Umbrage

Music and its random rot, eating the flesh off memories, making pain a bulimic, taking the weight off the mind, and flooding the veins with empty energy. Alcohol, a fun house of comic and tragic reactions, readily supplying tears and clown-laughter, fermenting the bitter brew discontentment in its pledge of pleasure. Distractions―in the form of rancid rhythms, a hint of casual sleaze, an elapsed toast to celebrate the folly of youth―the handmaiden to our urban megalomania, serving up petit fours of useless kicks and amusement.

And then the convivial mask splits faces; the deadpan actor slips out, a rictus, a dilettante to life. Ten minutes before the club's closing and you're a star, your body a reason of screams, your youth made beautiful by the strobe-lights sprinkling their ultra-violet fairy dust on you. Ten minutes after, the empty streets stretch before your vodka vision, the morning hours silenced with the echoes of your blank, and you realise you're now a has-been. The fawning homage paid―along with an exorbitant cover charge―you stagger into a waiting cab, pretending, perhaps, this could be a pumpkin-carriage, carrying your dreams, like a princess-in-waiting, to your ivory Elysium. The final curtain call, broken only by a rude jolt to the senses as the vehicle screech to a stop―

"14.60, miss," the driver calls the fare, and you realise, like all dreams, there's a price a to be paid.

***

P and I, we brought our raffish love for cheap red wine and fickle men to a questionable part of town. Orchard Towers, where the boys would do girls who are boys who like boys who do girls―I couldn't get the song out of my head as the two of us walk down the street looking like artless schoolgirls, vulnerable and out of place next to the glimmering ladies and their grinning men. The building was down-at-heel, flaking with sleaze: women lingered around like hungry magpies, the Filippinas small and pert and chatty, the Indonesians earthy and eager, the Chinese glamourous but overdone.

Men winked at us―faded men, fat with beer and promiscuousity, made lordly with money for the working girls, jostling in bars like licentious wolves, waiting for meat. The show we wanted to catch―a cabaret of fleshpot trannies, offering low-brow jokes and middling entertainment―wouldn't start for another hour, so P and I found a quiet bar with happy-hour prices, and we settled into our red wine ('One Cab Sauv!' the waiter called, and I cringed―because you would have too) and stories.

'None of my friends would have come here with me,' P remarked, smiling. 'So thank you.'

'You're very welcome,' I said, grinning, relaxed. In the low lights of the bar, P was particularly attractive. Her features are not delicate, but they fit together cleverly on her face. Thick brows arching over deep-set eyes, a slant of asymmetry to her lips, a degree of curve in her nose―pleasantly at odds, yet joined together by an interesting rapport. She's got beautiful hair―commercial quality, long and dark and silky, draping over her chiselled shoulders with erratic grace. Hair that men would love. Men who, unfortunately, are unworthy of P's stoic strength and relentless humour.

We watched as a hefty Caucasian saunter up the bar with his escort, a pint-sized girl, her face too young and unlined for the heavy make-up, her slight body too dainty for the showy black dress. Their drinks were served and the man lit up a cigar, puffing away like a druglord, his gut hanging out of his pants with repulsive nonchalance. She sipped her beer quietly, adopting an expression that was almost child-like; there was no light in her eyes.

P and I fell silent. We may be losers in love, we may be struggling in the race rat of our careers, we may have family problems that run with more melodrama than an average episode of a bad soap series―but at least we're fortunate enough to choose the losers in our loves, to be rich enough in our education to struggle for a grander ambition, to actually have families to call our own, despite their dysfunction and malfunction.

'A toast,' I said, 'to good fortune.'

We drained our bottle and left the bar. Saturday night had begun.

Rust

He sits, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. The ash drips in smoky flourish; the air becomes an evanescent grey. The space between us is swallowed by the edacious depths of time: was it twenty minutes since we were here? An hour? Fifty heartbeats since we last kissed? My senses were a dead empire: grand, empty, a daedal of fibs. Something has achromatised between us. Spent from our physical appetite, we're no longer hungry for conversation.

'Are you angry with me?' He starts, an accidental Adonis still, disturbingly young, and heartbreakingly earnest. But there is something barren in him today―a palisade, a riot of distance. An equivocation; something that's in me too.

'Nothing to be angry about,' I reply, taking a long swallow, letting my gin administer its alcoholic anesthetic.

'Do you wish for things to be different?' He ventures, a question born out of curiousity, rather than want.

'I wish for different things,' I mutter; love in abstemious.

Is it relief that is stealing over his features? A gentle wash of regret? Or maybe it is nothing more than the fall of the sun, setting now with celerity. The muscular void in my heart remembers the ache for another. Memories whisper and scratch.

I let him take my hand, but intimacy is such a quandary over our mutual lovelessness. Another ending; one more paraplegic page in my story-space of silenced lovers.

'Gina Maria,' he says, smiling, but his eyes are far away now. Like the unripe angel, waiting for wings in a Michaelangelo's painting, but without the saintly light of devout desire. I return my Adonis to my dreamscape legends, to the myths of a transient everlast, where my own abstract failures can be made romantic and real in the eyes of another.

Love is a tyrant. And that's why I look to you―how foolish, I know―to palliate the excesses of its cruel regime.

Promenade

Four minutes past five-thirty, and the same shaft of sun would hit the third column of the wall tucked at the far end of the office, forming an L-shape shadow with ordinary precision. A knight's move, an imprint, a sameness that I've been seeing for the last three years.

I'm diminished; this is a prison. This. Which is what, exactly? The clouds turn their silly cartwheels outside a window that would soon be closed to me. I have too much work―my final eulogies, my last will and testament―but I'm winded. Combat fatigue, perhaps. But save your fucking medal. It's my own crack-up debilitation. I'm spent. My leaving is the tally of my psychological expenditure: sorry hon, we're closed for the day.

My veins are heavy, filled with plebian plasma, ferrying lengthy lassitude, to a heart that's hibernating in the anchor watch of death. Cleave me open, and I'll bleed antipathy all over you. My arms need puppeting.

The shadow has faded off the wall. Good night.

Carousal

I.

Your secret profile
hide like faces in a coin,
minted for abuse.

II.

Like a lost treasure,
they will unearth us again:
from this consumed wreck.

III.

The tragic lightning
strikes a dreamy butterfly,
and erodes the day.

Trammel

Elements

The wind is knocking
around the capacious corner,
bringing with it
a farrago of madness;
there is humour,
in the elements―
it preaches the falling,
onto various grounds,
onto a promotory gladness.

The earth falls away,
sweeping clean the sapid smells,
of a teeming absence
temporise with dreams.
Unearthed, now, my footing,
life is a sacred celebration―
of our monsterous destinies,
of chances lost and gained, through
worth and struggles and schemes.

My way of farewell,
to the exhaustive shadows,
is to fall, to scab; words shall
elide into metaphor and matter,
into wounds and macabre chants,
that comes when the wind
comes knocking, around the corner,
to chafe, to bruise, to batter.

***

Rambling

One day I will claim you,
along with
the sweet fallacy of peonies
and the dark heaving of my heart.

The door closes to your
recreant face,
what can open up, your dissembling,
if leaving free is a finical art?

In my mind, love―the word―
is a palindrome, formed like
a voodoo ritual, formed,
when continents drift apart.

Nothing becomes of us,
and the peonies and our song:
frozen like eagles in an extinct
coat-of-arms, depart.

Grapes soured from Aesop's tale,
now mingle with my wine,
drink to the bottom of the months,
a badinage of days, bitter, tart―

Every iota of sleep endures,
the inkhorn terms of dreams;
another December decends,
and the caveat call shall start.

Incipient

Throw off the carapace of sleep, and the day gets old so quickly. So many morning hours have slipped by, distilling into my blood their gravity and brevity, mingling memories, raging with routine. So many mornings, but the wear-and-tear of my everyday remains the same, like carbon cargo―unchanging, a burden, oppressive. I wake like a caged bird, the horizon abstracted and dull because I am behind bars. Tear my errant dreams away from me, and I'm a half-dressed debacle, naked in my modest ambitions, unaccomplished, an indigent.

How fatalistic, I think, and I celebrate it with the anodyne of practice: a hot shower, a swipe of colour on my cheeks, a swish of silk as I dress, a sparkle of light in a piece of jewellery. I blink and smile at the mirror, always undecided: consolation―or disconsolation?

But the day moves ahead with gracious concession, and the hours speak in polyglot tongues―a vocabulary of habits and calculations, of the established and the unexpected, of questions, of answers. I listen, most of the time. The inchoate sense of what I'm doing―could be doing―is usually enough.

Until now. The mystery of change is calling up all the different sides to me―the philomath, the aesthete, the prodigal, the oddball, the rebel―all of them, demanding clarity, grappling for more, battling to exist, co-exist. An imbroglio. I'm here but not quite.

I sit at work, filled with sentimental piety about my imminent leaving. Conversations―within and outside my office space―remains infested with cant. I only seek out the company of a few; there is a glaze of trepidation over my temerity, and too many unseamed voices both disappoint and disengage. I hear the factual and the facetious, and I reply in kind, still fagged out from my prolonged sense of boredom.

That's why you're missed, I think. Your laconic smiles, your gentle intellect; the nadir of our friendship is the capstone of my indolence.

Cavil

Saturday night; the sybarite of the week. I brushed shoulders with the crowd, but I couldn't be further away from their uniform hunger for mindless enjoyment. My mind was immured. It couldn't expand in any direction, it caught no light, and it understood no distraction. Something is dislodged, somehow: the parley between the past and the passing of my life―old school days, my dead loves, a new career―was firing itself into a volley of captious questions, catching me blank.

To say I'm indifferent, to say I'm feeling the viral spread of ennui, to say that I'm bogged down, stressed out, hyped up―to say all that, to bring on the callow call of paltry definitions, is suddenly unimportant. Life is a wigged-out psychic sometimes, and change is a constant presage peeking out of its crystal ball. Why, then, am I so wayworn? Where the fuck is my frisson, my euphoria?

I find that I'm glad to be left alone. Only then do I permit a sense of lenity to my own thoughts; only then can I ditch all pretense, all masks with their rouged-on grins, and slip in place the dial of contemplative suffering. I'm not miserable, far from it―but when I'm alone, without the blackguard of social obligations, I'm free. To be forlorn, to be bored, to be quiet.

Saturday; a gamine, a minx, a coquette cocktail of hedonistic pursuits. I headed to the Sound Bar―fitting name, because even though my footsteps were sere with lethargy, the pulse of electronic beats were luring, alluring, waking the deadmind somewhat.

Sound Bar is the café society for the beau monde―it sees a constant parade of skin and style, of men and women guised in salient fads. High heels clicked, jewellery jangled, and lips smacked in frenzies of air-kisses. It was a configuration of chic―technical, mannered, and, at least to me, fake.

Oh my dear. You're always so critical. I hid a smile and walked into the crowded bar, trying to forget the blue eyes that had lit up when they saw me here the last time. The business men I were to meet―GS, CK, Tim G, Alois―were already there, boys with their whiskeys, boys drunk on beer, boys.

'Jeanny!' Tim G, all limps and impish smiles, that boyish dimple creasing his thin cheek, swept me up in a big bear hug as I approached. It's been two years since he was stationed at the Singapore office, but we've stayed friends. He's a high-living scapegrace, a thirtysomething with an adolescent streak of mad rebellion. I like him immensely, the quiet, half-serious sister to his brotherly mischief.

I shook hands with Alois―an older man, rather distinguished, the gleam in his eyes matching the glint of the slim wedding band roped around his finger.

GS embraced me with familiar affection. I felt his hand glide down my hips in sexual reflex―we had our history of flirtation, but the newness of his marriage should put a stop to his old dog-tricks. Seeing the sleepy lust in his eyes, though, I realise that the seasoned flirt in him―a rampant renegade―would be hard to kill.

I kissed CK and caught the gimcrack wink of a faded jock behind his shoulder.

'I need a double,' I muttered to GS, who already instinctively had his arm at the back of my chair, the protector, the godfather, a flirt, but nonetheless, a friend.

The drinks came―the third round for the boys, and my first. The palaver began in earnest. We quaffed our drinks, and the men―boys―raised their eyes at the bevy of flesh that came and went. The perfidy of our salad days, I think. Where the girls dress and the boys mess, where the women hold in their clevage the promise of power, and the men nourish their egos along with their lust. I'm no better, no worse―guilty as charged, yessir, to the pleasures of the idyll.

The group split after my second gin. GS, with a newfound propriety, was the first to announce his leave. 'Hey, you know, being married and all―you gotta take the bullet, right?'

CK was tired, withdrawn. His loveless state dries him, drives him. I could tell he was drunk.

Alois had kept up a slew of innuendos and a wandering hand the whole night on me; I was unfailingly polite, but unwavering in my disinterest. He left, too, after a conspiratory debate with the rest in German―but I understood enough. It was gauche, but I understood.

So then it was only Tim G and me. I was getting sleepy, an effete audience; my sight was blurring into the tiffany lights. But I didn't mind the chance to catch up with my captain Tim―an accidental nickname that stuck―and the knowledge that we'd probably not see each other for a long time after my current job runs its course was enough for me to fight the giddy waves of sleep.

'I hate it home,' he confided, carelessly fiddling with a beer-soaked coaster, his bony fingers emaciated, but nimble. 'I really miss Singapore―the weather, the people, everything.'

'What is it like, home?' I asked, wondering if the shrinking world has made wanderlust a drug du jour, and home is nothing more than a port of call, a space to unload. It certainly seems as though everyone is dying to leave, to run.

'It's getting boring. You know, I chose to commute 160 ks every fucking day because there's no way I could sit my ass in Ingolstadt. So I pay the premium of staying in Munich. But even then,' he said, a dapple of age suddenly framing his eyes, 'even then it's getting to me. I threw a party one day last month, and invited my best friends. I wanted everyone to get stupid and drunk, actually, after all the stress we have at work. And what do you know? I had about 15 friends but my apartment was filled suddenly with wives and partners and babies and dogs. At 10 pm everyone was like, oh my plant needs to be watered and we have work the next day. I was like, fuck y'all, what's wrong?'

I laughed. 'My dear Captain―not everyone is piloting their plane like you, you know.'

He shook his neat little head. 'I don't fucking want to grow up, I think. That's why Berlin is a much better scene for me. There, I meet people my age who still want to find an adventure, who still want to fly the flag of being young. Not just burying their lives in some stupid sheet of paper―whether it's a marriage certificate or a work contract. C'mon. Life is so fucking short. One minute you're employee of the month, and next second you're drinking beer with God. I mean, I hate the Americans, but I agree when they say, get a fucking life!'

It was a passionate spiel, and he ended it by draining his beer dry. I couldn't think, my wits had left me, and so I allowed Music the Idiot God take over the stage for us instead. At 2 a.m., we found ourselves packed in with the modish crowd at one of hotspots in town; I couldn't really lose myself to the inanition of electronic-funk, but I was glad to see Tim G did his thing, as he like to say.

It was odd, to watch him fall into the scrabble of rhythm with the mindless effort of a kid. I detached myself and observed the melee of hands, arms, legs and bodies cave in to the jumble of sounds and beats. Surely one day I can find my own votary too, when the manse of my disinclination finds a worthy exit.

Until then, I remain a restive reporter, my internal cavil a clarion to the questions, to the wanting, to the running, to the moiety of emotions I'm still enslaved to.