:: Hamlet ::

Sometimes I poise my fingers above the keyboard in a bid to write―but no words come. Not really anyway; slapdash atoms―parts of a phrase―coil around my head like eddies of an alien wind, taunting me with their strangeness, but there is nothing particular, nothing solid, nothing beyond my parabolic passion.

I miss the all-consuming liberty of sleep. I wake up this morning and wanted nothing more than a good book, a box of Belgium chocolates, and a strong shot of expresso at its bitter-fragrant best. That, and a long swim to cool off the poisonous heat; that and my mother's right hand to regain their agility; that and happiness for people around me to come surely as the inexorable sun.

In the meantime, I'm quiet inside. Emotions are wanton toys and I have no wish to play. Let me sleep a little longer then; there's no need to brandish your sword on the tangles of poison ivy around me. I'm in a coma, a reverie, and there is nothing to save. And so, bon nuit.

:: Bombay Dreams ::

I tumbled out of the Bombay airport, a heap of frazzled nerves, anchored sorely by my luggage and a throbbing rage tucked neatly at the back of my head. The clinical comfort of home already seemed like a vague memory; here the air was thick with haze, and the foreign chorus of voices seep like sand into the blaring cries of traffic―ah, the call of an Indian summer.

I scanned the crowd outside the decidedly run-down terminal for my driver―I say this with the unfortunate ease and jaded assurance of someone used, already, to travelling for business. The late hours, the ungodly transit times, the stressful build-up to a meeting or a launch are compensated by classy hotels, timely pick-ups and the odd upgrade to first-class seats, or so you train yourself to believe.

'Ms. Tan?' said a pleasant voice. I looked up to meet the eyes of a good looking young man, dark and keen-eyed, with a toothy, cheerful smile.

'Yes,' I smiled back, handing over my luggage gratefully. My head continued its malefic monologue―throb throb throb.

'I noticed the Audi bag you were carrying,' he said conversationally, accented just so, guiding me through the crowd of people with practiced leisure.

'Very observant,' I replied, impressed: most hotel pick-up services are efficient but distant, their staff neither friendly nor hostile, usually outfitted with their starched-white uniforms and the plastic docility of hired help. Samir―I caught his name tag―appeared different though.

'I like German cars,' he said simply, as he popped opened the trunk of the hotel car―'good engineering.' I nodded in agreement―yes, we of the Vorsprung brand!―but I was distracted by a little girl a few feet away. She couldn't be more than six; a faded sari, once bright and pink, now hugged her malnourished frame with dirty defiance. I flashed a smile at her, but her eyes continued their lurid stare at me. She stuffed her sooty fingers into her mouth in a jerky, robotic motion: feed me, give me a dollar or two; so inconsequential to you, but so precious to me, feed me, feed me...

'Please get in madam,' Samir's firm words cut through my thoughts. 'And please don't give any money. Otherwise they will all come round,'

I bit my lip. Between her desperate proverty and my cosmopolitan wealth, there was only abject pity. I turned away―like we all do, don't we―and I got into the air-conditioned comfort of the car. As we drove into the chaos of the mainroad, I turned to see the little girl, now a mere speck of pink in the background, still jerking her spindly little arm up and down, up and down, and I sighed―the slumscape of India is such a bleak, blatant reality, yet I was there because my company saw the money rather than the misery, and I was to be the natural accomplice of such a trespass.

Samir noticed my subdued expression. 'They rent children around, you know,' he started conversationally. 'Families who don't have kids rent children from families who do, to beg―babies are preferred, as are little girls...they're part of a large syndicate of beggers.'

Organised grime, I thought on reflex. We plunged into a long debate about proverty and politics, and I continued to be impressed by Samir's wit and knowledge.

'I'm a technician by training madam,' he confided in me, as our car crawled like a phlegmatic bug through the jumbled lines of traffic. 'I have a diploma in engineering. But what do I do? I come to the hotel line, simply because there is more money.'

'Are you resentful?' I asked. We screeched to a halt at a traffic light. Large billboards―the hellion symbols of commercialisation―grinned like idiot gods, rising with unnatural artistry amongst ruins and slums. Express yourself! A mobile phone ad screamed with neon irony, just above a filthy dirt-road lined with make-shift tents.

Samir shrugged. 'There are 30 million people in Bombay, madam. Everywhere you turn there is a doctor, or a lawyer, or a technician by training. No one makes enough money doing what they do best. So we become drivers, or waiters, or receptionists, just so that we can continue staying in Bombay.' He met my eyes through the rearview mirror. Then, with a beatific smile, he said, 'But you know what's great about my people? We're always hopeful. Teekhar, as we like to say. Can do.'

I grinned back. Their reality may be as dark as their colour, but their cheerfulness and their willingness to live is as bright as the mocking lights of my five-star hotel, beaming like a random angel in Bombay's business district, and for that Samir and his people (I noted the note of pride when he made that statement) have my unreserved admiration.

'All the best, madam,' Samir said as I got off the car. 'Very nice talking to you.'
'Very nice talking to you too,' I said, shaking his hand and slipping some money into his firm handshake. He looked embarrassed for a moment, but then he quietly pocketed the money. 'Thank you,' he said.

I waved goodbye with a heavy heart―we must be of an age, but yet we were separated by the economic status of two vastly different countries. But of course, my work was just beginning, and I needed once again to remind myself that I was there for capitalism and not charity, that I was there to launch a car that could probably feed street after street of slum-citizens, and that, was that.

***

Now, my work is done, my car was launched, and despite the humid weather, clean air, treated water, orderly traffic, punctual people and clinical sentiments are all for my taking, in apathetic abundance. And yet, remembering the words of a media contact turned friend in Bombay―my city is a gem, Jean, and I will never want to live or work anywhere else!―I couldn't help but wonder, when was the last time a Singaporean, whose idea of poverty may be the disability to buy a Gucci bag or a new set of wheels, have said that?

If Bombay is a rough diamond, sparkling but clearly unpolished, then Singapore is probably a sheet of glass, neat, clean and precisely cut―but flat and merely reflective of a bunch of dispassionate voices, without the spiritual strength borne of daily struggle.

:: Lesions ::

Don't lock the door, you say.

In an text message that made my phone jump, and my heart rattle.

Don't lock the door, you say.

But you're the only one doing the locking. You are the paperguard sentinel to your own despair.

***

8.19, a cheerless morning. I have nothing sensible to say to my aunt, whose eyes are burnt to mad ashes. 'We'll keep her in for another week,' the doctor says, not kindly, but with a trenchant nod that bothers on dismissive.

'I'll suck your blood―I'll suck your blood―I'll suck suck suck,' mutters my aunt. She looks at me, and then at the doctor, and then at her husband who is, at the moment, rubbing his left toe against the sole of his right heel with clumsy discomfort. He refuses to look up. 'Let me out,' she sings. A flash of hope―like that of a child, or a lost dog―veers briefly over her face. 'Letmeoutletmeoutletmeout.' She tries to bite her fingers. I gently push her hands down, and she claws at me, just a little bit, and then she looks up at me with pitying defeat. 'Let me out?'

I sigh. 'What can we do?' I ask the doctor.

He wrinkles his nose and shrugs. 'We need to make sure she takes her medication...she's not in a condition to go anywhere.'

My uncle shuffles into the conversation awkwardly. 'This is terrible―more money,' he says in Mandarin. He shakes his head tragically.

The doctor raises an eyebrow; I notice a mole just beneath his right brow bone, not unlike mine. 'There are some rehab centers that I can recommend―I can pass you some brochures or something. This is what your mother needs at the moment.'

'Not my child, not my child,' my aunt calls. She laughs hysterically, and then: 'My son is not so smart, not so good, where is he? You see? He's not here, he's not here, he doesn't say a word to his own mother―' In a sad small voice, rocking with displaced rhythm.

'Just keep quiet, okay, keep quiet,' her husband says, also not unkindly, but with the desperate impatience of crass ignorance.

'May I―see the brochures?' I say finally, as though I'm asking for a shopping catalogue. The doctor nods yes.

'I'll suck your blood, eat your heart, suck suck suck,' says my aunt, jerking her head up and down, up and down―she bares her teeth in a grotesque smile, making a sick, spitting sound.

'Keep quiet,' my uncle says through clenched teeth.

I left to the sound of her singing laughter, laced with the shrill, mangled note of pure insanity. And so the day begins.

:: And the caged birds sing ::

Twilight is the pregnant pause in a gentleman's speech, where the ebb and flow of the day's eloquence must die a natural death―indrawn for a breath!―before night falls.

I sat by my balcony and ate a pear and dripped its juice all over my toes. Part of the metallic pink polish is coming off the fourth toe on my left foot. Tired green veins jut rebelliously from my skin―I've got refuge's feet, my Marlboro Man used to say teasingly. (Ugly? I asked? No, just hardworking, he replied with a cheerful laugh)

Twilight is my escape, a fadeout coma from my everyday. I left my proposal unfinished on my laptop. Even as the digital eyes of my computer clock flutter to night, I was determined to enjoy my pear and my old copy of The Old Man and the Sea, and the muted call of rain coming in from the stifled April sky.

***

Stop being so angry, please. Your words are a whiplash soaked in brine, and they leave enduring scars. You know, when I was younger, much younger, back in our old house, I would run and crouch down near my bed whenever you got angry. Dust motes would flutter in down on me through a slant of light. I timed my breath to their flyspeck dance, just so that your voice―so loud, so harsh, so poisonous―would be eventually drowned out by the thumping of my heart. I willed myself not to cry by thinking all of the different shades of blue I could call the sky. I became the mother to countless broken lines: for everytime you turned a grey sky blue, I knew my heart has been burned by you. I cramped myself in that space between the wall and bed, between you and me, between fear and resentment, for years, until I got too big for that space, until we had to move, until your anger got to a point that I couldn't ignore it anymore, not even by timing my breath to the dust fairies.

You see, imagination cannot wipe away reality. I'm so sorry you find us such a burden. But I don't know what else to do make you love, to make you live. il faut d'abord durer―first, one must last.

:: Cavity ::

Even listless dog days must manage a bark now and then. These days my nerves are dull to sleep; I feel like a slack-jawed actor spewing lines with thespian repose. But sometimes a different soubrette takes his place, with different lines; haven't I always said this―that life is a master parodist, parroting humour and tragedy with bright-beaked insolence. Puppet me then, you faithless maverick!

M called this morning―his voice was polished and bright. 'I wish you were here!' he sang gaily, always such a boy in his warmth. 'I'm at Nara Park and the cherry blossoms here are beautiful,' he said, dragging out the last syllable, such that even in the blur of the morning, even with my mind still marred with sleep, the vivid watercolours of spring still danced on a splendid canvas: the sky is a vernal blue, tinted with streaks of clouds; the cherry blossoms are coral laughter in the greens and the yellow-greys of springtime trees. Everything rustles with colourful abandonment. You sigh and you breathe and your senses spiral with a thousand joys.

'Tell me what you see,' I muttered sleepily into the phone.

'Well, there is a little boy―'

Fat-cheeked and bright-eyed, chubby fingers reaching out for the falling petals because the swirl of colours is pretty and intriguing―

'And he's running around in his cute little jumper, laughing...a couple is having a little picnic near the river―'

Young love, young lovers. You reach over and brush a crumb off his chin, and he smiles; the wind whispers immortal poetry into your hair, and he smiles; the sun glints like rare diamonds―who the fuck is Tiffany!―off the sheen of water and the world sparkles with recherché. And he smiles.

'Oh god, Jean, it's just beautiful. It's a canopy of blossoms overhead.'

The song of sakura. Japanese poets of old―7th century!―wrote yards of prose and haikus about their national flower. Sakura trees do not yield fruit. They bloom for beauty and not for life; in itself an inherent irony, and in itself a tragic beauty.

'Thank you for sharing the beauty then,' I said, smiling, eyes shut wide.

'Beauty is a postcard when you can't share it―that's what you said, wasn't it?' M giggled. His dark days―tangled with so much hurt and tears and the betrayal of love―must have passed. He can still hear the footsteps―her footsteps―shuffling like wind in the sand, but like I've always known, you can't hurt forever, and one day those dead eyes would be opened to the canopy of blossoms overhead, and you join in their choral laughter, their falling petals like angel winks from a gentle sky.

***

So give me the bitter bread of brandishment and set me free. My dog days are leashed but one day, some day, I will play fetch and never come back.

:: Vernacular ::

I waited for the rain last night but it never came. The sky was as dry as sand despite the groan of distant thunder; the night baked slowly under the indigo desert. A large, listless moth trailed its brown-winged existence around my living room, fluttering with quiet effort to find a resting place on the unnatural green of our walls.

I watched the moth for a while. It was such an ugly thing really―nothing but a splotch of insectile life, flapping from light to light to death. It lingered on my kitchen light; I imagined its wings sucking up the filament atoms with unthinking, animalistic energy.

No one is looking; they are all butterflies, and I am a moth drawn to pale fire.

The night air cackled, with humidity, but also with the tendrils of memories. It was both unfair and unfortunate for me to wonder if he―so dislocated now, so far away―was also thinking of the one night that had prompted that useless sentiment.

I was wry with bitter amusement suddenly. And why do you care?

:: Litmus ::

12.39, this afternoon, at a local coffee joint―Ya Kun, in case details like these are necessary to the setting of the scene: marble table tops, polished wood, splashes of red, middle-aged ladies with their proverbial salon-treated hair, patterned coffee cups fashioned after those used in the 50s, plastic spoons, kaya toasts with slabs of melting butter, the magpie chatter of the lunch-time crowd, and a surprisingly mild April sky (I think of Robert Herrick's ode to daffodils!).

My mother: the stitches holding the gaping wound on her forehead has just been removed. We had a kindly doctor from Raffles Medical, in itself a tiny miracle: 'It's you, I swear,' I tell her, smiling, as I dissect the soggy French toast for her into bite-sized pieces. 'I always get the grumpy nurses and the frigid doctors.' She looks at me, amused, and then tosses out a joke in Cantonese.

We giggle companionably over our coffees―black for her, unsweetened by anything except her cheerful acceptance of her pain, and thick with milk for me, weighed down by the stickiness of anxiety.

I watch my mother: her right hand is swollen to an alien paw. The displaced vein throbs with greenish anger. I watch her face: it's not beautiful like the porcelain pale dolls peering back at you from a magazine, no―see, half of my mother's face is dragged down by the slack of paralysed nerves, ashes of a ghost illness ten years ago. And her eyes are faded with the dimness of age. There is nothing aesthetic about her sallow cheeks; why, even those flashing dimples that have once captured my father's heart are hidden in the fragile folds of her skin. She is slight, so slight, like an autumn leaf browned by time. There is nothing fashionable about her haircut―doll-faced cut, China bangs, now swept up by a bobby pin to expose the gauze taped to her wounds like a mayday call―in fact, there is nothing fashionable about her at all. She's wearing a neat short-sleeved shirt and a pair of old jeans. Her only accessory is a pair of reading glasses strung by a sensible chain looped around her neck.

That, and the clearest, most infectious laughter I have ever known.
That, and the strongest, kindest spirit I have ever seen.

'Why did you marry him?' I ask, stirring my coffee like a witch's brew. Toil and trouble!
She nibbles thoughtfully on a piece of toast. 'Humm. He was tall.'
We giggle again: she's a masterpiece of girlishness when she so chooses to be. And I am a caricature of womanhood, strangled with effort just to be sometimes.
'There were a few others,' she confides.
'I'm sure,' I say, and we both remember her: olive skin, sparkling eyes, a beautiful smile and an earthy sensuality that needed neither powder nor pearls to shine.
'But I only felt for your father. Do you know what I mean?' A rhetorical question―she knows I know. Yes. Love, that heart-throbbing disease. The cruel leap of flames: Cupid's arrow and Venus's blessings, that tangy sweetness so sharp it borders on acid. That errant power that makes you and breaks you and takes you. Yes, mother, I know.

We are done with our lunch. 'Sam and I used to come here,' I volunteer with an idiot grin.
My mother holds my hand. Her calloused palms are sandpaper warmth. 'I wish him all the best,' she says with maternal resignation.
I stand over my mother, a sentinel of sentiment, and I see the grey hairs peeking out like poppy seedlings on top of her head. 'Me too.'
She holds me a little tighter and we walk to get a taxi. Her 2 o'clock appointment with the reconstructive specialist (such a pretty name for a bone doctor, we note dryly!) is looming close.

'Do you want to―'
'Get the kids some―'
'Sweets?' We say at the same time. We grin with irrelevant happiness. Because you see, there is nothing to be happy about: my mother is still rapt with pain, and I am still wrecked with anxiety, and there is still a whole opera-worthy melodrama spinning like a web of sulphur around us. But then, you see―can you see?―for me, there is so much happiness packed in a little exchange like this with my mother, because there is no bigger fortune than the fact that she is mine, that she is here, and that she is well enough to giggle with me as we walk to get the kids some sweets before her doctor's appointment.

***

Have you done your litmus test? How much how well how often do you love your mother?

:: Theatre of the Absurd::

I suppose the human mind is capable of some of the most dramatic monologues known to theatre. And if our private measurement of what it means to be 'sane', 'normal', et al, is really nothing more than a series of unrehearsed pantomime, then if one should turn from unthinking, stock characters into raging protagonists spewing words from a lurid script, why then, we are only graduating from childish dramatic play into full-fledged Greek tragedies. Insanity, or a sequestered truth revealed only by impartial madness?

Curtains up for my aunt then, for in all factual sense of a scornful word, she has gone mad. No more dramatic play; she is now the central character in a Greek improvisation. Her script is fraught with melodrama―'Can you see the gods? They want me to kill you all'―and her stage is built upon her own compendium of truth―'See, if we all die together, then there will be no disgrace. All my insides are on fire! I will burn! So will you!'

There is farce upstage and fear downstage; everyone is helplessly compassionate and cruelly indifferent in turns. She trembles. She screams. She flings herself against walls. She hurts and want to hurt. It's an emphatic plunge into a parallel world where we―with our public versions of normalcy and sanity―cannot see the patterns, cannot comprehend the words and actions that are being puppeted with so much vehemence.

'Don't worry, we can help you,' I say, with patronising absurdity.
'I am not worried,' she says, eyes blazing with blankness. Her nails digged into my arm, leaving films of desperate strength. 'I am serious. I will kill all of us and it will be okay. Someone―we will leave a note!―will come and clean up after us.'

I want to laugh, you see―logic is a firm friend and reason is eager counsel, and both of which are useless against that sort of irrational rationality now.

But if our perception of improbable knowledge such as 'truth' and 'logic' are subjected to relativity anyway, can we really label her crazy? And―ha―is this why most prophets are mostly thought to be mad before they were regarded as messiahs? Because they see something that none of us with our unifocal eyes can see?

Now, this morning, all is still. The call was made―the ambulance was sent―the character is now a patient, and the stage is now an institution. Her bashing of her own head against the wall―I couldn't help but think, what a metaphorical act of beauty, flesh against cement, blood on mortar: no no no, I cannot effect change―was her swan song act.

My mother―still so weak, so small, swarthed in bandages and bruises―is quietly speaking to her, her tone rife with firm tenderness. Even now, even as bruises and cracks and fractures cover her body with tenacles of pain, her spirit is strong and compassionate, soaring only with the thoughts for others.

'She is a burden,' says my mother. 'At least for them.'
I smooth dabs of medicated cream over the beryl bruises etched on her thin, sallow cheeks. 'I'll do anything to help.'
Her old eyes smile, and then she winces in pain. And then: 'Will you wash my hair for me?'

When you are finally given the chance to mother your mother, it seems, you have been awarded a priviledge so great and a pain so unnatural that you realise you have finally made it to the Theatre of the Absurd, where playwrights create works representating the universe as an unknowable, where humankind's existence may be beautiful in its intensity, but is really meaningless in the three main acts of life.

***

Only Slave

April day; her heart is a dead organ,
No black song, no white notes:
No doctor guised in big white coats;
Only voices and a suicide slogan.

Vacant eyes; her mind is sandman sleep,
No hero light, no divine nod:
No medium blessed with idol god;
Only siren calls when heavens weep.

Feeble epitaph; her tomb is earnest gloom,
No partial score, no glorious win:
No holy answer crossed by mortal hymn;
Only minion dreams in violent doom.

Righteous night; her life is phantom grave,
No golden ken, no sunny spell:
No promised cure in her deviant cell;
Only pills can lay to waste, my broken mental slave.

:: Tears of fear ::

'So the business model is okay the way it is?' I barely glanced at JC, my intern: I was running a losing rat race with time―tick tick tick―

'Yes, but then I need the revised presentation from Malaysia, as well as the sample template from Japan―' My flight to Jakarta was less then three hours away, and my projects were running riot on my to-do list. What did we say? Time is a tricky little fucker―tick tick tick―

'See, if we move this column here...'
'No, we'd still need the information to go here. That's what they want.'
'Can you open the excel sheet? Let's double check.'
'There we go...it's opening...where is that ridiculous email again? I just want to make sure that we get it right this time.'
'Over on my desk―hey, your phone is ringing.'

My phone. I had it tucked under sheets of loose paper somewhere―it was ringing ringing ringing―it must be DS, or maybe WB, rushing me for that final presentation―

(tick tick tick)

In my mind.

(robotic ring tune, loud and urgent)

In my ears.

I contemplated not answering. After all―it was ten to twelve―and phone calls that come at ten to twelve couldn't be that important, could it? I glanced at the phone with cryptic nonchalance. It was my aunt―which probably meant it was no big deal. (tick tick tick!) Maybe she was calling to remind me to call my other aunt and wish her bon voyage before her trip to China―that's today isn't it―or maybe she wanted some English translation for a quotation she was drawing up―or maybe―

I snatched the phone from under Malaysia's revised business plan and planted it to my ear. My fingers were flying over my keyboard―ah, see, the format of the presentation from Japan was wrong, all wrong; how would I have time to fix this before my flight?―'Hello?'

'Jie, your mother was in an accident.' In a strangled voice.

My mother? Accident?

(The colour scheme of my presentation needed to be realigned; our corporate colours were missing! What was the percentage deviation from target again―18 percent?)

My mother?

'What?'
'She had a bad fall―I don't know how bad but she's in the A&E now―'

Bad fall. My mother. Hurt.

(Have I printed out all the documents needed for my meeting? Have I told Dad―and the HP guys―that I'm only coming back on Saturday because I couldn't get the flight on Friday―)

My mother. My mother, my pillar. Hurt? How bad? What?

'She slipped?'

(And my fingers were still flying, like graceful, seasoned acrobats, across my keyboard―I am such a corporate pianist! 16 percent from target, I think! But JC should have the information―)

'She fell down a long flight of stairs―Uncle Kuan said she was bleeding so much she actually fainted...'

And then my head cleared. (Like that click of a webpage that has just completed its download)
―My mother―
―Was hurt―
―Badly!―
―And bleeding, profusely (she is anaemic, did they tell the doctor?)―
―My mother―

'Jie?'
'I'm going.'
'A&E, NUH, your uncle should be there, I can't leave now―'
'Okay.'
'What about your trip?'
'I'm going.'

I snapped my phone shut. I snapped.

***

'She must have missed a step,' my uncle said, sighing deeply.
I clutched at my mother's bag―caked with her dried blood―and felt all of five years old again. 'Was she―unconscious?'

(Someone is groaning: an old Indian lady slumped like splintered wood against a wheelchair. Look down look down―that crazy voice goes irrelevantly―sweet Jesus doesn't care!)

'Barely coherent. She was trying to call me―can you imagine! Even when she was bleeding and in shock, she dialed my number, laughed and tell me not to worry, and then say: Kuan, I think I might have broken something! And then she stopped talking.'

(Tears of fear. That familiar warmth surges into my eyes, filling up my sockets with their hot, salty presence. Mom. Mommy. You've got to be okay. Please please please please.)

'What did the doctor say?'

(What a line, what a line―a banal question from a mediocre daytime soap! To be followed by, I'm so sorry, mam, but we've tried our best―and then cue sentimental music, and then cue close up shot of the heroine's tragic face, smeared delicately with tears―)

'Let's just hope her X-ray gives her the all-clear: no clots and no concussion.' My uncle rapped me affectionately on the shoulder. 'Don't worry. If the doctor says she's okay, then go for your trip. You still have an hour left to decide...'

―tick tick tick, haha, heyho, life is a clownfaced clock!―

'I'm not going,' I said with sudden strength.

(A young boy comes limping in, his school uniform stained with blood. His face is pale, so pale you can see the veins pulsing green and ghastly beneath his skin. A construction worker, his chocolate brown skin gleaming with sweat, and his thumb sliced with―I don't know, can't tell―a metal spike?, makes way dispassionately for the boy, who is here with his―brother? PE teacher?)

My uncle smiled―it was waterly but firm with love. 'Good.'

***

Time became an inchworm's crawl. Worry, impatience, anxiety, fear―the pyromaniacs of emotions, torching my nerves raw. Tick tick tick. By now my mother's blood was copper streaks across my crisp business suit. By now I was numbed to everything except a useless, common prayer: please please please please please please please. Let her be okay. Please. Please.

And then my uncle lept up, because my mother was out of the surgery room.
And then I started to cry.

(She is covered with blood. Fresh blood is still seeping through the bandages. She is smiling weakly, still barely conscious; her wrist! It's swelling like an alien growth. Is it broken? Her knee? Blood on her toes, part of her nail is missing―)

'What are you doing here?' she whispered. And then her own eyes teared. And I held her, and she was like a ceramic doll, fragile, earthy, a ghost of flesh―I could lose her anytime. I almost did.

'I like vegetables. But I don't intend to turn into one,' she said, her voice still rapt with humour. I grinned through my tears (ah, useless, useless fool!) and I realised that I could never love my mother anymore than I did in this single instant.

***

I don't know who or what was watching over her as she tumbled down that flight of stairs that day like a broken doll, with nothing to break her fall except her wrist (now limp and bandaged)―chance, god, angels, probability, providence, or all of the above. But thank you.

:: The Poison Tree ::

Death is a dissolution―a gentle, but categorical, melting of life's crystalised routines. I am blasé about its certainty: we don't die of any condition except having lived. It's an inherent dialectic that's strangely beautiful; life and death in a tensed spectrum of transitory motions and emotions.

And I'm ignorant of its philosophy―I'm neither convinced by religious explanations nor comforted by scientific facts; are we fragments of souls waiting to drift heavenward? Are we molecules of mortality worn by time to break down into soil and fumes? Are we capable of a third dimension existence? Are we lambs of God or children of the universe? Did the creator create us? Or did our creativity create the creator?

I couldn't help but think think think: my thoughts were raging like an insidious tide. CM was broken down by anguish: she was dead flesh in my arms, her guilt and grief at losing her mother has chased all light out of her eyes.

I had no words of comfort. I stroked her hair like I would my sister; but my tender empathy could not breach her pain.

So I may be blasé about its certainty and ignorant about its philosophy, but death's impact is a scythe; our lives are nothing except mirrored smudges caught on the glint of its blade, and we cannot hope to unlearn its truth.

Truth that our cradle is our grave.
Truth that we are programmed to be extinct.
Truth that our daily struggles are dust fanned by the sands of time.
Truth that though we live with an auric intensity now, our golden youth is but a turn of heaven's eye―a wink of wind that would one day blow our memories to petty cinders.

So why are you sad today? We are nothing but a forests of poisoned trees, gnashed to the ground by our roots, forever stretching upwards to the invincible sky, growing only to wilt, begging to live by instinct, and waiting to die by logic. We are never really here. Hence death is a removal of existence, not a rejection―we are never really here, and we can never fully leave. Life's true beauty is its surreal quality, and death's true value is its tangible reason, which we can neither fault nor blame.

Live. That's the only way to die.

:: Ghosts ::

Addendum:

'I had one.'
'There's nothing to be ashamed about―I had one too.'
'Any...regrets?'
'It was a necessary choice.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Don't be...it had to be done. How old were you?'
'Just turned 17. You?'
'Old enough to know better. He―ran away. Just disappeared.'
'He cried.'
'So did you, I'm sure.'
'Didn't you?'
'I can't remember. Must have.'
'Were you alone?'
'Weren't you?'
'We always are, in the end.'
'It's okay. We're fine now.'
'Sometimes I wonder.'
'I know, I know―you look back and get all emotional about it―'
'Not emotional. More like horrified: how the fuck did I―we―get through it?'
'We did what we have to.'
'Doesn't make it right, though, does it?'
'You already knew that, even when you were doing it.'
'I was so stupid.'
'Stop blaming yourself. It's not like anything can be changed.'
'What a decision, wasn't it? I never felt more in charged of my own body, but I never felt more despicable.'
'At that moment I knew―all lies. When they say they'll be there for you. Load of rubbish.'
'Are you jaded?'
'Aren't you?'
'Of course.'
'Naturally.'

And so we held hands of bitter sisterhood, laughing together with strangled rhythm, our eyes bright like memories. You never really thought it would come down to this, did you? That love―haha―would be more verminous than virtuous, that its ability to hurt is more―much more―than its ability to heal? It was easy when we were younger, wasn't it? You thought your scarlet passion would give way to a happy grey, that those white wedding flowers would eventually blosom into a golden anniversary. I thought love can overcome all; I thought that if I loved and I loved hard enough, that could be my commonplace faith and my unblemished absolution. In the end, who betrayed whom betrayed what? Are we really let down by the ones we loved, or are we simply disappointed by the rift of dissonance because our expectations became abject rejects in the face of reality?

'So you never talked to him again?'
'Whatever for?'
'It's hard to imagine, isn't it―from so much love to so much indifference.'
'How else to heal? I'm not about to pretend that it was easy.'
'Can you keep the love? Let it become something else?'
'Not at my age.'
'Friendship is ageless.' (And age is friendless, but I do not like to say it...)
'I'm too tired to care about that. I loved, I failed, I leave, and I don't like to look back.'
'That's harsh. But I see your point. And you didn't leave―he did.'
'I was a fool.'
'You were in love.'
'Love isn't everything. I didn't used to believe that. Now I do.'
'Do you feel incomplete?'
'Not as much as I did when I was with someone who wasn't with me.'
'All love stories converge to a point, don't they―a point of similar differences.'
'Maybe they are all the same. The men, the women, the choices, the good, the bad. Same variations.'
'I just want him to be happy.'
'All this is so pointless. More cheesecake?'

And so we ate with voracious appetite―this is one seduction we can afford, you see. This is one transaction that is clean and sensible: you get exactly what you're paying for, in the exact manner you want it. This is one love affair that does not get knocked up, broken down, cast out, fenced in. Perhaps my love for cakes and chocolates stem from the need to numb my tongue to sleep with their artful sweetness: how my hollow heart sings with felon satisfaction.

'Maybe the only time when you can have your cake and eat it too is when you're actually eating goddamned cakes.'

And so we laughed again, as we have been trained to. Womanly strength? Or girlish delusion?

:: Disambiguation ::

Time has become a tricky little fucker for me―it is a nonspatial continuum where designated motions are prescribed with prosaic labels ('eating', 'drinking', 'hanging out', 'meeting' et al) so that with moderate sense and random knowledge, I'm able to function.

That's one of my biggest failings, I guess―the fact that I'm more passionate about being a narrator than a participant to life. That way I can go on pretending that this life, this world, is nothing more or less than a giant pandemic accident―we are not made by religious deliverance, we are not accounted by cosmic calculations, and hence we are nothing (nothing!) except a beautiful mistake, a happenstance of sheer dumb luck.

Wouldn't that be something? Humanity reduced to nothing but a linear narrative. Life is a slapdash chance, and death is a chronological certainty.

I'm tired. Why live, when you can write?

***

But then I stare at my screen, and the cursor flutters at me like an antiseptic eye; my mind is filled with the white noise of nothingness. I'm bored and placid. I am feeding off the light of Europe still―it's like an ultraviolet suicide―I suck off the essence from my modicum memories and I become drained and dry.

My reality is tinged with the sepia song of necessary routine. My memories of that short break―now a week away―are rustling with a sonorous spectrum, and I want more more more. What a spoilt child I am sometimes, when it comes to life.

And what is this that they say―only time will tell―what a crass assumption! Time doesn't tell, and it most certainly doesn't heal: time is a quack doctor who plasters amnesia over wounds. Time is an irreversible succession of no value. As the clownfaced clock that is life ticks with cruel merritment to its unbending rhythm, we are being dragged along like lambs to the altar.

Can I be your prodigal son too?