| 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.