Skip to main content

2 March

Subway -

"what"
"uh"
"ugh"
"can i"
"this is so hard"
"wah"
"cannot la"
"aiyah"

"fuck it"

"i like you"


---


when?
since the day i first laid eyes on you

you tell your mother you cannot eat dinner at home today
then you ask me to go out for dinner

in my mind i disregard all other friends
all other dinner plans (there were none in the end)
immediately

and i decide to finally do it
in a tiny, half-closed-off subway space

a schoolboy asks us where the toilet is
i change my accent as i always do and direct him
you say something about him
i want him gone
my plan does not include him

i am nervous and afraid
all the while moving closer and further at the same time
treading water,
a tango with myself.

then slowly, a tango with you.
I invite you in,
you do not take the bait.

you play coy and throw me nothing
i keep going since i already began

"so the movie on saturday, was that a date?"

cruelly you say,
"was it?"

"so was it a friend thing or..."

truly evil:
"yeah, what do you think?"


i can't get mad at you, much less stay mad at you

i keep going,
completely aware of the fool i am portraying
until,

like a cold stick of ice cream after a rabak af camp,

you say,
"i like you too la"


---

I ask you to wait for me
you say yes
we go home
and you keep smiling

i do the thing where i rest my head on my hands
the easiest way for me to stare at you
and i keep smiling too

you and i on the train,
sideway glances throughout
grinning



i want to hold you hand,
so


i do.

---


then we shriek and laugh, embarrassed -
but my smile is still stuck on this stupid face


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thematic Summary of The Star by H.G. Wells

H.G. Well’s wrote The Star in 1897, but apocalyptic/disaster fiction had already existed for thousands of years. Well, the authors didn’t think they were writing fiction, but nevertheless, they were still writing speculative ‘non-fiction’. A quick Wikipedia look-up on Google will tell you that hundreds of seers have prophesized the end of mankind. Unfortunately, fortunately, they have all been wrong! Yet, these countless predictions prove a point about our very own human nature: many of us have fetishized the ‘end of the world’. Christians call it the rapture. Vikings called it Ragnarok. Others called it the Apocalypse. All these stories about our eventual end on this earth have a common thread: there is some greater reason for our end to occur – most of the time, it involves the triumph of good over evil. This is where The Star differs in its narrative. Instead of focusing on some grand narrative of good gods achieving a final victory over the forces of evil, it sticks to d...
3 comments
Read more

Thematic summary of When It Changed by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ’ When It Changed centers on a human society made entirely up of women on a planet called ‘Whileaway’. The human colony is void of men because of a plague that occurred thirty generations ago. The females that remained after the plagued managed to survive without the males by a process that sees the merging of ova. This allowed women to reproduced with women, taking away the need for penetrative reproduction and thereby making redundant the role of men in the human reproductive cycle. The story begins when four Russian astronauts arrive on Whileaway. All four of them are male, which makes them the first 4 men that have set foot on the planet in hundreds of years. Their arrival has a profound effect on the women they meet, and we see this effect from the perspective of Janet, a thirty-four-year-old woman that is married to Katy, with whom she has three children. Upon meeting the four men, Janet is immediately taken aback by their physical size – “They are bigger than we ar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inheritance [Balli Kaur Jaswal]

I really shouldn't attempt to write this... as if this were an assignment due on Monday. It isn't, so I shall not.  Two days - it took me this to finish my first SingLit novel, as far as I can recall.  It was about a family who goes through tough times. This family was Sikh. This family was Singaporean. This family felt, for a few heart-wrenching seconds, like my own.  Dalveer and Harbeer have three children: Gurdev, Narain, and Amrit. Karam is Harbeer's nephew, but he doesn't get to be a narrator in the story, so, screw him. Also, he's an asshole.  We see their story unfold over a period of twenty years - this is paralleled by Singapore's own growth as a nation. We see the effects of rapid industrialisation on the nascent city state, and we begin to identify some of the more... unspoken problems faced by its people. In its endeavour to grow, advance, burgeon -- people, genuinely good people, are left behind. In our  struggle for success, the few am...
Post a Comment
Read more