:: Nightminds ::

Friday night; the hours are dressed with a curious energy. CM is still wearing her grief like a corrosive code-of-arms; she talks of death with cheerful glee, and the tough-talking vibrancy I have known and loved her for seems to be drying up faster than our red wine.

12.05; the jazz band takes a bow. 'Well girls,' CM says, looking at P and myself with that familiar trace of maternal fondness, 'you babies go on at it, I'm going home.'

We see her off in a cab. 'Be good,' she says listlessly, wagging a finger of customary caution at us. 'Be good to the boys.'

'Maybe you should join us,' P suggests, opening the door of the cab with candid reluctance. Her long tresses are silk and seduction on her skin, gleaming and mocha-moist even in the dim lights of the hotel lobby.

'Get your hand off my cab,' CM says pleasantly. 'Love you both but I just need to crash.' I hug her quickly, knowing that logic is completely useless at this point; in her linear locomotion of misery, escape is the quickest point to her destination.

The cab drives off in a siren of dust and diesel. 'Boat Quay?' P asks. I don't care enough to defy and she doesn't care enough to decide, so within fifteen minutes we are inside the shadowy shrine of music and alcohol, of men looking at women looking at men, of skin and sex and satisfaction gleaned off empty beer bottles.

Placid and poised, P asks for a corner table. She sips her red wine while I swirl the plastic sweetness of vodka and lime in my little glass. The music wails, a blatant banshee, and the club jostles with the glamourous nightcrawlers shaking and shrieking their hours away. Smoke and mirrors, I think―flashes of colour surging into the smoky penumbra in time to the rhythm rocking out of the DJ console. When can I ever lose myself, like you and you, to the doomed anthem of youth? Why should I and why shouldn't I―how many more drinks do I need to down before I can drown my incessant questions?

'I used to be like that,' P says, chewing smartly on a handful of almonds. She nods towards the dance floor. I look―and there are bodies curving against bodies, disjointed by the beat of the trance tracks, infused with the hedonistic high that would be alien and ugly anywhere else. Faces blur into faces; neon lights bleed from the spinning strobes, their technicolour brilliance spilling onto the floor below. The modern tribute to tribalism, almost, with the DJ as the village god. And what is my pagan prayer?

'Yeah, those were the days, when I had too much time and stupidity,' P continues, rolling her eyes expressively. I grin at her. P is almost thirty and loving it as best as she can, packing her casual wisdom and effervescent energy into her pert little frame. She's a slapdash nymphet of fun and firm loyalty; in her honest humour I've found a friendship that endures beyond business necessity.

'Now? What do you think of life now?' I ask, draining my glass, as two tall blokes lingered around our table with feeble hopefulness. Boys and the cookie jar. And are we not from the cookie-cutter cliché! (I think and smile inwardly!)

P shrugs easily. 'I get depressed if I think about the whole "where am I going, who am I going to end up with" schtick...you know? You can't help to ask all these questions but you have no bloody answers. Maybe that's why I buy into the whole see a psychic deal.'

'But wouldn't that be―aren't you afraid―of self-fulfilling prophecies?' Ha―who are you kidding, Jean: isn't life a series of well-orchestrated self-fulfilling prophecies anyway?

'I take it all with a pinch of salt. But everything is so uncertain these days, I need that little bit of hope. Don't you?'

'Like magaritas eh. Best with a pinch of salt on the side.' We laugh companionably and we resume our voyeuristic interest in the crowd. P is too jaded to dance and I'm too awkward, but eventually we are drawn―like moths to mad fire―into the infectious cadence. For a moment, as we join the strangers made familiar by the proximity of pleasure, we become ageless and free and immortal. The minutes―previously so tightly welded to our private problems and various miseries―are now idle and unhampered.

Dance, baby, dance. Shake and grind your hips, fling your head back and laugh, run your fingers through your hair. Throw your hands up, scream!

But know that when the DJ spins his last, and when the lights break open for the club's closing, you'll be back in the same quicksand of your raging realities. We're all looking for an escape. We all need that silver of distraction, the exigent lifeline, so that we can dance to a rhythm other than the routine circadian that gives us life, but does not always help us live.

Dance, then―before your swansong season sinks.

:: All that glitters ::

Like most modern Eves of my time, I have lost every inkling of what it means to be natural. I have coloured and treated and straightened and waxed off most of my untamed feminity; these days the word natural doesn't seem too out of place in a bottle of peroxide, and I'm more than happy to convince myself that purple eyelids, glitter on the decolletagé, pencil-thin eyebrows, nails the colour of dried blood―all these, and more―are but symbols of modern womanhood.

'Woman's lib?' I remember the smirk on SY's face when she presented my birthday present in all its push-up, French-laced glory, 'for-fucking-get it.'

'I broke a date to be here,' I beamed at Bec, my trusty hairstylist. Not a date by your girlie mag standards; I had made plans with Col to meet his best friend ('A wanker of a Spaniard,' Col had gushed over the phone) José, but it appears that Don Juan preferred chicks to chicken rice, and I had no wish to wind down another insane work day looking at this messed-up world from the bottom of an empty beer bottle. ('You have reformed!' Col had wailed, but for this I have no regrets).

'It's about time!' Bec said grimly, parting my hair with a deft flick of her pretty wrists. The kinks of my natural curls showed with their vicious vivacity. As she gathered her arsenal of tools to treat, neutralise and straighten my hair into the sleek, chic 'do, into that salon-perfection that always seemed to border on clinical, I stared long and hard at the mirror and wondered, not for the first time, who the fuck was the person staring back at me.

It's not a question dragged kicking and screaming from the twenty-something existentialistic funk we're all cursed to go through; it's just a question. The white light of the salon washed like astringent over me, and my reflection was caught like a microscopic rhetoric on the large mirror. All of me―all―stared back with their hollow realities: the scars, the dimply skin, the purple half-moons of my late night responsibilities kissing the bottom rim of my eyes.

In my reflection, I am the beauty and the beast; there was nothing to congratulate and nothing to spit on, nothing to love and nothing to despise. I don't care to be labeled―I care to be known. There is nothing more intimate than showing your scars and the way your skin creases and crinkles the way skin on real women do―I'm not a mannequin, and I've never wanted to be one, but I understand the paper-cut allure of the women glittering in the glossy pages of Vogue. Yet I can never stop to hope that someday my scars will be loved along with my sass, even if I look in the mirror and see nothing but that overweight 15-year-old adolescent.

Another flashback of SY―she's as chic as she's caustic―'We want to be them, and the boys want to do them, so we're all fucked by this,' she said, jabbing a perfectly-manicured nail at some hapless magazine with Uma Thurman flaunting those bronzed, sculptured lines of her lithe body in an LV ad.

'You're pretty darn perfect yourself,' I'd replied, running an envious eye over her slight Oriental frame.

She curled her lips up into a mirthless grin. 'He's not going to leave his wife, is he?'

I turned my attention now to Bec; her tired eyes hinted at something more than physical exhaustion. Those long, lovely locks that she had lovingly permed for her husband of two years have been snipped off―she now has a spunky pixie-cut that was adorably girlish, but those eyes of hers, hued with green and golden glitter, were undeniably wary.

Womanly woes―our beasts of burden, I thought. 'Something wrong?' I asked her.

She didn't meet my eyes and she went right on combing her slender fingers through my hair, smoothing the treatment cream onto my scalp with polished practice. And then: 'I found a condom in his wallet,' she said.

Her words hung heavy in the air, limp and languid. I met her eyes in the mirror. 'And?'

'I cut off one corner as a marking; if he uses it then I'd know.' She shrugged. 'Men. All bastards, all looking for thrills, all wanting the next affair to happen round the corner. Bastards.'

My own conscience tingled with disquiet. I glanced again at my reflection and wondered why the woman in the mirror makes the sort of choices that she does, why she's excited about the illicit, why she cares for someone who doesn't have the capacity to care. Who are you?

Modern Eves and our modern pain: our garden of Eden is planted with forbidden fruits of all kinds, and the most sinful serpent is nothing more or less than our own vanity, which we would all later learn cannot take away betrayal, and cannot account for any other truth than the peroxide promise of store-bought beauty.

'Ash highlights?' asked Bec, while blow-drying my hair. 'It'll give you some colour,'

'No thanks,' I said, thinking of the red and the blue of the biggest chink in my armour. 'I think I have enough.'

:: Fool's Paradise ::

The odds and ends, collected by various whims and stored away for discordant fancies, flooded to life with a careless click of the naked light. I stood surveying my closet―the proverbial storeroom where my Bogeyman fears was tucked within alongside things that were bought and once cherished, needed and now discarded, valued and since forgotten. My sister wanted to paint―I couldn't help to wonder, when her ten-year-old impulses, pretty and petulant as they are now, give way to a certain grit that is adult as it is apathetic, would I be ready, would I not ache for the lost of these innocent demands?―and I was to look through the elaborate junk most families are capable of never getting rid of for my old art supplies.

"What do you want to paint?" I had asked her, half mindlessly; my coffee was still hot in my mug, and my Saturday papers were still untouched. Maybe colour pencils will do, darling; or crayons. I know where those are―on the top shelf in your room along with your drawing papers―I thought, in a reflex moment reeking of private ostentation.

She looked at me with curious question. "Did you always know what you wanted to paint?"

My thoughts got caught in my throat, as did my memories. What an avid little artist I was then. Years of art school didn't amount for nothing; I had the tenacity, if not the talent, and I let my art capture my imagination in colours and textures and prolific truths. And no, I didn't always know what I wanted to paint. That was the esthetic elegance of art. You never really know.

I smiled at her. "No, you're right, I didn't always know." I gulped down my coffee; the papers can wait.

***

Our storeroom. We've been living in this house for the last thirteen years now, and for the magpies in all of us―no, let's keep this, no, you never know when you'd need that, no―we've kept bags and boxes of arcane knick-knacks.

It's almost as if time cannot touch the dusty dimension of the storage saint; fuck the new millenium! Here in my storeroom, the 70s is safe and saved in yellowing photo albums, the 80s is bubble-wrapped with restro respect, and the 90s―still fairly new, wouldn't you say!―is packed and guarded with quondam nostalgia.

My mother's cheerful scrawl became names to cardboxed memories: I found old toys (of lego blocks and headless dolls, birds and beasts that speak no more!), old books, old clothes, old creations―the old me. I smiled―wry and waterly―at my childish creations, my precocious possessions, all still kept and sealed with tepid patience. Thanks mom.

I found the art supplies that I once thought would become the tools of my career: paints and chalk pastels, sculpting tools (all twelve blades), a variety of brushes, boxes of pencils, sharpened by hand. Xiaojie's tools, was my mother's label to this particular box. How apt and how sad; I grew out of my dreams before my dreams could grow out of me. Their better ressurection came only on my sister's impulsive want to paint.

And then I saw them, the shoeboxes.

My art supplies were stacked next to several shoeboxes on the same shelf, shoeboxes I knew contained newspaper clippings of my parents' published talent. My mother's stories and my father's poems in lilting Chinese confidence, printed in newspapers almost three decades ago. Where are you now? What brought on the death of you and you―two romantic scribes with melancholic madness for the written world? Was it us? Did the blossoming of your family wilted the verve and vivacity of the author in you and the poet in you?

Because if it was, I'm sorry. Because you, and you, could have been much greater than this―I love that you're my father and that you're my mother, but you could have been an author, a writer of grace and grandeur, and you, you could have been a poet, your prose purposeful and poised with your talent and taste.

You could have been so much more than a shoebox of dreams. And I'm sorry, because beyond the doors of our storeroom, of this clandestine closet stuffed to the brim with dying dreams, we live the fool's paradise of wasted wealth, rich in the reality of our everydays, but bankrupt in the possibility of our forgotten potential.

***

"Do you like my painting?" my sister asked, later.

I watched her colours calmly take shape with a certain maternal pride. "Yes I do," I told her. But, I do not like mine.

:: Anthology ::

Some days you sit squarely in the malady of my memories, the fabled Arabian prince encased in black marble. Like a bird of paradise in a square full of pigeons, you are a petulant presence, your winged insolence colourful and chafing. I could never take flight with you―as far as rancid romance goes, we are both firmly caged in, perched on putrid possibilities of what-could-have-beens. And so we sing of serendipity with languid longing.

Some days it even feels like a punishment―when strains of songs and parts of phrases (yours and mine, and ours) slip in and out of my mind with the careless charm of remembrance. I despise the predicability―and uselessness―of melancholy, and so I think of you and smile, rather than risk the bitter burn of missing you. Your little catchphrases. The way you laugh. Your lingering warmth. All condensed now, into stroboscope stories blinking indifferently in my inbox once in a blue funk moon.

Romance―don't you just hate the word―is sometimes really nothing more that a vivacious splatter of vagary, a thought-trance spinning yarns of pretty pictures. I don't want to be your Mona Lisa. Someone else can stay framed in that sort of divine felicity for you to visit once in a while; I don't want it.

(And what do you want? asked a voice; I turned down the lights and put on my sad music, and I stared out at the undying night and ached the amaranthine ache of my broken loves.)

***

I called A last night, on a whim. He was impossibly gentle, as always, his voice full of boyish polish. I liked the fact that our conversations didn't have to make sense―the earmark of a longtime friendship. Once, I think, he had wanted our friendship bear the brand of romance; now I think he realises that I am much more worthy as a friend than I can ever be as a lover.

'Revenge of the jilted?' he teased with caustic compassion, when I mentioned that I didn't have the stomach for love.

I laughed into the shadows of my room―I imagined though, my eyes must be bright. 'No―I'm just on a diet,' I said.

'Good,' said my sapient artist, 'it was a long race and you must be tired from running.'

'Do you think I've become cold―indifferent?' T's recent comments hung like a ragged fog in the air.

A slight pause; I heard nothing for a while except the silken rustle of lead on paper. He was sketching, I think. And he was, because he said, suddenly, 'It's like sketching sometimes, you know? Lines and spaces. Love and spaces. When do you cross the line? When can you? And space is a difficult concept to grasp.'

I grinned into my phone. 'Thank you,'

For this sort of understanding―so cryptic, so immaterial to some―is rare and precious to me. This is the sort of understanding that the one who left can never comprehend, and the one that has yet to come must live up to. It's unfair, almost―for the loves that I've lost and the loves that may never come―it's unfair that I'm such an emotional whore, that it's always the unnamed and unspoken that attracts me, that you could be a perfect prince, but yet I prefer the bankrupt passion of a pauper. I can be such a crass cliché, but for it's an ensurience I have no excuse for.

'Beauty begets beauty,' A, his voice―like his demeanor―a mellow whisper. 'Nothing to thank.' He broke out into a song, sweet and slow. I felt sleep calling. And that's why you must remain close, in the distance. Because you can never sing me to sleep.

:: The Hours ::

Days are now like wanton sand, slipping by. It's fluid and flaccid, slightly obtuse at times, and mostly roused by routine. At the end of each time marker―a day, a week, a pinch in the years of youth, so to speak―I hear nothing except the roar of the hours. It's not the same narcissistic emptiness that had plagued me during my laborious teenage years; it's a quiet blank, where the maturity of knowledge cannot quite cancel out the childish want of want.

My weekend disappeared, and I wonder if I can still call it mine. Time has seemingly become a commodity―one that doesn't care for ownership, and doesn't answer to management. When my world blurred into focus on Friday and I knew that my entire weekend has been cemented by social calls, I wished suddenly for the freedom to fade. It was a mean and petty thought and I was immediately ashamed: there was no reason not to do that bottle of wine. There was no reason not to be excited about Sid and Meeta's visit. There was no reason not to want the infectious inclusion into the social circles that have spun their loving cycles around my life.

There was no reason, expect perhaps my inner nirvana didn't want the noise of social platitudes. I wanted only the company of intimate friends and forgotten luxuries―five more fucking minutes in bed please―I wanted only the love of a good book and the scent of strong coffee―I wanted only the virgin void of silence―saved for cries from the rain-ravaged sky―is that―are those―good enough a reason?

***

My old Marlboro Man―I miss you. You gave me an invincible spark of confidence, and your laughter was a phantom force in mine. Fly safe, for you took your wings with you.

:: Mad minstrels ::

Sometimes I toss and dream and in my dreams, I am a mother. One that never was, one that always will be, with or without you. My heart and my body remember the child that was taken, and my mind calls on the blighting blisters of another's poem: I'm seven now as I was then; when children die they do not grow.

You would have been, wouldn't you. You would have been seven. You would have been growing, glowing, a bright-eyed existence, clear as day, and stronger than memories. You would have been loved, even if you were unwanted; you would have been cherished, even if you were an accident. You would have been named, even if you were born outside of a licit definition. You would have been.

I am tearless when I think of you, about you―my teenage casualty, the clumsy result of my pedomorphic passion. I'm tearless, but then my regret becomes lonely swirls of ivory fire, white-hot and bitter. It's a claw, you see, a claw cleaving at my conscience, like nails in my veins: you would have been, but you couldn't, and you didn't, and all of this―now―has become a dissolvent of dreams. I'm corroded by your possibility. If I were braver, if I had been more of a mother than a martyr, then―who's to say? I could be craddling you now, instead of an overwrought penance. You would be safe, and I would have been saved―no scar tissue―not in mind, not in my heart, and not in my womb.

We sought an inchoate exit for you, you see, and now I bear the guilt of not having borne you. You are a shadow in my smile, and with or without you, I will always be a mother, even if all I'm carrying now is a surrogate dream left to dry in the playground of an elapsed era.

***

I'm high on corporate cannabis at the moment. Excuse my silence. Shalom, everyone, even if peace is a lethe utopia, an accomplice to the dissident void of nothingness.

:: Claque ::

2.16 a.m.

The night whittled into morning; our little circle of friendship spun intimate zodiacs of cheerful stories, tensed confessions and tender troubles. I smiled inwardly while watching my girls. We've stumbled through the doors of adulthood with the clumsy grace of age―our school-going, books-hitching days have been eclisped by a certain repressed maturity; there you go, that's our coming of age.

But we are rapt with humour still, even as our homage is now made to different gods. Once we crusaded for acceptance and fought for grades; now we're shielded by the armour of womanhood and our war song is waged against work, love and family battles. We've never been more individualistic than we are now, but I'd like to think our coming together is still a celebration of the collective identity we've branded on ourselves―a brazen logo of love if you will―a decade or so ago.

Stay close, girls. Thank you.

***

Later, in bed. I was the sandman's wanton toy, my mind claimed by petty senses. The heartbeat of my thoughts felt like a claque―hired help, applauding mindlessly to a rhetoric rhythm. I turned and tossed―the heat of the night is a banzai bell!―and, you know what, I missed you. Just a little, with the offhanded keenness that was echoing seconds in a separate universe. The sudden emptiness that seeped within the thoughts of my dreamscape trash called on Margaret Atwood's quiet lines from There Is Only One of Everything:

Not a tree but the tree
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down
like that again.

There is only one of everything. No separate universe, no parallel lives, no celestial skies shaded by the languid magic of romantic treason.

I let sleep wash over me then, as the Sunday light broke free from the reins of night.

:: Vulpine ::

The night feels famished. The atmosphere is hot and dried of stars. I feel condemned by the heat―a captive yardbird, a pawn in the killing fields of mother nature. The day seems to have bled passed my fingers: the spoils of desperate times. These are unfed and unfettered hours, where I try to work a little more, write a little more, think a little more; these are hours of social celibacy, where the only company that really makes sense is the plastic rhythm of my keyboard.

Tonight my mind is filled with scar tissue. Tonight I'm convinced that we are nothing but playpieces of some vulpine and wretched fate, who drills us with militant resolve to madness and mayhem. Neither beauty nor joy can thwart the covert mechanism of pain―humour becomes a frightful subtlety, a trembling hand jerking off to the lust of death―what am I saying, you ask?

***

'My blood pressure―it's not looking good,' my uncle―Uncle K―said. He was matter-of-fact. Yet the news would have hit us―nieces and sisters and mother―like the backhanded wave of Moses' prophecy.

He took in our wide-eyed expressions and grinned cheerfully for our benefit. I imagined the effort needed to gash one's face opened just so, with that sort of smile―at that moment I ached and I ached and I ached.

'It's nothing serious, not now―hypertension can still be controlled. But the doctor warned me of kidney failure as the worst case scenario,' he rattled on, with the same casual confidence of the rockstar he had wanted to be in his youth. He popped another piece of chicken in his mouth and chewed nonchalantly. 'We'll see.'

The same cabalistic discomfort that has been seeping through the maternal side of my family―ever since we broke opened the fortune cookie of chance three years ago and cancer was the prescribed destiny that grinned and leered at us―is back. I can feel it. Soon we'll be talking about check-ups and hereditary diseases the same way other families talk about taking a holiday, and every now and then we'll look out of the window and feel the whispers of death and fear lengthen like an incongruous shadow outside our corridor.

***

I remember snatches of my uncle's youth: the way he looked in his Air Force uniform. The way he jammed on his tennis racket, pretending that it was a Fender Stratocaster. The way he drove with reckless speed. The way he always won at Carrom. The way he was, squandering his youth with the goodnatured ease of a demigod. The way we all were: healthy, alive, happy.

Now. My grandfather is dead; colon cancer. My two uncles are still in the shade of cancer's guillotine, as we all are. Haven't I always said―we are the wanton toys of the universe, and it has the libertine licence to bleed time from us like a leech purple with fateful promiscuity.