and unhinged the windows, opening them wide enough for the smell of the falling leaves to enter through the curtains.

She allowed her back to fall onto his bed where the mild afternoon sunlight unwound. He slowly crept beside her, and stared at her, almost dispassionately, yet with an obvious sense of concern. “I never realized,” he said, “those dark brown eyes.” She smiled, wryly, shifting her gaze towards the calendar that hung at the far corner of the wall.

“September’s just ended?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s October now, isn’t it.”

“Is that a question?”

“When is May?”

“Seven months from now.”

“I see. So it’s May then.”

“It’s October.”

Eight o’clock. Four hours had passed and there they were, still side by side, still as the black and white animal portraits on his wall, both their lips shut tight like they’ve never been opened before. All of a sudden she curled like a wilted plant, as if something inside drained all the energy she had for herself. He looked at her, and as if he had to wait first for a laborious instruction he grabbed her right hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I really have to go now.” He stood up, dressed in his work clothes, and planted a kiss on her cheeks.

Left. And probably, she thought, would never come back.

She then got up and stood by the window, penetrating the moonbeams with her most distant thoughts, embracing herself for warmth, arms crossed over her breasts, hands firm on her shoulders, feet tight on the ground, seemingly afraid to slip and fall down. In his comforting absence, inch by inch her hands slowly moved down, traversing the contours of her body, until finally resting on her womb, where the flowers of spring had already begun to bear fruit.

The settle down

They both sat on an old and rustic wooden bench facing the setting sun, their windswept hairs glowing under cold carrot-coloured hues, their eyes faintly reflecting the culminating grey of the clouds and the endless sea of indigo above them; their slouched backs gently sinking beneath dark silhouettes, and their shadows longitudinally growing in length, as if eternally stretching themselves to find some other outlet, some unfamiliar space, some different brand of solace somewhere far away.

But those were the shadows, opaque and lifeless in their entirety. The afternoon, for the lack of a better word, was beautiful. She was at awe with the tree leaves falling gently; so much so that she began entertaining the idea that the air had numerous invisible hands that plucked out the leaves one by one from the tree branches, settling them down on the ground in graceful and lightweight fashion. She was amazed at how the nearby stream brought music to her ears with the sounds of running water; at how it eternally murmured a string of different words she could barely, if not at all, understand; at how those different words made themselves heard to the trees and the fishes and the grasses and the frogs and crickets and to her before heading further downstream. Minutes after swimming in her imaginations, she realizes a hand gently brushing her hair, running a thumb through her cheek, a few fingers down her neck, the smooth skin-to-skin friction working to get her senses back after going off on a tangent for a while. The masculine familiarity was so hard to bear, that she eventually turned around to look at him, the one who owned the hand that caressed her and pulled her consciousness away from her meandering thoughts.

He looked at her in the eye and glanced away into the horizon before them. He then examined the area like a refined soldier, quiet and meticulous, careful not to make a noise or move that would distort his present view, like he had a piece of sensitive and sophisticated radar equipment ensconced within his skull, scanning the vicinity with utter precision and, for some reason, preordained images of the future. There, will be the playground. Beside that, will be a small grass area for us to play with our kids and dogs. A few trees on the side, and a flower garden to add colour and vibrancy to the green backdrop. Here, in this plot of ground, will be the house. Probably don’t need a big garage. A basement here, it will be cool and cozy for work. Three bedrooms, one floor up. Living room, kitchen, and a small fireplace for the cold winter nights. And the bench – this bench – will stay here.

The images coagulated inside his mind into lego pieces, moving on their own free will, forming outlines of a prospect in life that he never thought would come into fruition. That he never even once dreamed of nor desired to have, for he was scared of commitment. He was afraid of failure. But that didn’t seem to matter somehow, right at that moment. Right where they sat together, hand in hand, dreaming of the future they could build – a house, a home – seemed all right in place. Like it was the only thing in the world that hasn’t been done, and thus had to be done accordingly so, you know, he thought, he could be with her. Be one with her. Forever.

This is it, he said. This is the place.

And before they knew it, the sky had already completely turned dark.

The strobe lights

I find it totally amazing how the mere flickering of electric-coloured lights in a dark cold room can already put you in an indescribable state of trance. Not to mention the seeming aleatoric array of overly-synthesized sounds and noises blasting through the tunnels of your ears, normally causing you to palpitate and vibrate like an epicenter of some mad earthquake, a good way of releasing mixed feelings of agitation and excitement. The never-ending river of alcohol, perfect for those craving for a chance to temporarily switch themselves off from the rest of the world. The collision of bodies, the inevitable friction of human skins, the exchange of dripping sweat, of thirstquenching kisses, of fleeting yet burning glances among provocative eyes. The smell of people screaming, the taste of people dancing, the sight of people raising their hands up in the air, as if worshipping some nonexistent deity.

Your heart pounds with every music beat. Your eyes cringe at the flashing of the strobe lights. Your throat burns with every shot. You head spins. Your feet, uneasy. Your hips, they are grinding. Your hands moving, exploring every inch of skin, every strand of hair. You, forever spiraling down to a state of restlessness.

The Sea

It felt like a convoluted sense of relief, knowing that it was soon going to be over. It felt like waking up from a dreamless sleep, from a long and deep metaphorical sleep (quoting a friend), only to realize how many things have already happened and how much has already changed. The whole journey had been filled with inseparable uncertainties, perennially caught in between god knows what. How I survived swimming in a sea of question marks, I could never explain – but perhaps what matters now is that somewhere from a distance, from where I am currently struggling to keep afloat, is a new shore that can be visibly seen, a piece of land where the solidness of the ground, in every perceptible aspect, might be a little less unsettling for any intrinsically terrestrial creature.

I guess there is no point diving for inexplicable hearts, for abstruse pearls that lay on the grim seabed. There is no point holding your breath while fighting against the strong undercurrents that only threaten to drown you forever. However irresistible the mysteries these deep waters exude, what a person like me truly needs right now, more than anything, is a time and place in space to watch the stars in the evening sky, while thinking of new ways to reach for them.

The only way is up.

So I keep swimming.

C

The world was drowned in a sea of orange.  On the balcony she stood against forty-three years of tribulations and sufferings, triumphs and failures, joys and sorrows; carrying the brunt of the world on her aching shoulders; palms outstretched to the Creator whom she has never seen before, but has solemnly sworn to believe in and confide with, no matter how difficult. On the balcony she stood gazing at some unknowable relative space on the horizon, allowing her thoughts to wonder and wander around with the tidal winds that blew her thinning hair like venetian blinds that hung on wide windowed walls, as she waited, and yet not wanted, for a certain moment to happen.

She held the wooden railings that guarded her from a fatal drop, wooden railings that seemed to have gradually aged with her over the years. She looked down on the ground, to the grass patch that housed her unkempt potted plants, to the gravelled driveway, to the vines that crept in infinite directions, to the edges of the trees that fell short of height from where she advantageously stood, up to the sky, the clouds, and the empty spaces in between, and filled them with her memories from the yesteryears, with olden times where things seemed better in almost every imaginable way, and with moments that could not be relived yet could be reminisced from time to time. She wanted to fill them all until she had nothing left.

She stood in quietude, teardrops slowly falling down her wrinkling façade, like grains of sand painstakingly dripping inside the fragile contours of an hourglass. Then she shifted her gaze to the other side of the balcony where he, not even scraping past through his fifties, had been there sitting on a rocking chair all day, steadfastly sleeping yet at the same time fighting an unscalable and unpredictable battle inside him – a battle that only he could win. What could be more painful, she thought, to be waiting, and yet not wanting, for that certain moment to happen?

Prologue

I go with the flow. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I like circumnavigating life on my raft without any destination in mind. Basically, I like random things. I enjoy living my present life relishing the past and looking forward to the unknowable and unforeseeable future. My decisions are based on the external influences that guide my life to wherever they take me. They’re like the wind propelling my sail to places I’ve never been before, allowing me to meet new acquaintances, make new friends, and enjoy the different experiences life has to offer. At times, I drop the anchor to the sea bed, but I’m generally a nomad keeping up with the tides in this ever-moving, fast-paced, undulating world.

If any of the writer’s articles appear to be insightful, inspiring, incomprehensible, incoherent, insensitive, or incorrigible: I hope that you read each of them with an open mindset and conscious knowledge of the fact that they should never be taken seriously for whatever they may literally or figuratively mean – every single written word has neither been planned nor been given any serious thought.