9. Karma (2017)

 (the playlist)

As a famous songwriter once said: I didn't have it in myself to go with grace. That was why, in all my glory and the universe in my head, I was begging on my knees for a measly gust. Me in early 2017, the year I turned 22, the sixth or seventh breakup by the same hand. 

I had believed wholeheartedly that we were meant for each other, despite the rift I personally put between us. I truly believed there was nobody else for me but someone equally toxic, so beg I did. Every single time. And every single time he walked away, I made knives of his footprints and plunged them into my own chest. 

Of course as time went by those very knives turned into medals I wore with pride. I didn't have to drag my feet to work, played cards with my colleagues at fast food restaurants and barrages. I ignored our 2016 ghosts on my train rides and went to piers with pilots. I held my chin up high when he walked past with his school friends. I found my identity while sticking out like a sore thumb among my cousins.

While I was picking up my own pieces, he was breaking into his. He was trying to commit to the reason he gave when he last left, you remember; the dating experience. He was getting what he wanted, but it wasn't enough, while I somehow made the mess a nice place to live in.

Only three months later, I would get thirteen missed calls from him in the middle of the night. He would send me dozens of messages on instagram after blocking me everywhere, pleading the same things I did when he was leaving. 

This fed my already growing ego, even though I really didn't expect it to happen again. He did practically do the same back three years prior, bouncing back into my life each time he left me stranded. I thought it was time karma strike him instead, that I was finally the one to close the door. 

8. Glitch (2017)

(the playlist) 

The further along we go, the more i realise some feelings aren't felt the same way anymore, if any. It's always been easy traveling through time to find something old to mourn about, to extract and put into new words. You just need music, an old diary entry, a memory brought back to life.

At times it's something to laugh about, at times it becomes regret along the years. And sometimes it's a fleeting moment you're still in disbelief that you caught. 

Mine happened in the june before I turned 22. Someone I'd had feelings for again and again but never got to hold, a dreaded white rose. A phone call under the guise of someone else's behalf became catching up over texts became waiting for him by a wall in novena. He brought down his bag in the crowd of the train, he ordered us pizza to pickup, we laughed over Google translating "lima suku" into 5:15. 

Someone boarded the train with dark glasses and a walking stick, and the station usher called out by the doors for a seat. He talked about the hurricane I knew and his new girl, and I nodded like it didn't break me just a little bit. 

I think he told me about the first time he saw the new trains, about how he thought their flat faces looked abit cute. About how he had never seen them that way and how I was always the person he thought of when seeing any. A thousand little moments that would become my favourite night of the year. 

New memories at an old station; in 2014 it was a staircase hug that threatened my heart to explode. In 2016 it was his twentieth, koi at the bus stop and train depots outside the window. June 2017 it was a hill at the top of the world, I felt like, while the rest of it was sleeping. 

I told him how apart from a rose he was always a moon to me. The way he comes and goes as he pleases like the phases of the moon, the way he sometimes disappears altogether. That night he was full, right next to me, like the one we watched rise throughout the sky. 

I think he'd stayed almost nine hours with me, a once impossible idea. What made it more unbelievable was, for that one night, he was completely mine to touch. Nobody else knew how alive I felt, if I even was. 

And I wish he had kept me a secret; such a contradiction to all the times I'd had to beg my partners to show off pictures of us. I wish he had kept that night between us instead of telling the last person I wanted to know, before disappearing on me altogether. Maybe I hadn't touched him in the way I had hoped after all, just a plaything.

So now I look back to that night, forcibly, just to write this. And I've convinced myself it was all in my mind, no proof of its existence apart from a stagnant playlist. The leftover pizzas have rotted, the coffee flavour we drank are not in production anymore, the tshirt I'd been wearing somewhere in the landfill. All a figment of my mind, all just a glitch in the world I'd typed up. 

7. High infidelity (2016-2017)

 (the playlist)

I've never been shy with my feelings. If I like someone or something, may the whole world know. I was however, really good at twisting them around to hide the truth. Always to the point of breaking, if not me, someone close to me. 

The excessive writing started again sometime after I turned 21. That's what happens when you feel like the whole world is against you. When the people from your schools are fine without you, graduation pictures. When the colleagues you see as sisters don't need you outside work, conversations in the language you don't speak.

I fed the insecurity that came from all the girls on social media and the friends of his who never liked me. I kept it like a pet and gave it our good memories to eat. I grasped onto a rose so tightly I never noticed the thorns making all of us bleed. 

Only years after I was doing it I learned the term emotionally cheating. There is no better way to describe the too-deep bond I shared with someone other than my own partner. It might have been different if it was a girl. Maybe it might even be different if it was any guy in the world other than his own best friend. 

But it's still true that nobody else understood me and put up with me the way a certain friend of a boyfriend did. It was still my year of Ugly and Lonely despite everything else. When you've been desperate for any form of validation and you find some in the deepest, dirtiest of friendships, you take it.

I already knew he was leaving again; the voices in my head told me so. But I never knew why I couldn't have left first, always having been one step ahead. Always waiting until his dust suffocated me first, and even then, worshiping the ground he had walked away on.  

I had reasons to leave. From the cruel words he spoke to the rift growing between us like a flower. Maybe I just had too much delusional love for him and none for myself, and in the end it destroyed three separate parties. Four, if you want to count what we did the previous year. 

He listened to my favourite songs and read all my posts, and I kept tally of it. The same way I kept tally of the few things I did for him, using them to justify the high infidelity that would come to be my third tattoo.

Marinate

Is anything ever random? It's hard to believe in non-methodical happenings. Not when you have almost a religious belief in long trains of events and thoughts. Not when you believe everything is connected, like soulmates through invisible strings and adult personalities through childhoods. 

This very spot I stand in, this very moment I breathe in, everything has led to this. I'm just sitting alone in a cliche coffee chain but it's enough to do me in. The parallels to my past, a Wednesday night in buona vista almost five years ago.

The throwing of dreamcatchers led to reading old messages led to realising the way I had hurt him. Led me here, simply wishing I have my good friend back. The friendship already hit its highs and lows in a short month, and I wish I'd soaked in its average longer. Late night conversations and sharing favourites and revealing pasts. 

I wish I was still nervously waiting for him, and we will ritually take a sip whenever the conversation lulled into silence. I wish I was still there by paya lebar counting trains, and he will ask Why are you doing this? I wish we are staying up all night talking again and I will say, I trust you now.

I wish I was still waiting beneath the tracks and we will walk beneath them to his neighbourhood, stopping to pet any cats along the way. I wish we were eating cheesecake in view of the tracks, and he will drive me home by a deliberately further route. 

It was all this happenstance that brought me to tears on a monday in orchard, and I can't help but to think now of where I would be if I had given it a chance. If it might have been enough to prevent me from feeling this way right here, right now.

Backstroke

Dizzy. I can't believe I still have some bits of me left to unravel like this. It's like picking at old scabs and pinching pieces of cord left on the bed. On the surface it's me inviting old habits back. Refusing to eat, listening to old songs, downing caffeine all day and night, like a cliche drinking problem. 

It's not like anyone has hurt me lately. I still have the life I always wanted, a self made family in our own home. A job I still enjoy, dominoes falling or not. I'm not with someone who makes me doubt everything and I have enough friends to call my own. What's the problem this time?

You don't need drugs to get high when you have enough emotions and memories to bring you there. Despite all this weight on my shoulders and chest, sometimes I'm floating in an endlessness, pictures of my past like clouds. Sometimes I don't realise when sky becomes ocean, promising to engulf me if I'm not careful.

I haven't gone to swim in a very long time, but I remember the feeling of water in your ears. I remember the distorted sounds traveling through the pool, very much like the montage of my life that has played me to death the past week. I remember almost drowning when I was seven, and I'm convinced the water from then is still in my lungs somehow.

So how do i know whether it's safe enough to float or to swim for my life? With the bad memories that comfort and the good times that hurt? My chin is tilted but how do I know if it's to the right direction? Backstroke; I'm breathing easier, but I can't see where I'm going. 

6. Anti-hero (2016)

 (the playlist)

A few months before Taylor released a music video with her selves throughout her career, I myself had been sitting on my own throne of past lives. Her album Red came out a few months after I started calling my heartbreaker Red, and her album of second chance love came out the same year a boy returned to me time and time again. 

My point is, her music always come at the right time for me. Why do you think I'm revolving my blog posts around her songs now? But sometimes it goes deeper than just a song to relate to. Sometimes it feels like she wrote these lyrics for you, knowing you're not talented to do so yourself. 

The year I turned 21 was supposed to be fun, and maybe it was to a certain extent. I was working with people who were more sisters than colleagues, my relationship lasted the whole year, no big family arguments that I can remember. 

Took a trip to Bali with my family, found new songs on Spotify, rediscovered my love of making little videos. Fetched my boyfriend from work every off day, friends with his friends and the only tears I shed were for the characters I read about. I was already living like I hadn't just killed an innocent life the year before. So what else was wrong?

This song may have come six years too late, but I still remember the resonating feelings. It was the loneliness that came on the trips home after work, after sending him off on bus 950. It was having no friends of my own and seeing the girls from secondary school being fine without me. It was the solitary ride after a day visiting the homes of his secondary school friends. 

It was the feeling of towering over everyone just by being taller than the average Singaporean girl. It was the feeling of being an entirely different species just by being born a different year, by being the only one working full-time, by being the only one who hated rain and loved the sun. 

Staring at the sun head-on was so much easier than looking at myself in the mirror. The front teeth and sparse eyebrows so blinding, shining over the bit of love he had for me. The whispers from his friends and the voices in my head, preparing me for the time he would leave again. 

Now I'm her reflection in the mirror, stuck in 2023 and looking out at 2016, wishing I could tell her she's alright the way she is. Wishing I could hold her gaze and tell her only seven years later, non-conformities will be celebrated. Wishing I could tell her she was never the villain in anyone's story and merely the unfortunate anti-hero. 

5. Bigger than the whole sky (2015)

(the playlist)

On the day I found out I was pregnant, I'd been crying about the time I was pregnant. 

While I was taking public transport home from work, my husband was at a petrol station somewhere buying me a test kit. I was already disliking the purple line, so pale in comparison to my green and red. So different in views and people, so many metres underground just like my identity. 

Without realising it, I'd boarded the feeder bus that would take me to my new home. So many parts of the trip different from the interchange I knew like the back of my hand, back at Pasir Ris. A town I once wanted to set fire to, memories and people all. 

I started thinking about my settling down and finally being happy, and all the points that led me there. I thought about the steps I had to take and the people I had to lose. The things I had to do and the things that had to be done to me. 

And for all the things I'd been through, the only thing that brought me to tears was a pivotal moment of 2015: when I found out I was pregnant with the girl I would come to abort. 

What were the tears back then for? The fear, the longing, the knowing that I only had an illusion of choice? The denial came very soon after, masking the fact I was running out of time. Masking the first time my depressing feeling was more than heartbreak for a boy. 

You know in movies or shows, when someone complains of cramps and then suddenly gives birth in the school toilet? It's true, a pregnant belly tends to compress when the mother is in denial. And that was why halfway through at 20 weeks, I still looked like a girl. 

If I were her I would've felt worse than a mistress; a secret love song, a girlfriend you're ashamed of. A child with a missing arm. You want to tell people you've created a being, but you know you can't. You've done something no one else your age has done, but you shouldn't have. 

I used to write with "us", "our" when writing about this time of my life, but it wasn't referring to mother-daughter. It was me and hurricane, as if we were in it together. As if he shared the same feelings, hand on my belly or not. He wasn't there to see her move, and I once wished he could have been. Only now I'm glad it was just between me and her. 

Only now, I could never deny the second heartbeat I carried. The life I'd been growing for five months. There is no grave to visit, there is no name to pray to, there is nobody to feel the same way I do. Nobody else saw her move apart from me, but I'm enough to know she was always bigger than the whole sky. 

Next: 6. Anti-hero (2016)

4. Would've could've should've (2014)

(the playlist)

Some debris turned out to be gems in disguise, like friends made in unlikely places. While others turned out to be sharp-edged wreckage forcing themselves through the windshield of my car. 

Maybe it was my fault for having driven down that road. For getting into a car and letting the wrong parts of myself take control of it. My fault for even getting a driving licence in the first place.

At 19, for someone who played Victim alot, nothing stopped me from drinking with minors, kissing ex-schoolmates and ex's schoolmates on staircases. But I think I still had an ounce of sanity left, or the worse that was to come would have happened so much earlier. 

For someone who thrives on making and keeping mistakes like trophies, there is one I wish I hadn't made and never want to again. 

I met the devil again in the form of a long-haired ite student with piercings and a piercing glare. The same taste in music as my old self, the same rage, only he wasn't shy to spark his fuse on anyone. In other words, someone I would have avoided entirely if it wasn't for his invitation to dance.

The thing is, we all knew he was already occupied by a months-long dancing partner, someone on equal grounds as him. Everyone applauded them as a pair, so perfect for each other in their clothes, music, and glares. The gap between her front teeth and the voice notes of her singing. Everyone loved her, and by extension, they loved the devil. 

It's hard to revisit, for someone who keeps traveling through time to look for something to write about. The feeling of shame somehow outweighs the major pains of 2015, 2017, 2021. But when I stumble upon a certain station or a certain perfume wafts into my nose by accident, I threaten to unravel.

The tickling in my baju kurung, the kissing at the back of the bus; the movements beneath the blanket and hands beneath my clothes by the viewing plaza; the pulling of my arm back into his house and the locking of his legs around my torso. All this, while the girls before and after me were already intertwining with us. 

It's hard to write about, but sometimes it's the only way to let go. And for all the things I've been through, from my father's and older brother's physical abuse to my ex's emotional, for my own murdering of a life; this is the one I deem worthy of the name devil. The one who's shattered my morals and brought shame upon someone with skin so rubbery thick.

Next: 5. Bigger than the whole sky (2015)

dreams, landfill. landfill, dreams.

I've cried in the bathroom of my parents' house over a toothbrush once, and then over boxed drinks. Both times over things that could be replaced, both times badly wanting to die jumping off the ninth floor. If someone else reacted the same over something trivial on the surface, I wouldn't understand. 

But look deeper and it becomes something else. A missing toothbrush becomes all the times your mother threw your tubs of ice-cream and your water bottle, justifying her claims why you didn't need them anymore. The boxed drinks become your parents defending your older brother to death, convincing yourself they still would if he ever brought you to yours.

This time my turmoil revolves around dusty dreamcatchers that I haven't had the chance to collect since moving out. They become the way my brother's room is left untouched more than two years since he moved out. They become a Friends episode where the younger sister's childhood things are destroyed by a father's choice, a father's subconscious biasness. 

Why didn't I pluck them off the wall when I was packing my things before I left? Why didn't I text the same thing to my father when I told my younger brother I'm picking them up the next time I come over? Why didn't I know that my father would start spring-cleaning out of nowhere on hospital leave, recovering from his surgery? 

I was clutching my chest so hard, feeling it tighten when I saw the bare wall above my old bed. My husband had just prayed in the room, my son was sleeping on the floor in the living room, my parents were treating me nicer. Four reasons why those dreamcatchers shouldn't mean a thing to me anymore.

What else do I do, over something so meaningful? Something nobody else ever did for me or had the thought, despite bad dreams being a big part of my personality for as long as I can remember. Painstakingly handmade, unprompted, by someone I can't talk to anymore, someone not on social media, someone whose pictures I never took?

So many people to blame, so many components to be mad about. As I write this I shed the first tears for my lost everything, for my dreamcatchers, for all the dreams that are on the way to the landfill. What exactly do I cry for now? My whole life. The freedom-loneliness that only comes after a bad breakup, a friend that will never see me the same way again, a husband who doesn't do things for me unprompted, a changed childhood bedroom and lost fatherly love.