Skip to main content

Quick, write something beautiful like you once did

 1.30am 


Be specific and detailed, you know, really go deep. Keep asking why. Tell me something you didn't know about yourself. Tell me something I'd never seen. Tell me an a-ha moment, an insight, an unseen revelation. 


Tell me truth. 

... 

A most valuable commodity. 

Tell me the truth. 

Here it is: 


I am back at my wooden desk, much like the one miles (yes, miles) away in Bostonia. Long hair, black jacket - feeling cold and old, and alone. I had friends but none that I really wanted to put in the time to be friends with. I did try - beer, shots, even clubbing, even that day in the parking lot and then the colourful aisles of cereal boxes and chips. 


Still the same, but with a haircut. 

More balanced now? Hmm, perhaps. Less in touch with friends. 

Hmm. Yes. New acquaintances, new-ish friendships. 

Ah. Yes. yes, yes. 

The ol' friendsyouwannakeepintouchwithbutitsreallyhardtodowithoutanactivitylikeschoolorsomeformofchurchlikespacetotieeveryonetogethersowehavestufftodowhichwouldthenmitigatetheneedforsmalltalk


Oh god small talk. directionless conversation that has a 20% chance of success each time, more if there's alcohol and if it's night time or the end of some liminal moment (graduation, a show, a funeral)


some camp where i first felt that feeling and wrote it down - IP1? J1? Gopher's birthday, Sha's Final 1 performance. Gopher's text asking me if i still went to church. 

I didn't find the time to take the books from yan's, but it did seem like we didn't want to put in that much effort into our duo-friendship anyway. 

good, not so good-byes. 

Sam's mother passed away and it takes me 10 seconds to rationalize why I did not need to go. I hadn't met her in a decade. I knew how it would go - like Jiayan's but Sam would be there to greet me with a most awkward "oh, hello" 


Sihuay, colin, i see amirah's insta stories. elizabeef's stories. yoda's bunnies. why still "keep in touch"? 

peihua - ha ha hua ha ha. that i knew, but some others did hurt more. was it my pes problems? was it the post depression despondency? or an inevitable coming of entropy. 


Today I did 10 pull-ups, the most I'd done in 10 years - 

And I pulled a muscle. 

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