Kuching girl

Your earliest memories of her were mostly in relation to her mysterious tardiness, how she often stumbles into the back of the lecture theatres dumping her large bag, file and sundry next to where you would always sit. For you, it was always a preference to sit at the back of this small class; a quiet space that belonged to you alone. Yet her weekly intrusions were something you strangely tolerated, an affable aberration to an otherwise mundane university routine.

You think back to the times where things were a bit simpler; how acknowledging smiles turned into introductions turned into light banter turned into something more. You think about how you used to help her take notes when she had to miss classes for her photo shoots, and the way you teased her for her lame attempts to hide her heavily styled hair and post-shoot thick make-up beneath a cap. You remember the conversations about her home town in between moments, how she holds her cigarettes, and the quiet meals together at her place.

Years later, you see her on the cover of a few major women's magazines, still sporting her long straight hair and her signature Japanese doll bangs, her deep set eyes a little heavier with maturity and her smiles more at ease. Now a leading model with Mannequin Studio, you're secretly envious and amazed by how far she has come in this cruel and capricious career. A small town girl living the big city dream, her overflowing world-view bursting beyond the confines of a sleepy Kuching.

You silently wish her the best as you push the glossy magazine back into its racks, pondering vainly that she might still remember you after all these years.

Distress signals

A telephone - it's a strange device, constantly entangling the emotions of human beings within itself, yet capable of uttering nothing more than a simple bell tone. Doesn't it feel any pain from all the loves, the hatreds and desires that pass through it? Or is the sound of the bell really a scream of pain, convulsive and unendurable, that the telephone continually inflicts?

Yukio Mishima, Thirst For Love

Back when I was in the army as a conscript, manning the guard room at the barracks was part and parcel of the weekend duties assigned to personnel who had to remain behind (usually unwillingly), while others checked out for the weekend. There was a standard handling over procedure where the last guard will brief the incoming personnel on the expected duties to be performed and what one would normally expect to see in the course of such duties. I still remember how our unit had an additional clause in such a brief that was the source for legends for many years to come.

"You will expect a call from someone late at night," this was how I was briefed that very day. "You don't have to ask who she is or what she wants, just listen to her to talk. And don't ask too many questions."

At this point in time, most of us would be rather freaked out by the prospect of a female voice on the phone in the wee hours in an army camp, with no one around except yourself. This sounds almost like one of those ghost stories you tell to newcomers of the camp to warn them not to skip certain superstitions in the performance of their duties, I thought to myself. Sensing this, my senior went on to say, "No, nothing to be afraid of. Not a ghost lah!"

While the rest of the day was mundane and was really boring me to tears, nightfall brought me to feverish heights of anticipation. What will the conversation be like? I mused periodically at the desk of the guard room, watching the clock tick slowly away with abated breath. The air was starting to get rather cold as soft drafts carried the wet air from the forests around the camp, across the parade square, right into the room where I was seated with my head resting on the table. By 1:00am, I was slowly drifting off to sleep, the pages of the log book beside me flapping softly in a lullaby of sorts with every sweep of the table fan.

The telephone sounded at around 2:30am, its artificial tone giving me a jolt that woke me up instantaneously. I raised the receiver slowly and recited my script in a sleepy voice, "G Wing Guard Room, how may I assist you?"

Silence.

Well, it was not exactly silence I heard, because the ambient noise on the other end of the line was a sign that the call was connected, just that the other party wasn't speaking at all. But it was certainly very quiet.

"Erm, hello? G Wing Guard Room, how can I help you?"

I repeated my rehearsed lines again, not so much as a clarification, but more of a standard operation procedure you perform to calm your nerves in unexpected circumstances. I could remember hearing a soft breathing on the other end, before the phone was hung up. The rest of the night went by quietly and uneventful, even though I was waiting for whoever that was to call back again. I couldn't sleep; the soft breathing kept replaying itself in my mind, and I could vaguely remember it as something I've heard before, like a soft weeping as someone cried.

I was woken up the next day by the incoming duty personnel, this funny chap, and I did the same handling over procedure with clockwork rigidity, telling him about the phone call to expect as well.

"Oh that one, did she speak to you?"

"No leh. You've heard of this before?"

"Not really, just some details. Most of us won't even get to hear her voice, or even receive her call because it doesn't happen all the time. I think she only talks to a few of the guys here. Maybe she chooses them by their voice or something. You quite heng (lucky) ah."

"Who exactly is she?"

"Don't say I say one ah. I heard she started calling few years back. At first it was a wrong number, but then she kept calling until it was a regular occurrence, even WSM (Wing Sergeant Major) knows about it. He instructed some of the regulars before to just listen and play along. How true is that nobody knows lah, but it's like a legend already."

That was my first and only encounter with that mysterious caller, as I've managed to stay clear from guard duty for the rest of my stay at the unit. Till this day, I still wonder what those phone calls meant. What were the contents of the conversations between her and her "chosen" duty personnel? If she was crying, what was she upset about? And did she call the guard room time and time again after the initial chance encounter because she could always count on us to provide a listening ear no matter how late it was? But there are all these counselling hotlines she could turn to... why us? Did the guard room's number had some special significance for her, or did a particular duty personnel's voice rekindle some lost memories?

I will never know the answers.

In the bigger scheme of things, if human connectivity is nothing more than mere static and electronic signals travelling across a thin wire from one point to another, how can we bridge the divide between two people? Has the telephone become a human yearning just to hear another voice, just to reach out and feel, regardless of the outcome?

Who do you choose to call then, if you have no friends or family, and will anyone suffice?

Monochromatic Luminosity

How can you not fall in love with that airy voice? And those dimples! I think S. is a new convert to Piana as well.

Some songs she sang in her short appearance (not in order):

Little Girl Poems
Something Is Lost
Early in Summer
Blue Bell
Snow Bird
Butterfly
Prayer

*swoons*

In a totally serendipitous encounter, I met her at the concert. I felt young again, that kind of silly high you get when you spot someone you fancy. Not that I'd ever wanted anything to come out of it; no names, no conversations - those things spoil the fascination.

But I'm just delighted. It's an indescribable light and wafting sensation that washes over you when two pairs of eyes meet for a moment at the door, the soft electric tingles at the back of your neck just because she's seated so close to you. So silly.

For her I'm just another stranger, a meaningless face in the crowd, but for me, I felt as if she's known me for years. It's a secret pleasure for myself, and not even her boyfriend, whom she had her arms wrapped snugly around, can take that away from me.

iDissect

So even iSlap has failed me. The ridiculously low-tech remedy to my ipod's ailing harddisk by giving it a hard whack at the back has been the last resort for me in the past weeks. Funnily enough, it resuscitated the white brick for almost a month now. The only thing was that my 4th generation ipod started to behave like an ipod shuffle, allowing me to listen to certain songs only on certain days.

And yesterday, my playlists disappeared when iSlapped the white brick. Great, now I can't even enjoy the random surprises my ipod selects on my behalf.

So for the past 4 hours, I have been performing iDissect in a bid to check if the ribbon connections are in place, removing a little dust in the interiors, as well as checking up potential harddisk replacements for the cursed 1.8 inch Toshiba MK2004GAL on the net. Yeah you heard right, G-A-L. A menopausal ipod after three years, it seems. And Sim Lim Square is not going to help; 1.8 inch hard disks are still relatively obscure in the mass market.

So what shall I do now? Should iGiveUp or iShop?

Same answer

I have been thinking lately.

A love that cannot bear fruit; what is its purpose and meaning?

Something that disappears eventually, and something that never existed in the first place; aren't they the same anyway?

Piana mania

I'm so excited about this! Are you?

Now if only they bring in Spangle Call Lilli Line and Polaris, my Japanese dreampop fanboy life will be effing complete.

I hope April and Ricks' set will be rocking as well, their new video looks amazing.

Room 903

You're standing by the balcony with a dying cigarette in hand, watching the last of the smoke rings rise and fade into the darkness as they catch the soft draft from the South China Sea. In the distance, a sparse handful of cargo tankers lay berthed in calm waters, their floodlights bobbing up and down in undulating rhythms, a little dance to the forgotten songs of listless resignation whispered by their tired seafarers.

Behind the glass door, hidden underneath the white covers and pillows, a trace of hair is the only hint of her presence. A misplaced stain of darkness in the light; the smudge of black on white is a mysterious juxtaposition that draws you slowly in. You snub out the dying embers of the fag and pry open the glass door quietly so as not to stir her from her spa-induced slumber. You like to watch her sleep; how she takes the shape of a foetus during these moments of unbridled weakness, when she doesn't have to put up that bold front you've come to admire.

Slowly, you watch a pillow dislodge from its position, revealing the soft nape of skin and those collarbones you can never get enough of. Her smooth skin shimmers with a light glow under the ambient lighting, the bare space behind her ears a glistening pool tempting you to take a plunge into. Will you lose yourself completely if you do? You nurse that thought in your mind, taking in a swig of the red wine on the bedside table.

With every soft crash of the waves upon the breakwater in the distance, her thin eyelids quiver gently, and moments later they part to reveal watery eyes, and the half open mouth curves into a faint smile when she finds you seated beside her on the bed.

"Hello stranger."

Her flocculent voice is still light with the soft playfulness of dreams. She brushes the covers aside to rise and plant her lips on your forehead and you trace the contours of her supple neck with your nose in return, taking in the hues of ylang ylang, lavender and vanilla that line her luscious skin. When you're about to mouth a repartee, she reclines slowly into the sheets and draws you into her face, closer and closer and closer, until the two blotches of black become one against the whiteness of the bed.

Far away, a tanker sounds its horn as it sets off from its berth, with its bow pointing towards an imagined destination in the darkness, the beams of the strong floodlights charting a hopeful course over the grey choppy waters that lay in its path.

Film-pal

I have been exchanging arthouse films with Shir via snail mail for the past two months, and she has always impressed me with her selection of videos, which always seem to be spot on in terms of aesthetic eclectics/eclectic aesthetics, with riveting plots that leave me wanting more.

This time round she seems to have outdone herself, with the accompanying package handmade and designed from scratch, her thoughtfulness evident in the smallest of details - such as in the placement of the name of the films on the mailer flap, attempting to confuse the post-person with the arrangement of the mailing address, and using the stamp as a seal at the back. I can still remember the resounding cries of "spoil market!" in my head as I opened it. How in the world am I supposed to top her effort?

If this is your dedication towards design, then your career choice, despite your qualms about its unearthly hours, has been a right one after all. Eat, sleep and breath design, you go girl!

Navel gazing ahoy!

We interrupt the usual emotional thingamajigg for a light hearted dosage of inane blogging and mini memes!

*engages himbo mode*

Hokay, since I got tagged by Skye and have nothing non-emotional to say these days, I may as well do the silly questionnaire and get myself all chirpy.

"Tagged! This is what you are supposed to do. Cut and paste if you decide to participate in the tagging game.

Each player of this game starts off by giving 6 weird things about themselves. People who get tagged need to write in a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state the rules clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names.

After you do that, leave them each a comment letting them know you tagged them and to read your blog"

Now brace yourself.

Weird Fact #1
I was on the milk bottle till I was six. It wasn't Mum's milk all the way, towards the end, it got all funky with Milo and soyabean milk. My parents just couldn't figure out why I will only drink through that. So yeah, many of you psychoanalysts were right; my oral fixations with tits and its proxies do go a long way back.

Weird Fact #2
If it wasn't for academia, I would be driving a rubbish truck now. Yes, seriously. In fact, my first ambition was exactly that. I still recall how my attraction to big machines began with my daily morning ritual at 8am in the morning when I was 4-5 years old. How I would dash out of the toilet, midway through bowel-movement, with my pants down whenever I hear the rumble of its engine four houses away. Come to think of it, my pants was always down whenever the rubbish truck drove by. No wonder the driver had always this smile whenever he waved at me... When I told my Dad of this aspiration, he laughed a very hard laugh, almost a painful one. Now I know better.

Weird Fact #3
I think I'm a woman trapped in a boy's body. I sometimes act and think and dress(!) like one too. This is one reason why my sister loves me as a shopping partner. I love to read women's magazines, growing up with a regular serving of Her World, Female and Cleo; which probably explains why I know a lot more about menstrual cycles and make-up than your typical heterosexual male. It's also why I can be extremely bitchy at clubs when it comes to style-checking other bitches and pushing and shoving to make space. I'm your diva drag queen in pants. You don't get that from me? Oh, you'd better not.

Weird Fact #4
I have problems throwing things away. I love to hoard. Essays from primary school, old postcards, love letters, basketball cards, torn underwear, pubic hair of significant others encased in fibreglass. This probably explains the dishevelled condition of my room; it's a stuffy fire hazard with a haphazard sortie of pseudo-furniture and year-old food crumbs. The real me within my personal museum; sloth-like, unkempt, furiously nostalgic.

Weird Fact #5
I love the smell of books obsessively. I know this sounds perverse, but I buy books based on how they smell (the same goes for vinyl records), and I'm not shy to stick my nose down the centre of the book to make my purchase decisions, with the cashier giving me horrid looks. My personal favourites? I gravitate towards books from Vintage and not Penguin, because Vintage UK (not International or Classics or USA) tends to use paper with faint hints of lovely vanilla and nut (quite a connoisseur eh?), while Penguin's paper reeks of aged sawdust and moist toilet floors (save for their premium classic editions with jagged paper edges). Verso also has pretty creamy paper, which I enjoy tremendously, along with the softness of Princeton University Press. I hate the sour bleach taste that Routledge reeks of. I told you I'm weird what.

Weird Fact #6
I have this problem of overreading everything as sexual. Like how I think Lord of the Rings is a gay show (Frodo & Sam as a couple, Gandalf as the gay daddy, Aragorn as the young jock, Legolas as the effeminate one, etc.), like how every category in charades/board games can be interpreted in terms of phalluses, nuts, sex and whatsoever. The list is limitless. This is one possible social hazard of having a hyperactive (sexual) imagination. But that didn't hurt anyone, did it?

To propagate this viral nonsense, I will tag the following random people (in all senses of the word):

1. Thumbie-chan
2. Little Fish
3. I think we should act as if.
4. Paid with Naivety (starting afresh, remember?)
5. Mosey
6. Johnny Swallo Stop watching

Alright, I'll be awaiting your quirkly responses, now, be off!

*disengages himbo mode*

Mykel will return with the usual fare, hopefully soon.

Impressions

On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely have figured out, lurks an equal amount of the unfathomable. What we know are fragments of you and me, approximations pieced together by vague impressions that neither of us can fully grasp. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings, a silhouette we try to hug of someone who was never there to begin with.

But we try anyway.

We are not aware that the present moment seems to stand forth already endowed with the soft beauty of reminiscence. The soft wetness that is her lips, the fluttering of her long lashes on my cheeks, her strong arms wrapped around my body, her long angelic curls teasing my neck. The freckles in her eyes are like little brown colonies of hope, mirror images of mine. And as we kiss, I really do wonder if ours align.

Yet when we are together, there is neither evidence nor commemoration; a joy that is not allowed to burst its brimming banks. We are like unrecorded secrets, nothing more than a mingling of glances... of hands... of lips... of sex. How abstract have we become, like poetry in motion, words unneeded, meaning unnecessary. And when we're gone, there will be no traces for keepsake, no scent for remembrance.

She never asks for anything much, and I never promise either. Perhaps what we need is not the anchorage of words or promises, but the accumulation of small realities like these. A fleeting look, one evanescent taste of her moist lips, that is all I ask for.

Is that too much to ask?

Rear window

You're seated in a tiny wooden chair in her kitchen, feeling slightly dwarfed by the towering furniture that surrounds you. The chilly, mildew-esque air is getting warmer as day bleeds slowly into the remains of the night. The sound of families getting ready for their day mingles with the drone of early morning traffic and the bright chirps of a sole oriole; the cacophony cuts through the atmosphere in bold, stirring strokes.

Like partitions of fluorescent light stacked neatly upon each other, you take in the sights and sounds of the opposite block like a voyeur, as if each light whispers of a different story of the family living within. From the darkness of the kitchen, you spy a young mother putting out the day's laundry in anticipation of the glorious sun this morning. Another family is having breakfast together, the father with the routine newspaper at hand, while the daughter juggles a mug of milk and bread in her well-pressed school uniform. At the far end, you notice an aged lady holding up joss sticks to the heavens, her lips moving in an inaudible prayer and her eyes closed in deep thought.

She hands you a cold packet of Milo to ward off the gastric pains you have, while she attends to the sandwich-in-progress. You turn to watch the cold pieces of bread spin slowly in the carousel of the microwave oven, strangely taken in by the faint festive glow of the oven's bulb and the quiet roar of its motor working. A million voices are clamouring for your attention now, but you can't win them all. You found out at the coldest hour before daybreak, that nothing makes sense to you anymore. It was as if all these fragments of yourself are finally starting to pull apart from the precarious lies you have allowed to glue yourself together with. When the irreparable faultlines of a million pieces start to shatter, you wonder, who will be the ones who get cut? The sky was turning bright. Vast sections of clouds waiting to reflect the glow of morning's coming paraded their grandeur in the heavens, but all they could do at this early hour was to lend a cast of severity to the sky, and a certain heaviness to the heaving heart.

Cheese, turkey ham, defrosted bread. It's warm and comfortable and soft as you grasp the sandwich with both palms; much like love, but you wince your words and tell her its dry to the taste. Defence is the last refuge you have. Before you step out into the morning traffic, she stands there by the metal grilles of her front door, and your eyes meet for a prolonged moment in silence. You smile your usual smile, which she always mistakes for a weird one, and you leave, stepping out into the morning sun. Somehow, everything feels different this time. Did something transfigure within you over the course of the night? Maybe.

But no matter how our way of looking at things might change, you know that in the end, you'll always come up with the same answer.

Quotes for S.

"Let's go for KTV now!"

"Now?! It'll be so boring with just two people."

"Yeah I think so too. We'll probably end up killing ourselves by wrist slashing. We totally cannot sing lah. Our duets will be like two frogs croaking away."

"Wah lau."

* * *

"Why do you look so sad all of a sudden?"

"It's the cigarette. Smoking makes me emo."

* * *

"Do you know your blog is mostly made up of recollections?"

"What?"

"Recollections. It's like you have no future in front of you at all. Why are you so caught up with the past? "

"I am stuck in the past. I'm a ghost reliving my moment of death, on repeat forever."

* * *

"What's the most scandalous thing you've ever done?"

"Scandalous? Nothing man."

"Really?"

"I mean we're so jaded, what is scandalous anymore?"

"Hmm yeah, like everything's a been-there-done-that. But I've yet to come across an incest story."

"Incest? Then why don't you go pull off a Murakami?"

"A what?"

"Murakami lah, you know like in his books, the Oedipus complex thing and also the reminiscing-of-the-past thing which you already do so well anyway."

* * *

"I want a lot of people to send me off when I leave this country. Will you send me off when I leave?"

"Leave for good?"

"No, maybe just a couple of years."

"Hmmm. What about you? Will you do it for me too, when my turn comes?"

"Yes."

* * *

"Why are you so quiet?"

"Does the silence make you feel uncomfortable?"

"No, not at all. I love the silence."

* * *

"Who do you think of when you feel lonely?"

"I don't know. Nobody?"

* * *

"So why did you like me in the first place?"

"I just feel comfortable around you. That's all. There's nothing much to say about that."

"Really?"

"Really."

* * *

"Have you heard Feist's new album, The Reminder?"

"Yeah. I love the last song."

"How My Heart Behaves?"

"Yup. Your shoulder, a mooring for me, like water lost in the sea~"

"You know it's very hard to buy music for you?"

"Why?"

"Because you're always ahead of me."

* * *

I can spend the entire night thinking about our conversations.

But for now, to bed, to bed.

Vita Fragilis

Meet Priscilla.
Singaporean, 19, fun loving, pretty.
Until recently, with not a care in the world.

Hear what she has to say:

I began my much-wearisome treatment a couple months ago after I was diagnosed with leukaemia. I have to withdraw myself from school and my busy schedule. I was nineteen and five days old when my world came crashing down on me.

I am feeling positive now. There are plenty of things for me to do, but right now I have to focus on my health. I spent time with my family and friends whom I am very close with and there are beautiful people out there who truly cares for me. I am the unfortunate one to have to fight this battle. I took this time to gather my thoughts and to re-bond with people that I barely had time to talk to in the past.

For the first period, I am easily reduced to tears. It is already hard to enough to live with the revelation that I have cancer. I was in a complete mess, both mentally and emotionally. I have bad feelings, bad days like any other person but I have my network of family and friends who cares and loves me.

What I had been through this few months had been definitely life-turning. I had seen my dad sobbing uncontrollably, I was bed-ridden for a month, looking myself into the mirror for the first time, been under the knife leaving a long scar across my abdomen, and the roller-coaster rides that I've seen my family and friends went through. I've seen my uncles and aunties reducing to tears in front of me, I've heard of friends crying for me. My cancer revelation causes a lot of heartbreaks for others, that broke my heart.

For now, I am just glad that those days were over.

I don't deny that I have my own fears and hopes. There were sleepless nights that when I think too much into the future, I'd stop hoping. There were days I woke up crying because coping with this illness was simply a tad too hard for me. I have to grapple the realities of life and death and for the fact that I have to live with cancer. As I learn to cope, I have to fight and maintain the optimism and inner peace within me.

My story is sad not because my life is taken away by this illness but because only through this I've learnt that I am a significant and precious individual in the eyes of all those that truly loves and cares for me.

I am a cancer sufferer. But I am gonna win this battle and be a cancer survivor. For me, my family, the girls and all the beautiful people out there.

Who would have thought that the last time we met would be one of her last days living as a carefree individual, with so much promise awaiting her in the future, happy memories waiting to be created and remembered for life. She was undefeatable then.

She still lives now, but wearily. Amidst the drudgery of chemotherapy and face masks, as half the person she once was. She has lost her crowning black tresses, the shining strands of youth that once drew in admirers by the flocks, and her cheeks now a sunken paleness contrasted to the glowing cherubic smiles that I recount from past encounters.

How do I comfort a person like that? What words of solace can I offer, out of politeness, kindness, or pity? Maybe I can't, because I can never know how she feels. This unshareability of pain exacerbates the loneliness of human existence; it is world destroying. It makes me feel sad as a helpless bystander.

If words fail us in the enunciation of such a deep pain, then tears of absolute anguish are almost always shed in silence. Whatever pain accomplishes, it achieves in part through its unshareability, and it ensures this unshareability in part through its resistance to language. Even if pain is amplified into a wail, or an uncontrollable sobbing, the purest of pain occurs primordially without words. And now I understand why babies cry before they learn how to speak and why adults lose their ability to speak when they cry.

But words are all we have. And that's why sad people talk more than they usually do. They seek solace in language, hoping to displace the hurt they've sustained via verbalization, in order to regain a sense of self that has been destroyed by pain. A cry that needs and wants to be heard.

Priscilla's story is a cry of pain. If I cannot offer any words for her comfort, then I will reproduce her story like an echo-chamber, hopefully displacing her injury throughout the far ends of cyberspace with every retelling of her plight, with every reminder on the fragility of life.

You can do the same for her.