paper lights

:: paper lights ::

I watched my sisters fumble with their paper lanterns, their faces marked with childish concentration. We preserved the tradition of using paper lanterns - the modern battery operated oneswith grinning cartoon caricatures and electronic tunes are result of a grotesque evolution, and I'm glad certain traditions are still kept, still treasured, still applicable.

'You used to play like that,' said my grandma, grinning toothlessly, her old eyes kind and gentle.
I looked at my sisters and felt a tender ache for their innocence. One day they would know heartache and loss; they would grapple with lust and adult anger; they would learn discontentment and self-preservation; they would be adults.

But before that, they would still have some years of making dreams. They would have faith and childish wonder. They would be honest. They would find happiness in obscure, trivia things. I watched the candles flicker inside their frail paper lanterns, and I wished time was kinder, more patient, and more passionate that those trapped within its silver whisper.

***

I miss you.

| perfection |

:: perfection ::

She's perfect. A perfect angel, nestled in my arms.
She fidgets, looking around her still-new world with baby wonder; she squirms, wriggling her miniature, perfect little toes. She smells of milk and powder and newness and joy. Her skin is satin and pearl and baby-butter.
She's perfect.

| in the red |

:: in the red ::

From her wisdom:

"The value of Love is such that only when it's lost will its value appreciates. Not only does it discredits, it makes you emotionally bankrupt eventually. Your check and balances are in a mess and you may never recover from being in the red..."

How true. If only love can be a business transaction - clinical, clear-cut, generally profitable, open to compeition, responses to healthy investments, pleases its shareholders, and sustains itself through volatile market conditions.

If so, then I had been the worst businesswoman ever.
Because I allowed it to go into the red.
Because I didn't invest - not the right amount, not at the right time, sometimes not at all.
Because I didn't please the shareholder.
Because I allowed the volatile market conditions to sink in and fester.
And so the value depreciated, and so the law of incremental returns set in, and so by the rule of economics and common sense, it all became bankrupt.
In a profit-and-loss dichotomy of success and failure, I am an incredible failure.
I didn't capitalize, I didn't cash in, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't.

| whisper of a footfall |

:: whisper of a footfall ::

I'm a defeatist, I've always been; I never knew the beauty of hope, and I hankered constantly for the peace of contentment, because I found happiness to be such a patronizingly simple entity. As a self-proclaimed cynic, I became victim to my own victimization.

I don't want to be a defeatist anymore. I don't want to be the person I've been. I don't want to be selfish and uncaring, a splinter of an ice-berg, sharp and destructive. I want to...change.

Faith endures, and hope is a wish on a prayer. As it turns out, the true god is the god of small things, the smallest, most trivial things that we let slip away.

***

Like a harmless poet, I find myself lost in words and memories; each whisper of a footfall lengthens into an ache, a reminder, an acid kiss of if only. I'm sorry.

| revelations and regret |

And so now I know. He spoke with such indifference; he was completely matter of fact about it. I heard his resentment, his pain, his anger, his hurt. And 'I'm sorry' has expired its meaning. The wheel of time can't be spun backwards.

Is it too late to try?

***

When you’re young, love is like a candid mistress, sucking on a cigarette. You wilt under her lips, smeared with crimson promise; you willingly surrender to her sultry perfume, never mind its toxic nature; for the kiss of love, you would die.

And then you get a little older. And then you find that love has morphed into a matriach, firm and fierce; she drags her poisonous breath through an opium pipe, illcit and tempting. Sometimes, you find the verve to fight it. You see her now and you see her, in the soft light of her glory and in the glint of her dark, daunting mystery. But mostly, you still succumb.

Some days she’s a young girl still, dancing to her own wayward melody. She makes you heedy, giddy, leaving you with the spice of tangy red wine. She makes you giggle; she makes you indulgent. You think of her and you think of blue skies, sand in your toes, wind in your hair. Your hand tremble, and with child-like trust, you entwine your fingers with hers. Her grasp is never firm, but her touch chains you. It binds you into an eternal dream, where the colours rustle with gold, a spectrum of joy.

Some days she’s all woman. Alluring, but demanding. Her eyes narrow with purpose, and her voice sings with an intensity that leaves you breathless. You close into the mystery of her being, only to be disappointed; you realize she’s never quite yours, and this elusive chase turns you from predator to prey, prey to dust, and back again. You plead. You bleed. And she only shakes her head, mockingly: the same crimson smile blinding you into a scarlett obscurity.

One day she’ll get old. The lines of time will set in, bringing with it tears and cracks and the shadows of memories. She’s still powerful, a never-dying source of light in a fabled tunnel you’ve spent your life in, running running running after the echo of her footsteps. But you’re astute now, wise with the age of your own time, and shrewd with the scars she’s marked you with. You learn to let go of her hand. Her touch is still sacred, still desired – but not with the same mindless passion that once rendered you stupid, helpless. You remember her smile, red and brilliant. You remember her voice, a chaf, searing beat, ricocheting down the corridor of time. You remember her gleeful kiss, the fire of her embrace. And you remember the victims that she has bound you to, the loves lost and found – and with the peace unknown to her, you smile in return, choosing now to return her into the Pandora Box of life, choosing now to close this box, and choosing to acknowledge love can never be truly, wholly, yours.

| platitudes |

Social agendas can be campy, useless, boring, destructive―I filled my week up with the unfortunate verve of someone looking for distraction, and depsite having a 5,000 word essay on media freedom vis-a-vis commercial agendas and political implications due next week, I said yes, yes and yes to things that just happened.

H wanted to share a bottle of wine at a newly-opened bar.
S tempted me to gatecrash the trade launch of a well-established local daily, just for the kicks.
A wanted to catch a chick flick with the works―hot dogs, mustard, popcorn, candies.
M had an extra invite to a party where the Beautiful People of the Publishing Industry congregate.

I said yes to all of them, half mindlessly; work is escalating again, bringing with it an enormous tidal wave of responsibilities. At the end of each working day, between my mother's herbal tea and my father's stoic lethargy and a strong glass of wine, somehow, the latter seemed more―logical.

With an insipid social agenda―just to 'catch up', 'chill out', 'hang loose'―I don't need to think. I'm not a natural homebody, and mingling is not difficult for me. I can play the whole social 'oh my god you look fabulous!' role really well, if I choose to be, and I have an innate curiousity for people. But at the end of the day, they're all platitudes. Fluff.

That's why I choose to round down my week with a sushi date. Just me, her, a dish of tempura shitake mushrooms between us, along with steaming hot tea and a steady stream of girlish conference.

The bottle of wine with H was fantastic.
The trade launch was fun.
The chick flick and popcorn date with A was suitably distracting.
The party was cool.
But they're all platitudes, blank and empty inside―and like alcohol, these platitudes can be a pleasant shock to the system, but the after taste is a bitter, acid whisper of exhaustion.

| fragments |

The day is hurdling by with an alarming velocity. Five minutes on the phone, ten on an email, twenty on a report, an hour doing lunch―and so the day goes. I stare out of my office window, the horizon dusty and predictable. A languid heat is brewing somewhere inside me; I feel a familiar discontentment―the old disease of youth, if you must―tingling at the base of my spine. My old anthem: there must be more to life then this.

***

'What?' W had asked, as I twirled my spoon around my coffee cup. We sat across each other in a private corner of a down-town cafe. I had spent a few hours in the office before that, and I was exhausted; W, on the other hand, was relaxed and placid after a few sets of tennis, his choice sport.
'I don't know,' I said, feeling foolish. He always had that effect on me; his eyes, although kind, always had a mocking, stilted look in them. The two years he spent in Melbourne had only sharpened that look, making him more of a cynic, more of a man even―he's now 26.
'If you had all the money in the world, Jean Tan,'―he had a strange habit of calling my first name―'what would you do? What do you do to make yourself happy?'
I had to smile. I remember the same question from D. And I remember the same void that had captured my mind at this question. A realist doesn't contemplate the future. A pessimist contemplates the future and gets depressed by it. I―stuck somewhere between the two extremes―don't fucking know.
'I'd send my mom to university.' I said after a while. W sat back, surprised.
'Are you that noble?' he asked, almost jeering.
'No, I'm that convinced,' I replied, with slightly more force. My mother is a blue-blood scholar. Her thrist for learning is quelled by her circumstances, but when I see her, bent over the light in the wee hours of the morning, pouring over history books and ancient poetry, my heart aches. The only times I see her eyes―old and tired and anxious―shine with an interest that's almost child-like, is when she's in the company of books.
'And you say you're not a romantic.' W shook his head, and then conferred me with a gentle smile.
I laughed inwardly. Romantics don't strive to send their mothers to school. Romantics pledge their souls to another kind of god, building their hopes and dreams within the sultry temple of love. I only want my mother to feel like she deserves to feel―fulfilled. At peace.
'I suppose I'll never understand this,' W said with a casual shrug. 'I think my mother is an ignorant person, and I can't be bothered to talk to her.'
I think of my mother and the beauty of her character, and I'm torn between gratitude that she's my role model, and shame because her benchmark is a beatific impossibility for me.

| post scriptum |

Thought Du Jour:

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." ~ Henry Lime, The Third Man, 1949.

***

'The strong are made to be tested,' said C in a particularly intense email. I was quietly amused; I've always been―C's straight-laced philosophy and his quirky take on life never quite come across as being holy revealations, but they're often little nuggets of truism, easily digestable if taken in small quantities.
'I don't think the world is separated as such―everyone's being tested. You can only tell who are the strong ones afterwards.' I replied, knowing that in return I'd get a lengthy email quoting everyone from Freud to Marx.
But this time, he only said one single cryptic thing: 'If we don't convince ourselves that we are the strong ones―why else should we go through the trials that we do?'

I stared at the screen, the cursor blinking uniformly, a tepid, clinical eye.
'You're the strong one,' Sam had said. 'You're emotionally strong―you can take this.'
Was I? Am I? Or have I only been a deluded, half-wisp shadow of human weakness, proclaiming my strength in order to hide my weaknesses?

***

Another week, grinding into a halt, dragging its feet, scattering the dust of Time with seeming purpose, but also with infinite indifference. What did A say in his fit of artistic optimism? Time is restless with opportunity. And its colours are all so intense.

'Are you always this optimistic?' I asked him.
I picture his grin, wide and child-like, the knives of broken memories behind his merry mirth. 'Even fools must have their rewards,' he assured me.
Then I wish to be a fool, blissful and stupid for a while. Knowledge and truth are fragments in a hologram. Smoke and mirrors. Two dimensional reflections and refractions.
Can I disappear?

| Stronger Now|

I held you for a moment in my hands
The moment with you slipped away like sand
Through my fingers now
In front of me a choice I have to make
To carry on or simply fade away
I'd lose you either way
I like to say that it was easy it was hard to say goodbye
I wish that I could die

Letting go of you
Was so hard to do
And I thought that it would kill me but I made it through somehow
And I'm so much stronger now

I gave to you my love and my respect
But I could never make you love me back
I denied it so
I grew bitter watching you grow cold
My life became your prison
Took its toll
I decided like a bird that's trapped inside a gilted cage
Tried to set it free
Hurts to watch it fly away

Letting go of you
Was so hard to do
And I thought that it would kill me but I made it through somehow
And I'm so much stronger now

~ Warrent, Stronger Now

***

Maybe one day, someday, I can make this my anthem. Right now, it's just too raw, too new, too much.

|of verve and valiance|

So N and I stood by the peeling parapet wall outside our lecture hall and talked about the ideology of romance.

'I don't think we're meant to stay together with someone all the time,' he said, drawing deeply on his cigarette, the amber-ash glowing, a putrid point of emphasis.

I shrugged sadly. Am I that obvious―am I carrying my wounds and my weariness around like a rusty badge―how is it that two classmates who never really talked before, who used to skirt around each other with the patronisingly polite fashion that becomes all of us, stood together by accident during a self-permitted break from our pseudo-academia, and our first point of conversation is 'I've broken up with her, you?'

'Maybe not at our age,' I replied, slightly defeated. I didn't, and I don't, want to believe that. A part―a tiny, but persistent―part of me is still stuck somewhere between modern romanticism and the old, glorious Cinderella dream: if you love, and if you love hard enough, you can. You can conquer. You can be more. You can be better. You can be happy, fulfilled, at peace. You can―can you?

All this, after the little men I knew and know have left their little momentos behind. What makes you different? The Voice had asked before. Now I know. I'm not any different, I'm not immuned against heartbreak, and when it happens, I bleed. All my cynicism, all my staid insistence of needing to be strong―they all merge and blend into a silent, sterile, scream.

N looked quickly at me. It's not difficult to see how my emotional exhaustion are now purple-bruises under my eyes. Cleverly guised with the genius of make-up, yes. But if you care to see, you would. 'We are romanticising romance,' he said. 'We've been fucked by all that we've seen in the movies. You know it's not like that.'

I didn't want it like that. Stardust and fireworks. I never believed it. I never really wanted it either, except in moments of stupid melancholy, which come and dissipate, like the acrid lure of N's cigarette smoke. I didn't want it like the movies. But it still didn't work out.

'Men are bastards,' he concluded. Ah, his guilt. His own demons, unlocked by mine. How kindred love can be. People who never knew each before, people whose past conversations were limited to plastic hellos and chirpy small talk, can now cut through all that social-bullshit and hit their pain straight home. And like an insipid tennis-match, we bounced our pain back and forth, back and forth, until he ran out of fags, and we had to go back to class.

'You'll be okay.' His voice was a dry bolt of certified doom, his boyish smile was grosteque, mirthless.
'So will you,' I smiled back at him, clapping him on his shoulder, wondering how can two people talk with the verve of a wisdom not quite young for their years, and too old for the life they had yet to live.

***

Valor is deciding not to cry anymore. Valor is knowing when I must stand aside. Valor is being able to be quietly passive. Valor is saying goodbye. Valor is faith. Valor is my cross, my trial, the fleeting shadow of sunshine.

| imperfections |

You can never win it all. You come to a point―as we all do―when answers converge into questions and questions spiral out into greater questions, and you're standing in the midst of it all, a blank, an eddy of wind, lost.

It's not so bad, not always. Life and its imperfections, love and its intangible cruelities―all fragments of a universal truth we've known long before. You can never win it all. And you shouldn't even try. No one needs a hero, because―ideally―we are our own.

And besides, if you ever were, where were you when I―when he―when we needed rescuing?

***

Sitting with him, laughing with him, talking about the inconsequential things of little importance over an apple tart―it's my cartharsis and my peace. What I've never learnt to treasure, I'm learning now, over every syllable, every bite, every splinter of our accidental intimacy.

***

I dreamt of my grandfather. He was laughing, protective, a specter of familiarity. Love―in whichever shape or form―will survive. Perhaps not prevail, as the silly songs tell us in their lyrical promises, but it survives. When memories fail, when life wanes, when Time brings its dust and shadows and cracks―love survives.