why so many josh rouse these days? because he’s practically the only one i’m listening to.
yesterday marked the best birthday in my life, and many thanks to (by seating order) wanjun, waikit, kelvin, qixin, bala, eugene, matthew, sams, debbiezor, ailin and seow yanmei who wrote me one of the sweetest cards that i will ever receive. it was a day of food, of monetary excesses, but i suppose your birthday is a good excuse for you to spend money which you normally would balk at. valentino’s was lovely, but the antipasti cost more than the mains itself and it was something that was rather wtf-inducing; much love for the cake, which was the first i’ve had in more than fifteen years (seriously. i swapped my cakes in the past for pizza hut buffet meals because pizzas are round too.) and the fifteen shots of vodka which waikit helpfully whacked me into; i can still smell the tinge of alcohol when i take a deep breath in.
these have been magnolia days, and it’s wonderful to meet old friends again. thank you everyone, i say for the umpteenth time, tackily, thankfully, belatedly.
“She was feeling nineteen seventy two
Grooving to a Carole King tune”
it has been a year since dandelionwine was left to mature and ferment in its digital oak cask and to this day i wonder what it would smell and taste like; this year i turn twenty two, a numerical palindrome of sorts, a symmetry, a mirror between two worlds. this year i turn twenty two, but i feel as though i’m fourty four and there’s nothing that will help me change that fact.
there s a sense of tranquility and peace as i sit on the second floor of waikit’s house typing these words out; today i ate durian in the rain, today i will shoot hoops in the dark and i am happy, glad, elated because it’s the simple things that matter. i don’t like elaborate things and all i wish for today, is a day of peace where no one will sacrifice him/herself to ensure that others will die, for no one to die in a conflict, where there will be rain, where there will be happiness, and where there’ll be love all around.
that, is all i ask for.
i’ve always been a creature of love more than anything else so i suppose it doesn’t strike me as entirely surprising that the deathly hallows is (i say, phoenecially ungrammatically sound) for me, the best book in the series. it’s not about harry, it’s really about snape and his love for lily through the decades and in the process, his love for harry which was never quite requited until it was too late and there is much sorrow in that fact. it may just be a story, but that doesn’t detract from the tragedy of it all because it remains impermutable and unchangeable; i probably am spoiling this for a few people, but then again not many people know of this space and those who really do want to know what happened would have probably finished it way before i did despite me queuing up for it exactly two days ago.
it has been a bittersweet weekend and a rather hectic one at that; a dance performance on friday night, a rush to prepare for the queue, meeting queue buddies from hbp, prata at cashuarina road, hastily crammed half of tdh, lear where sir ian mackellen was absolutely excellent and the duke of albany sexy, a 9 hour dota marathon instead of a 12 because 20 year olds are not as fit as a 21, a grumpily taken nap, another cramming session of tdh, basketball with waikit and the uncles down at my court where we were interrupted by the rain and where we had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation (for me) as mr lai fixed my fundamentals. i came home, had lor neng and tau hu with toh bak, watched penelope cruz on central and embarked reluctantly on the last third of the last book and here i am, in the familiar setting of being in front of my computer with josh rouse playing over the speakers in the aftermath of the rain and there is a quiet maudlin sense of melancholy and peace.
two dreams died along the way over the past three days, but dreams do that all the time innit, so i suppose all in all it’s really been a good weekend, really.
these days, there are some words that actually do exist:
two balloons floating at the top of the ceiling in the unoccupied master bedroom that has been so for the better half of two decades and the only thing that’s stopping them from floating away is the ceiling itself. they’re gold, and black, the colours of my bag and there’s an odd sort of comfort in the consistency of things. i need consistency for once in my life, a sort of reassurance, a physical hug of sorts because i suppose i’m needy that way. sometimes it’s too tiring to be alone.
sometimes, i think i love myself more than others.
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it was raining in the morning along thomson road while i was having plaster prata and ginger teh chino; it was drizzling by the time i got home and i suppose i have to be thankful for some things; there is rain, there are friends, there are old friends that you meet in the rain and it was good today to meet christie and jiamin and kevin and louis and ailin. there’s not many days before the chin flies off to japan and it will be at least a year before i see her again and i think i will miss her muchly more than ever.
sometimes. this is how it goes.
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my mom’s attending a wedding at chijmes and i grinned at her as i asked her if she wanted me to get married, and she replied ”No one’s going to marry you with a character like yours.”
and i think she may be right.
today was an awesome day and nothing beats eating xiao long baos and sitting in an irish pub drinking whiskey, talking about practically everything under the sky and doing finger dancing. there are no photos (on my part. jac and shuki will disprove it i suppose) to show it, but i haven’t been this contented in ages.
to jaclyn seow, debbie soon, joel tee and shuki thng for an awesome day.
and hello to andi and her sister where breadtalk rules and for singapore being awfully tiny!
but now, now is the time to run because there has to be a time in the week where the wind will go by and there is nothing but the voice of the morning and your soul; it is the closest approximation to sprinting i have these days and there’s not really much of an alternative.
“When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked at her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into an love-affair with a beginning and an end. I can name the very moment it had begun, and one day I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy – I think I was even good enough to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly.”
-Graham Greene, The End of The Affair
and it’s true i guess, because that’s how i am. so live pak, live without loving, if that is possible because your life has to go on; you can only give so much of yourself before all that’s left is an empty husk.
today i met an old friend for beer and peanuts which is something i haven’t done in a long time and it was good, it was good; there was conversation about girls, about soul and poetry, about alcohol, about music and comics and the future and perhaps there were some things that i should not have said but sometimes that’s how i fail myself, and the people who trust me, and that’s essentially another load of guilt that i will bear. i do not forgive myself easily i suppose, but that’s because i forgive myself too easily most of the times.
there were fresh oysters, the discovery of a new neighbour, of how a mechanical yellow creature was supposed to bleat when it’s placed on the palm of a human being but continued to do so on the cover of my running ipod; the return of three old friends, two from hong kong and one from london, the purchase of a third interpol album and i suppose it has been a good day, a much better one than i’ve had in ages.
poetry is all about soul, but do i have any left.
lend me your shoulder to bury into.
there’s too many things left unsaid and all’s that’s left is an emotional maelstorm that threatens to consume my soul entirely but i shall continue to resist it, silently, singularly, defiantly.
as it has always been.
the track and field nationals begin today and it seemed like a lifetime ago that i was last actively involved in it and that being said, i can’t really claim to be actively involved in the finals because i was never expected to get any points and that is a failure that will always gnaw at me because in 2003, all we needed was one point to defend our championship. the current batch of j2s were the last group of sec 1s that i last trained with, and really, all the best to them especially lawrence chan, who has through sheer hard work and will, become a hurdler not to fuck with.
time flies like butterflies, neek used to say.
“i don’t expect anything, i don’t expect anything” rachael yamagata would say.
there are days when the weight of the world falls onto your shoulders and you are paralysed between the piece of the sky in your hands and the ground beneath your feet. sometimes there is nothing you did rather do than curl up in a corner and let everything coalesce around you without fear of the consequences but that is something which i did centuries of days ago and there hasn’t been a single waking moment where i do not think about it; there is too much guilt, too much love from my mother and i do not deserve this.
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i’ve always loved this song and i have a propensity to play it in the early mornings when everyone’s asleep and the world is silent because there is a certain resonance at 2 am in the mornings.
there is a silent declaration of sorts, but it shall be silent.
