:: Carbon dreams ::

The train hurled itself into the Gare de I'Est station like an acrid glob of spit from a cranky old man. Our train had torn through the Austrian-German-French countrysides like a languid slug in a metal cocoon: it was now a mauve-coloured morning, and the sky was a tensed canvas of spring-winter pigments, and―

'We're here,' T said, eyes shining―exhaustion, excitement!―'we're in Paris.'

It didn't look like Paris, not at first; the train station was non-descript and dirty, and the mad jumble of foreign voices mingled with the philharmonic bustle of activity into a triad tune of noise.

But we were there. I was there. In Paris. With or without you.

Paris was the dream of old by the very young; we were barely out of our teens, and the future―our future―was to be a glorious utopia of infinite possibilities. Paris. You. Me. 2007, remember?

Ah, numbers, pledges, the memory of your kiss―all blown to fractured atoms by the Parisien wind. This morning, today, this March, this year, I'm here, with or without you.

I ached, but not with grave romantic sentiment. I ached for our ruptured innocence, our plundered promises, our crippled couplehood―I ached with carefully administered dosages. The ache didn't dull my experience of Paris, it didn't demolish any bit of joy walking down the quaint little alleys of St Michel, it didn't dampen my awe of art at the Louvre, it didn't stop me from laughing and it didn't spoil my cheerful companionship with T.

But. As we strolled down Champ d'Elysee, amidst the Parisien poise, holograms of a parallel world flashed like remote demons through my mind. We could have been here. And here. And here. Walking down these same streets. Sitting at the same cafés. Watching the same sun set behind the Arc d'Triomphe.

Holograms. Smoke and mirrors. You are far away now, and we are a dissipated past. But no matter; Paris, my dear, is still the sultry, sensuous mistress of Europe I've always imagined it to be. With or without you, the Notre Dame still stands with the same saintly dignity. With or without you, the Louvre is still a wondrous home to history and art. With or without you, Paris is Paris, and the reality of me being there―without you!―spurred the wheels of memories to a broken stop.

I didn't need to look for the metaphysical symbol to know of its existence. Goodbye.

:: Photosynthesis ::

Planes cannot land with grace, they never do―they tend to tumble onto the runway with clumsy forcefulness. I heard the screech of friction and imagined the smell of burnt rubber. And as the oddly familiar wail of rubber-on-tarmac faded into a comforting thud, as the giant metal bird connected with its nest that was the airport terminal―then, see, the Singaporean sky, clear and concise―I was home.

In a way it was like I never left. After all, it had only been two weeks―nothing more or less than a pixilated window in my wired world. And I had left so much of myself here―I worried for my family, I couldn't detach myself from work, I was constantly in touch with the people and processes that made up my world―that my vacation became exactly what it meant: to vacate. I was my own vacuum and it was no victory.

But in a way it was like I never came back. It had only been two weeks, but it was two weeks coloured by so much visual stimuli that my memories are now tactile and voracious with life. It's a cheap cliché to be romanticised by the notion of novelle vie, I admit―but because Singapore is really a dislocated infant teething at the edge of history compared with the rest of Europe, I took to its cultures and past glories with thirst and the tepid patience of a bewildered child.

I have photosynthesised parts of Europe with this trip: I like to think I managed to capture the essence of each city I've been to with the solicitous fierceness of a plant begging life from the sun.

***

Two weeks and four cities. I feel like I've loved four different people in four different lifetimes:

Vienna. You are grey but dignified, an ashen aristocrat cradled by your blue-blooded past. You have a panache of quiet class, but that old-new tension of marrying the classic with the capitalistic is as blatant as the ugly advertisements adorning the scaffolded facade of the Stephensdom. Your people are kind―Frau Wolf, wie gehts?―and your art is the steely preservation of the artistic anatomy that becomes you.

Paris. The scarlet lady of Europe. I feel I must whisper your name rather than say it: je suis la belle, and you know it. Your magic has been weaved into our cultural consciousness long ago―you were a rough-cut Celtic gem that has been polished with passion into a haute couture high. You are extravagant and almost arrogant in your beauty; you don't care for praises and you don't work for charm. Your are savoir faire in technicolour, lending graceful amnesia to your flaws (immigrants! crime! graffiti and grime!). In your romantic legend we are fallen knights and disgraced felons―but oh, what a stylish way to die.

Budapest. If only you could shrug yourself completely free of your communistic cocoon―if only those bridges, like metal tongues across your belly, can bridge your past and present to your future with the delicate ease of a butterfly's flight―if only. I walked down your cobble-stoned streets and felt enveloped by the mulberry-coloured gloom. You are such a sleeping beauty, caped by the ivories of time. The Paris of the East, they called you. But you never quite retained that foreign exotica; now you are sated, and even though you still carry a certain dash of fashionable intellect―art nouveau, yes?―about your art and architecture, your stability has become a whiff of decay, festering in the solemn tension between Buda and Pest, your Geminian-twin cities.

And finally, London. What a heady concoction! You are a little mad, a little stiff, a little loud, a little racy: you are a gentleman and a heretic, a genius and a germ, a choirboy with a kooky glint in his eyes. You are the most cosmopolitan, and the least Eurocentric. You have a monarchy and a subway full of graffiti. You have theatres staging high art on the same streets where sleaze and sex hit the same high notes as culture and couture. You have a raging humour and an unforgiving currency. You don't charm, you swindle. You are home to Shakespeare and a bevy of tastes so mixed, I get drunk just by looking at the ingredients. I speak your language, yes sir, but your language doesn't speak to me. C'est tout!

***

This was never meant to be a homage to Europe. If anything, it's a biased caricature of the four cities that are now home to my dappled memories and vivid stories. I'm now back to life, my life: the languid misery of discontent is still shimmering like genteel foxfires over my horizon, but then I've always known that there is no magical exlixir to which this is a cure. I wanted to fly, and I did, a little bit―but I'm that proverbial bird with the broken wing, who may sing with opened beak about a wider piece of sky, but I'm crippled and lame, tamed by the solid, sordid comfort of its scruffy nest.

***
Thank you, as well, for your humour and candid concern: I must have been a burden of reluctant sentiment, and my logic has probably dishued the many colours drawn out by you. Still, thank you for your kindness and indulgence, and yes, we'll always have Paris.

:: Images ::

It wasn't quite the thing to do, I supposed, but I found myself perched by the kitchen window at 2.49 a.m., reading Lolita and ravaging an apple.

My shopping bags were spilled like petty sewage between the threshold of the kitchen and the living room. I was still fully dressed, except my cardigan had joined the pile of new jeans (cheap, factory-quality, perfect for use and abuse), fur-collared coat, woollen throws and faux-wool sweaters (borrowed and bought, with happy gratitude for the former and stingy grudge for the latter), half-eaten snacks and the other odds and ends (keys, another book, ticket stubs, lip-gloss et al) that had jostled their way out of my trusty bag onto the floor that needed mopping.

I didn't care.

The night breeze was a Zephyr song; my bare shoulders tingled. My stance was that of a woman, but my unceremonious enjoyment of my book and my apple was ungainly and childlike. So it was fitting that it was Lolita I was reading; yes, it's Nabokov again: he is macabre but romantic, dreamy but demanding―I could never tire of him.

And then suddenly, at page 22, just before Humbert was to fuck a French prostitute (a nymphet, how pretty!), I got tired of the apple. Its icy tastelessness was starting to numb my mouth, and where I had bitten myself on the lip―an unfortunate childhood habit―was smarting. My father's choice of apples never agreed with mine anyway: I favour the red ones, ripe with yellow flesh, sweet and soft and consistent, while the old man prefer Fiji apples, listless and pink, with white meat and bitter cores.

'Red apples―Royal Gala or whatever shit they're called―they're so sweet, they taste almost artificial. You can't be sure if it's natural,' he chastised me once when I hinted the want of a change.

While I had nodded with daughterly consent, I couldn't help but think―fuck, you're distrusting a fruit?

So I sought out the fridge―it was humming companionably―for an orange. 2.57 a.m. I loved the quiet, broken only by the occasional roar of traffic: souped-up bikes and turbo-charged cars, eating up the highway just as surely as the stupidity of youth is eating up its occupants. When you're 55 and distrusting an apple's nature, for example, you will not be tempted to push your car―as though you're a knight straddled to your steel horse, gallant and grand―to its speed limit at three o'clock in the morning.

(Metal dragons, fly by night:
Carbon smoke and tortured grunts
Speeding crippled to the light.)

I leaned out of the kitchen window and ate the orange. I left Lolita and Humbert's quiet obsession with young girls for a while, because I wanted to think. I have no time to think these days. I am a robotic clockwork of frenzied function, my mind a machined landscape tuned to necessary sentiments. So I just stopped and think for a while, turning over thoughts in my head like a child would seaside pebbles: with careless focus, and always on the lookout for that distant bell of the ice-cream truck.

***

I ran a hot shower because I like the sting of heat on my flesh. My senses are dulled with sleep but their nerve-endings are raw with energy―this is youth, perhaps, this abject disregard of the body's natural needs. Fuck it all. I'm 23. Let me abuse myself: my body, my mind, my graceless feelings. Aren't we all compliant pricks. I've rented this body from the cosmic dimestore―one day it must be returned (ashes to ashes!). And since I'm only entitled to a limited ownership with no warranty, no sir―fuck it fuck it fuck it.

And with all my sincere apologies to Maugham―it was 3.28, and far too late for me to be original: it is only because nature is unkind and has no regard for the immortal longings of youth that I did not light a cigarette.

That, and because I've already hurt my mother enough.

***

The bathroom mirror was fogged over with steam. Did you know―I used to write your name on the mirror, my fingers forming the childish alphabets of your name? S.A.M.U.E.L. I liked the way I could see only fragments of my face through the clarity of your name. Ah, how romantic this sounds on print. In reality I did it without thinking and without fail―at home, in a hotel far away from you, at the hospital even as my kidneys bled and swelled.

Tonight―no, no, this morning―I wiped the mirror clean of steam with a swipe of my palm. Very adult, very sensible, without a trace of romanticism. I hope you're happy, and that your name (gift of god, was it not) will appear in someone else's bathroom mirror, as well as her heart and mind, and it did in mine.

***

Europe―albeit only in three small bits―will come. Let it then; perhaps the wintry sunset and the crumbling histories of the western world, sculpted and built into its architectural cultures, will snap some life into me, and I will come back, infinitely poorer in cash, but eternally richer in memories.

For you: I will attempt to make a carbon copy of the haut mondé for you; of the comely cultures on the colourful canvas you so thoughtfully got for me. Thank you.

:: Pathos ::

I am a rhetoric of rational irrationality today. Today―my yesterdays are pale and yellow, and all my tomorrows are secret and irrelevant. So there's only today, a hyperbole of sterile routines and prudent passions―a dormant vocalno, waiting to erupt.

Was Shakespeare right then? That the day you were born marks the moment you start to die. With this knowledge―heyho, you're a dead man now, this very moment; you could be kissing the woman of your dreams, you could be holding the hand of your firstborn, you could be sharing a Delphian romance with a feisty lover―doesn't matter, you're already dead. With this knowledge, would you do more? Would a 9-to-6 job keep you? Would a marriage? Would anything really count, if your life is nothing more than a panoramic train shuttling down the tunnel of time, its schedule unknown, but its destination is an immotile nail rigged to God's timetable?

It's the rain. The sky is crying with lassitude. I'm lulled; my mind is asleep. My work is nothing but a strangled syllable in the giddy vocabulary of life. Why can't I be excited―what is extinguished―who are you?

***

1.29 p.m: I wanted to abandon my heels and my files and run into the rain. I'm so full of hippie lust sometimes, a heterodox dropout from an oddball universe. Who is my flowerchild god today? What is today's specials on the cosmic menu? This is the street with no name, this little chasm of my life, where I'm a dissident of my past emotions, and a separatist from my current ambitions. I am happy but discoloured, at peace but bristling with abandon.

Who cares about flying to the fucking moon. I just want to fly.

:: Harlot ::

Don't you dare, I told myself. Don't you dare apologise for the myopia of this world.

And so I didn't.