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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.