halcyon hells
neverwhere amanda benjamin crystal cuifen cuixian dalena dalglish david debbie ivan jane janice jireh justin keith lennard riposte shane shawn sheila suxin wen en wey ren ao1c avendesora truthtellers touch icq: 20648870 elucidate the dent here.inmyhead dictionary.com boy meets boy slayage a buffy guide photos! [not mine]  history  BlogSkins.com |
Saturday, October 18, 2003
New Blog Here. Tuesday, September 09, 2003 Coda [finale] I walk on familiar ground as the tune becomes recognisable. I close my eyes and walk forward, because I know exactly where each step takes me. I breath the air, the sickly-sweet scent of ginger-grapefruit, because I need it to live. It seems paradoxical, somehow, that living is the end, the coda, the little bit more after the clashing of cymbals [or symbols], of this blog. I have a lot to say, which is, obviously, why I added this coda, but right now my mind is so blank as to be constructed thus, so ostensibly blank that I chase the pure whiteness to its edges and find there the fingers of colours trying to pull this white blanket over them. On the precipice of forgetting, I find the true nature of friendship. As all the greatest things, it is the unseen complexity that drives the simplest of emotions, of relationships. Elisa the Bitten, you are who you are plus a few bite marks. I bite because it is the only way I can cloak my need for skin. I can laugh and say, 'Grr I am a rabid dog, please let me bite you' but what I feel is the contact of skin on teeth. When I say 'feel' I mean it both ways, as a physical sensation as well as an emotion. I feel skin on teeth because I need it. Not to get my rocks off, prosaically and obviously, but because something in me craves the feeling of people in my life. If one day I see you on the news, with a wanted for terrorism sign flashing red over your smiling face and a reporter asking the cameraman if he has seen Elisa Soh Hui, I will smile at the television and reply, 'Yes, I have seen Elisa and so glad that I did.' Passive. Sometimes we lose friends not because there is a lack of intersecting interests but because either depends on the other to be the match to the other's rough surface. Being passive, I fear most of my passive friends will no longer be friends when obligatory contact, like school, is no more. It's so weird, Dalglish, to think of a time when there will be no longer this Problem and this Answer and then this gripe that the Answer is like a mathematical solution, but then it's irritating that I can't think of much beyond that. It seems, Xin Hui, that you have contradicted yourself. You called me intelligent and yet you said I will not bother to keep in touch after JC. The intelligent person would always keep in touch with you. So one of your statements is true, while the other is false. Which is which? Suching, my dear, if only you had a penis. Haha I'm kidding. Nyeh nyeh, diana multimamia. Finare ke nonesce ce bin toleure? Shi bin ce corrunt! Understand that that is exactly what I think. If I lost you, you said you'd kill me, but I think you'll be pretty much set to take on anything without an exacerbation of this fantasy world in which everything is healed by an obscuring fog of haha. If I walk around the corner of a Parisian boulevard and before me stood someone I have not seen in an age, most probably, I would not remember the person at all. But Debbie, I will not forget you. I will say 'oh my god, Debbie! I haven't seen you for ages! You haven't changed a bit! [in my hypothetical Parisian Boulevard, you look exactly the same as you do now] Tell me what's been happening in your life.' And you will vow then to be tall and skinny when you are older, throw murderous glares at skinny french girls talking in sexy languages and bitch about your life before ending with characteristic Debbie optimism like the sweet concluding note of a tempestuous concerto and I will remember that forever until I meet you again in some Italian canal, rowed in some gondola, gushing about how romantic it is while ogling the gondoleer's tanned biceps, ready once again to vow, throw and bitch. 'I am as constant as the Northern Star,' declared Julius Caesar. 'I am as constant as the Northern Star,' sang Joni Mitchell. 'I am as constant as the Northern Star,' I wrote, finding out in surprise later that Joni had quoted Shakespeare too. You are constant, Cuifen; if x is sufficiently small for all powers to be ignored you'd probably still be there, lacking a variable to diminish you into zero. I suppose that's the best thing about you and the worst thing about you, that I do not rely on variables to interact with you, and yet because you are a constant variables in my equations do not touch you. Sometimes all you need is time. Like some vat of feet-smashed grapes, some things ferment too and reinvent themselves. The only memory of you in secondary school, Nathanael, is the conversation we had one morning involving the pun in mourning/morning and my rolling of eyes. That was four years ago. Six year and to the finale of the last two. If anything, you make me hopeful that anything at all can be salvaged with time, with effort, and with a little rolling of eyeballs. Irritation is like a thorn; worse than a stab. Little pricks that infuriate you beyond belief. That, dear Shawn, is what you do to me. But I'm not sorry, because some of the best memories I have involve you and that has made all the difference. I realise I quote Grace Khoo's favourite poem but forgive me this transgression as I forgive you yours. [And oh my god, that's a sizeable amount haha] There are people I think would make excellent friends, and there are people with whom I know befriending beyond any superfluity is impossible. At the intersection of these stands people like you, Mr Andrew Lim. This greatly saddens me because it makes me realise that nothing can be independent of conditions and situations outside any control, that there always is that certain injection of which content is unknown but decides everything. Remember me is all I can say, Rachel. Whatever you do, you will be great, and I think it'd be nice to be remembered, if only as the annoying boy who pestered you constantly during maths and economics. I think I'd breathe easy at the education system if my hypothetical children came home one day and said, 'Damn it lah, I can't stand our lit text!' and I asked what it is and they thrust the book at me and I saw Rachel Lin YX on the bottom of it. Cuixian, if you receive a call from me on my 30th birthday demanding to know if you're married and if not, then making good the promise of marrying me, don't be surprised. Because I intend to beat you at mah jong on a regular basis and I can think of no better way to make regular contact than to force you into matrimony. You were always the older sister, Sheila, if solely because I felt safe with you around. You are the older sister that went to university, found a job and an apartment and comes back sometimes to see her younger brother still struggling with his little teenaged problems. Inevitably, siblings grow apart as they grow up, but it doesn't mean they stop being related. We're not of blood, but I'd like to think somehow that we're related anyway. Somehow, you make sense. Keith makes sense. Like some answer to any question. Why? Because Keith. How come? Because Keith. Like this restless, wandering icicle poking about my brain melts away when Keith is somewhere in the vicinity. You're not normal, because saying that'd be an insult, but you exude this sense of normalcy and calm that is at the same time infuriating and intoxicating. Like a requisite assault of sanctuary before I pick up my pickaxe and break stones again. I am still slightly puzzled by the fact that we talked as if we had known each other much longer than reality's accounting the first time we properly met. Usually, I take the longest time to talk to anyone about anything because I such a social spaz, but then there was something inherently familiar about Jane. Like a long lost t-shirt you find and go 'Oh my god! Where have you been all this while?' Oh my god, where have you been all this while? Eight months and fourteen days out of eighteen years of my life have been privy to this little [except around the butt and thigh area] thing called Jane. The figure is accurate, Miss Double Maths, we met on the first day of the year. 'Help! I'm an ant!' I have been sending this message from countless handphones because I think it's funny. It's a disease, this stealing of handphones to send completely irrelevant messages to random people and thinking it's funny. It's a disease I caught from Crystal. Another disease I've caught from you is the awareness of these things called Eye-candy that should be treated by much ogling [although my strain of the disease has become more sophisticated, considering your Eye-candies of choice haha]. Don't cure me of these disease, little Bio Student, I like the infections. I have never told you the reason why I asked you that question, Wey Ren, so I will write it down here and maybe one day you will come across it. We both knew we were coming to the end of each other's factory lines [to borrow an image unused for the longest time], but I decided I wanted to prolong your shelf life. Thus, I intended to shift you to the beginning of another line. But you didn't want it, and [we both know] you have reached the end of the factory line. At first, as I picked up the pieces smashed on the floor, I grew bitter, but now I realise something, and that is although it is past tense, we had a friendship. So thank you for the memories; we make no more but there are new people and new friendships and neither one of us is poorer for the past. It's already Wednesday, half the week is gone Yet another Wednesday of things I haven't done. Just a hang-up call and the quiet breathing Of our Persian we call Cajun on a Wednesday. I am aware it is Tuesday, but I want to hurry time along. Compress everything into a single second of intense feeling and then be released from this place, shooting out like the expansion of a tightly wound spring. Coiling through the air and spinning like a whirling dervish, one hand to heaven, one hand to earth, until I find my peace. Wednesday, July 16, 2003 Glacial Exhalations It is Wednesday and I sit at the computer in the library thinking of decisions and the choices I never make. Today can be recounted in so many ways, but the ways that matter to me are the worst ways for me as well. A change, a shift, a paradigmatic scaling of brain cells into territories of the others and then I might be ready to read myself again. Most probably, it will begin again, I'd like to think with a burst of avian glory like a phoenix, but I know with a whimper and a slinking of low canine bodies, it will assume its place again and nothing will seem any different save for the changes of nomenclature, but goodbye, because this blog has just been ended. 'You have come to discover what you want; What i want is not to want what isn't mine.' Tuesday, July 15, 2003 Synapse Today Elisa looked at my handwriting and said, 'You write very openly. Your letters are all spaced out, this shows you have nothing to hide.' Initially, I was insulted. What? Am I some personal information slut that I dispense freely of my life's stories to anybody, whether they are willing to listen or not? No, I'm not. So what then? Well, apparently, I don't have to tell anyone anything because I think too loudly. 'You think too loudly.' Thus was I admonished a few weeks ago. Like the lunar cycle, where the moon waxes and wanes with precision and yet you are never aware because you don't look into the sky every night to chart its progress, this thought has been in and out of my head for some time now. Am I that readable? I'd like to think no. Not that from being gratuitously inscrutable do I derive my life's meaning, but because I know that I'd never be comfortable telling anyone everything. Or actually, for most people, anything at all. There are only certain people I trust with certain information, and mostly, those bits of me are completely detached and dissected from all other parts. I have this theory that if everyone I've told stuff to were to collate it all, it'd fit together quite nicely like a jigsaw puzzle and they'd get a pretty good idea of my entire psyche. But normally, I engage in... What's the term, Mr Wakefield? Evasions and laughter, is it? Yet maybe people recognise levity for what it is, a defense, and guess at the protected and concealed. I don't know. Maybe I give people less credit than is due them. What do you think of me while reading this blog? It's not a peephole into my mind, you know; ultimately, I select everything that goes into it. It's more a carefully constructed stained-glass window. Monday, July 14, 2003 Sophie Sophie said she would like an orange juice very much, thanks, she was a bit thirsty and I told her orange juice was sweet and tasted like crap. She disagreed but allowed herself to be persuaded into a glass of grapefruit juice, upon which she decided to loosen a barrage of complains. Sour, she said, and why did sour always remind her of bitter? Like bitter old ladies who think they can do better than their wrinkled husbands with spotted penises. Like how they wear their bands of nephrite in alluring shades of vomit and think they step out of the confines of a hoary old lady and transform for an instant into that pretty girl of the kampung every boy had to wax his hair for, when it is the opposite that takes place; they are shackled into their husks by an antiquted piece of jewellery strangling wrists. I partook of her orange juice and said it was so freakin' damn sweet. Sunday, July 13, 2003 So Contagious I'd like to growl in the general direction of the 1-10 classroom of RJC. Thanks to the people who frequent this room, I had to cancel my poor Hilton rooms, in which I had planned to have one last proverbial shriek before the A levels. Although, admittedly, it wasn't actually the fault of my class, I've learnt that spontaneity is the trait of the devil and should thus be avoided. This lesson comes from imagining that my class could agree to stay over at a place and then actually, you know, act on that agreement all in four days. But alas, the fates are cruel to those who display random acts of madness. Anyway, I try to look on the bright side. Ironically, the bright side comes in the form of black Armani Exchange pants, which I would not have bought had I been couped up wrecking the Hilton rooms. Oh my god, I love love love my AX pants and I shall now begin to wear them excessively everywhere until the little prints on them wear off. Part of this delirium stems from the fact that I have not owned a pair of Armani whatevers in a long long time. As a prepubescent kid, I was obsessed with brands; I hadn't a single thing in my wardrobe that wasn't from Armani, or Calvin Klein, or Moschino; basically, I had nothing under fifty dollars. One time, my friend bought me a t-shirt for my birthday and said jokingly, 'Eh you'd better wear it ah, it's quite expensive. Twenty dollars.' To which I replied [I am mildly embarrassed to admit], 'Oh thanks a lot, now you've lowered the minimum price on clothes in my cupboard.' Soon after that incident, I realised how stupid it is to be ruled by a little thing such as brand names, so I bought my first pair of cheapo pants. The interlarding senses of shame and excitement overwhelmed me; I was on a cheap clothes high! How sad is that? Addiction to this feeling [which I now figure is called 'bargains'], naturally, petered out until it was quite in my nature to buy cheap clothes all the time. Then I was in AX, saw this nice pair of pants that cost a hundred a forty dollars with discount [40%!] and bought them just because. Oh my god, and now I'm on the polar opposite of a cheap clothes high. I haven't bought anything wearable that expensive for the longest time. Unless you count my nice blue shoes, but I don't. Unfortunately, my wallet and lack of money in it cannot sustain this particular high, therefore, sadly, I have to wean myself off this feeling by buying some underwear. Red, of course. Thursday, July 10, 2003 Art and Lies Like those fish-lipped flowers that swing like the filled cavities of wanting bodies it's strange that outside, where I might see the world and the school and the people that surround me with perfect clarity, I feel most unclean. Every day, the same after-school ritual: I go into my room and shut the door. I shut the windows and draw the blinds. I turn on the air-conditioning and turn on the fan. And then I shower. I don't sing in the shower because at the transition between being surrounded by animation and then suddenly being physically alone I feel the need to silence the songs in my mind. Who talks of butterflies in songs; who turns 'song' upside down and out of the pockets of connotations fall 'pretty' and 'tralala' will never understand that songs sink in the deepest. Then begin my own songs. Sometimes Space Dog runs through my mind and I'm so sure I'm onto something, and other times I feel Unwell, knowing the imago of myself to be incongruent with reality and yet the forcing him to fit a shape. Being the Stoic; investing emotion into nothing because everything decays. Yet it isn't that I say my jug is a jug, but that it was always a jug, unfettered by my non-existent ownership. Petunias are pretty, tulips are prettier. Wednesday, July 09, 2003 Anfractuous Rocks Is it justifiable to hate someone for solely hating you? Suppose it manifests itself in the smallest, most insignificant ways, or not at all, such that the only major flaw present is his or her dislike for you. Is that inclusion enough to allow yourself to hate the person? 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