20. Sweet nothing (2024/2011)

 (the playlist)

I used to have my ears plugged with music all the time, I needed a soundtrack for every bus I took to work, for the way home, for every new station I wandered. I needed words to associate with every step of my life. Like a song about demons heaving on my shoulders when I didn't have the strength to get up anymore, or a song about daylight when I got married.

When he was born, I stopped relying on music. I started measuring time with his life, a week old, a month old, a year old. Two and a half years old. I have no songs associated with his first steps or words. From the moment he was conceived, I measured my birthdays with his existence, 26 and pregnant, 28 with a one-year-old, next year, 30 years old with a 3-year-old. I spend more time with him than my music or writing, and I have to tell myself I am mother first, writer second.

But maybe one day I can go back to my writing, in his independence and silence. When he will go to school on his own and I no longer have to hold his hand crossing the road. His father and I won't be the first thing he looks for in the mornings, maybe a phone or a cup of coffee instead.

But if I raise him right, he will still talk to me over the things in his hand. He will still talk to me about the cards he was dealt with, numbers on the front of tests or words a friend stabbed into his back. If I support whatever he does and comfort him with my kitchen humming when he comes home from school. The way my own mother was for me in my youth.

I always thought her nodding at my endless chatter was a sign of absence. But I grew older and she tells stories about me as a kid to my husband. And I am surprised to know she was there. She remembers my awards in primary school and friends from ballet, I'm sure she remembers every single time her 16-year-old daughter came home late without greeting her.

What she doesn't know is I remember everything she does too. I remember her bragging to my kindergarten teacher about me knowing the word 'astonishment'. I remember her praising the makeshift storybooks I made in primary school. I remember her listening to the speech I made at secondary 4 camp, and if she had kept it up afterward, I would remember her reading my scribbled poems and cryptic posts. 

Now I get annoyed when she makes the entire family pose for a picture, not realising she is just trying to make memories the way I do. She is back to being happy whenever I visit, and just because of that I feel safe coming home to pasir ris again. And I want my children to feel this way with me even decades down the road. I want them to walk around their lives knowing I will always support whatever they do in the sweet nothing of my settling down.

Maybe they will turn out okay immediately, or maybe they will have to go through their own versions of 2012 and 2013 and 2014 and 2015 and so on,,, like I did, before they can come to the very moment in their version of 2024 where they realise... that they may not break the generational trauma after all... and maybe their child will still turn out to be the cursed way they did no matter how much they try. 

Restart the never-ending cycle: 1. You're on your own, kid (2012)

19. Dear reader (2023)

(the playlist)

If you're still here reading this, reading these numbered posts inspired by somebody's music and lyrics, somebody else's words, then you should know by now: somehow, I made it. 

But what they usually don't show when somebody has made it is what comes after. Not runners lying down, gasping for air by the finish line. Not critically acclaimed actors getting into drugs at their peak, losing all sense. Not the cleaning of floors and picking of bottles after new year's eve parties. 

Definitely not girls from broken homes spiraling back into nothingness after creating their own healthy families. 

I never read anything about that, so I didn't know what to do when I became one. With a job that I loved and a man who was nice to me and made me laugh and a kid who was alive and perfect and a house that overlooked my expressway of loneliness - you'd think with this success I would have no reason to be sad. But we all forget, when we are at our highest, there is nowhere to go but back down. 

What had to happen for me to feel this way but the erasing of my past. Just earlier this year I thought of a trip to langkawi when I was fifteen; the pictures were on my old facebook account which had been unfortunately deleted from being stagnant too long. I thought of the sketchbooks and diaries from primary school, I thought of 2012 when my father decided to discard all pictures of me out of spite, a gap between my brothers'. 

Then I thought of the diaries from my naivety of fourteen, crushes on tall boys next door and wondering what having a boyfriend would be like. The diaries from my loneliness of seventeen, painstakingly writing about my parents seeing me as a bug and other metaphors. The laptop from the time, I didn't know the concept of hard drives. All gone, not a word or picture or cell left. 

The knowledge of snippets of my past disappearing started collecting like rainwater, until one more memento broke me like a dam. 

Back in 2018, someone gifted me a dreamcatcher. When I started thinking of all the lost memories I had the heart to take that back; I didn't take it with me when I moved out, being a gift from another man after all. But I was slowly losing proof after proof of the adversities I was so proud of going through, and I needed to hold onto every scrap. 

Timing is a funny thing, it's true. The things in my room were left untouched in the almost two years since I moved out in June 2021. But come March this year and my heart stopped when I saw an empty corkboard instead of the one thing I needed to stay upright.

I had to laugh it off in front of my parents, keeping up the illusion of having matured. It was only when I left that I thought of my older brother's room being left alone for longer. It was only the next day that I wondered whether my dreamcatcher giver was still alive. It was only after more vivid dreams that I wanted a dreamcatcher after all, be it against Islam. 

I retraced all the wrong things and made up conclusions about my father still not loving me after all, that the friend who gifted me never existed and that my youth wasn't real. I wanted to retrace further, but now the medals I wore with pride were tainted with the trash of the landfill they sat in.

Afterwards I did what I did every time I had my heart broken. I gallivanted. I wrote endlessly. I listened to music I liked in the past, trying to grasp onto who I was as my own person, neither wife nor mother. And I couldn't find her. I could not find myself anymore, because I was too happy and at peace. 

Friends had to see my unravelling through stories, because I think texting people directly about it would be forcing them to listen or advise. If anyone wants to ask if you're okay, they will, and if not, they can flip past without feeling guilty. 

I went to work laughing like a normal person, I went to social events and talked about my family, nobody noticing the caffeine and confusion up to my neck. Nobody suspected I was drinking four coffees in a day and searching in vain for something poisonous to feed on and spit back out as words. 

If I was religious or have had my heart swallowed by it, I'd have told myself to pray. I still did my five prayers during my mental breakdown, but I was only exorcised by it when I read through whatever of my writing I did have left. 

I read my blog posts all the way to 2012, I searched the storeroom for the notebooks I wrote in at 22, I scrolled up old conversations, I opened up the Word document for a novel I hadn't worked on in years.

I desperately read every single word, and I realised: the best self-reminders are the words you wrote yourself.

I saw between the lines, between the timeline of the young and now me's, a message from myself. A letter to myself. Dear reader...

18. Mastermind (2022)

(the playlist)

I read somewhere how all the eggs a woman will ever carry are already forming within her while she's a 4-month-old foetus. So you were already in your grandmother's womb when she was months pregnant with your mother. If you were pregnant with a girl, you'd already be carrying the eggs that would be your grandchild.

My son has been with me everyday since he was born a year and a half ago; you could even count the nine months before that. But scientifically, he's actually been with me since I was in existence, more than 28 years ago. And somehow that was everything. Somehow that was the start of the plan I didn't know I had, to create someone I would give up so much for. 

During a birthday you only celebrate the fact you were born. You don't celebrate everything else that had to happen for you to be. You don't celebrate your mother going into labour, holding you in her arms for the first time and thinking of all she has gone through before you. 

My life flashed before me when my son was born. I knew everything I did led me to this moment. I thought about the boys who had to break my heart and the friends I had to lose, the hits from my father and the insults from my mother. I thought about the unborn girl whom I still wish I could hold sometimes, and I know it was all steps and shoves I had to take to get here. 

I retrace my steps to the day I endured surgery to keep him, to when I cried for days after finding out it was a boy. To the day we saw a red line, pregnant, to the day we exchanged wedding rings and my husband took full responsibility for me. I retrace my steps to the days I almost jumped off the ninth floor for a cousin and a father and a few boxed drinks. 

I retrace my steps to our engagement day, to the first fights and touches, to the day we first met and the hardships prior. The bottles of coffee surrounding my laptop and the swipes on dating apps. I retrace the days I lost my mind after losing someone I didn't know if I still loved. The nights I cried for someone that I chose to kill. The train tracks that I fell in love with and that I wished I could be dragged across.

My first day working fulltime, my last day at ngee ann before I would drop out without graduating. My first day of year one standing on the platform at paya lebar instead of pasir ris, an aunt paying my school bills instead of my own parents. 

I think about the year 2012, when it all fell apart. I think about my youth where my father nearly kills me with his punches. My childhood where my older brother nearly kills me with his, after buying me the first diary that would kindle my love for writing on my 7th birthday. Where I start to notice being left out of the mother-older son and father-younger son relationships. And I know throughout it all, I was already on my way to my life today. 

When I looked at my son, both of us alive and well, I knew I made it. I burned bridges and paved the way with my mistakes to get here. They say God is the best planner but it was all along hand in hand with my bad luck and stupid decisions. The baby I held in my arms that night in April was the product of our mastermind: a God's creation and a girl's endeavour. It was all planned. 

17. Paris (2021)

 (the playlist)

My wedding day wasn't one of my favourites. You'd feel the same way if you hate having your hair out of your face and a different woman looking back at you in the mirror. I was lucky to be among the few who value the marriage instead, and only when the groomsmen and our photographers left did I feel like myself again. This time, better.

We had to have our honeymoon in singapore, with the borders still not open yet. I couldn't complain, with my everlasting hatred for flights and travels. We spent two nights in a loft hotel and one in a fancy, expensive one in orchard. Both we marveled at, even the loft despite it being significantly smaller. Despite the fancy hotel being walking distance from my own workplace, as if I weren't always in the area.

The first thing we notice when we check in new hotels is the floor we are on. We gasp in pleasant surprise when we realise we're on the highest floor, already excited about the view that is to come. Maybe we take pictures, maybe we share them with lurking eyes or maybe we don't. 

The next place we stayed at was on the 18th floor, and already we wondered about the perspective. Even before seeing the unit for the first time, even before signing our names and taking congratulatory pictures with the property agent. Even before we got our keys to the house and had our impromptu wedding photoshoot in one of the empty rooms.

The view from our new home wasn't much but it was everything. 

At 18, you could see ikea and my old hometown in the distance; you could see our 2017 selves, 22 and lonely on a bus, 24 and free on a newly owned motorcycle. Once ants on the expressway but from our new home, we had a good view of both our past and the future we wanted to build together. The house itself needed some work, furniture to buy and kitchen cabinets to rework.

It was nothing much, but with the right person, it may as well be Paris, it may as well be the whole world. And that was how our honeymoon, though confined to the walls of the country, was extended until now, where he continues to make me laugh, where I continue to hug him from behind. Where our laughter is joined by genuine friends and now, our toddler. Two years honeymoon, and still going.

16. The great war (2020-2021)

(the playlist)

His knuckles were bruised, from the punches he blew all my life. I think the physical abuse stopped somewhere at age 17, but the emotional and mental continued on to my adulthood. 

The war started again the year I was turning 25, two years after finding someone I wanted to marry. The way my father agreed to marry us in front of my partner's parents, but looked down on me behind them. The things he said about me thinking I was so mature, that I'd gotten big-headed since being with this person. 

My mother insisted on a traditional process, which includes a merisik. Something from the olden days, the guy's family comes to the girl's home, knock knock, we'd like to have your daughter as our son's wife. 

My mother insisted on it, my father refused it, and I was caught in between. I didn't want it either, but when the day came, I still wished for him to be around instead of lying about having to work. 

Then circuit breaker happened and the battle was taken underground, behind closed doors. The torment continued, adding on to the migraines I had from screwed body clocks and niblings shouting in the house all day. My father banging things around when I walked into the room, getting up from the dining table when I sat at it, my engagement day when again, he 'had to work'.

Getting engaged was only the beginning, it was a big step forward but it was only getting harder. I know he always saw me as a burden, maybe from the fact that in Islam, as a father he was responsible for my deeds. If so I never understood why he was so angry seeing me change for the better. His words, Dia ingat dia dah ada matair dia dah besar, tattooed on my mind.

After trying to keep silent as long as I could, I finally tore his banners down when I started fighting back. Since he was treating me like an adult daughter not worth respecting, I thought I'd act that way. I was, after all, fighting for a future with someone who actually treated me like a person.

I turned 25 in September 2020 without a single acknowledgement from him. It wasn't my first birthday where he had ignored me, but it would be my last being his responsibility in the name of Islam. Tears on the mental letters I wrote him because deep down, I still felt a little bit sad about it.

The year I was turning 26, the year I was to be married, our father-daughter relationship still didn't improve. It was difficult not having that bond, seeing that as a father, he had to be heavily involved. He continued leaving the rooms I walked in and stopped acknowledging me completely. 

I eventually did the same, bombs coming closer, until Melonsoy happened. He finally remembered I existed, but for the wrong reasons. I turned chairs over and he yelled at me, I didn't know for certain if he would lay a finger on me one last time, but I left the house before I could find out.

I truly commend my partner for the way he helped me through things. Being the middleman between two hot-headed egos. Nobody else could plow through the situation like he did, so patient and firm. The way he drew up good faith treaties for two people adamant on drawing curtains closed instead.

24th of May, 2021, I told myself my parents still hated me nine years after my teenage angst. I walked from paya lebar mrt to my refuge, my grandmother's house, and I finally burst into tears. Tears that were held in from the past several months, the tears for 17yearold me who thought things between us would get better by this time.

19th of June, 2021, I left my house as my father's responsibility for the last time. To my wedding venue, where people braided my hair and put layers of makeup on my face. Masking the restless nights that precede what should have been every girl's happiest day. The flowers in my hands for the life I was about to start.

From the moment my partner said my name in full, from the handshake my father gives him to seal the deal of giving me away. That was the moment I as a burden was lifted off his shoulders, and he finally loved me again. As a wife, I gained a husband and in-laws who treated me like everything. As a daughter, I gained back my father but it was too late to ever be a priority to him anymore. Because in his eyes, I am finally my husband's problem first.

So I know now that in the great war between father and daughter, I never could've won. 

References: playing victim (2020) https://109blackaxesii.blogspot.com/2020/05/playing-victim.html?m=1 

melonsoylia (2021) https://109blackaxesii.blogspot.com/2022/11/melonsoylia.html 

green light of forgiveness (2022) https://109blackaxesii.blogspot.com/2022/09/green-light-of-forgiveness.html

15. Snow on the beach (2021)

(the playlist)

Early morning, with a long road ahead. It's a very particular time of day where I don't have to switch on any lights, but the entire house will be lit up with sun.

It does remind me of certain parts of my life, after long nights of terrors that make me wonder if I'll live to see sunrise each time. 

But the sunlight that comes in each morning; I couldn't have done it without the people who unknowingly opened the windows for me. 

It is the first friend I had in my new workplace, seven years older but a shared sense of humour. It is our similar complaints from our own partners to the common avenues we walk on. It is the way she has inspired me in religion and motherhood even before I embraced either. 

It is the one year older friend I laughed over crossword puzzles with, hiding behind acrylic displays. It is the way we suffered by the same hand, giggling on our knees amid the magazine stacks. It is the comrade I almost saw as a best friend despite the names she called me.

It is the gem of a friend I'd only discover when our departments were forced to merge. It is the way she laughs at my jokes and listens to my rants, it is the way we help each other out on the days it was just us two, and the way she appreciated me every single time. 

All these friends I unknowingly made after telling myself I wouldn't, the conversations in the pantry and hidden behind counters, handwritten letters and drawings of cats and my favourite pokemon that would be pinned onto my corkboard. I saw flecks of these when I first joined this job, but I told myself to ignore them and not to get too close.

But most of all, it is the group who asked if I would join them cycling. I remember standing by the back door of our workplace, punching in the passcode that would bring us to the shopfloor, when I was asked to join them. And that question, taking me by surprise, would change everything.

They gave me new memories on old routes, they took away the skepticism I had from cycling again after many years. The first time we went was at night, and cold bit into me but I was only feeling warmth from the friendship. 

Again, I reminded myself of the past colleagues I saw as sisters who didn't feel the same way about me. More new memories replacing old ones, balancing on train tracks and walking treacherous trails. More tremors that threatened to break the walls I'd built. 

We were playing by the beach on our second cycling trip when I felt that warmth again, seeing them on the swings and taking photos in the ocean breeze. 

Life was abusive, I'd had an awful flight getting there, but I started daring to call them my friends. They weren't just colleagues anymore, and I already knew I was falling. So soft and quiet, I was the only one who noticed the falling of the snow on the beach that blazing day.

14. Question...? (2020)

 (the playlist)

I remember. 

Your hurricane wasn't confined to the country, stemming from your parents' house in johor and sprouting towards the sky. Ivy around my house and the planes that would be your second home. Your rental unit in the neighbourhood I wanted to burn down. I finally wanted to settle for you but you had an underlying sadness. 

By then it had been five years of knowing you. Your handprints imprinted on my soul when you walked me home, singing the songs we played on our phone speakers. Even with the many abandonments and reconciliations it was enough time for you to paint me into the mosaic I was in 2018, that I would never be again. 

Two and a half years later, about a month after I turned 25. Chocolate ice-cream thrown, old friends texted, angmokio waiting. Conversations around a table dripping with condensation from our rounds of iced drinks, and he casually mentioned you. One thing led to another, and I was in the cab after midnight when you texted. 

It was about the money, for a computer whirring to life and a soul being put to death. Some back and forth until you relented when I said, I'm still bearing the emotional cost until today.

I thought it was the end of it but you asked about my family, something exes don't ask each other. You always agreed with your friends that I played victim, yet you always agreed with my writings that I was victim.

How's your grandma, your family scares me, I read your blogposts once in a while, you left an impact on me. And then a picture of your bunny and a video of it doing zoomies. 

I had years-old questions, from fears that fed on my imagination after you left the last time. I thought of all your friends cheering when you said you were single again. I thought of your marsiling girl coming over to your room after another night at the club. I thought of your feelings for a fellow flight attendant that overlapped with our relationship.

I couldn't ask any of them, so I never knew if my thoughts back then were ever true. I don't think it'd be wise to know. The same way your mother would never know the alcohol you serve and the girls you bring home and the sin waiting confused in heaven. Would you ever tell the truth or let your whole life remain a question...?

You'd know.

13. Lavender haze (2019)

(the playlist)

The first part of my new life already started 2018, with a new romance. At that point I was content with the still waters, the same routine of bus 21 and a dead mall on tanjong katong road. 

It was a job that kept me as happy as occupied, maybe from the familiarity. I was enjoying the mix of customer service and putting racks and shelves in order, even in the departments that weren't mine. I thought it was exactly where I was supposed to be.

But the year I was turning 24, things began to change. I'm not sure if it was my outlet's closing down that finally opened my eyes. I'd like to think it was my own indifference that led to its downfall, when I, the one person running things, finally stopped caring. 

I'd applied to my current workplace somewhere in February 2019, and four interviews and less than a month later I got it. I was a little bit proud to be told the position I'd applied for was only for minimum diploma holders, but that they valued my experience. 

People like me would usually be under scrutiny for our lack of education, but I really felt appreciated when mine was glossed over. Also when comparing bookstores, the company I was from is completely different, vibes and clientele. Alot more heartland and rugged. I was pretty sure of already being defined by these things.

I finally tendered somewhere in March, a few days after my grandfather's passing. My outlet was already having its closing sales, and I spent my fourth anniversary of the job overnight, packing products away to be given chances in other branches. 

It was surreal looking at the racks and years of effort stripped down like nothing. The glass windows were burning red from the company poster that stuck on the outside. The length of the entrance was already boarded up, and it was bittersweet seeing the inverted logo and name hanging lonely.

I still had a week left, so they assigned me temporarily in bedok. It did leave a bitter taste in my mouth, to know that I wouldn't 'finally be appreciated' because the colleagues at my old branch didn't have to work in my absence. After four years working so hard and being in love, I didn't even get the mandatory call from hr asking why I was leaving. 

I told myself from the start of my new job not to get too attached, not to get too close and to guard the old me. To stay in my own department and never see my new colleagues as family. I wanted to stay in the lavender haze of my meagre pay and humble position, no matter what people say, and never leave the bubble of the newness. I'd learned from the last time. 

12. Labyrinth (2018)

(the playlist)

From the moment we met, I hardly wrote about him. For the most part I was still hung up on the wrong things and did not believe in my own future, definitely not one with a good guy. But once I was helped out of the years-long tunnel, it was easier letting streetlights shine upon me.

There was where I sat waiting the first time, underneath the dim lights by a Domino's. The least romantic place you could think of, what more with the abundance of ghosts sitting right there, old friends and boys alike.

My bedroom window has view of his block, we'd taken the same feeder bus to school years back, his brother married one of my past best friends' sister. We met for the first time after texting for weeks and living opposite each other for years; and that was how he came to clean the taint that was my life.

I believed wholeheartedly in montages that would never last. I believed the neighbourhood I was living in deserved to burn to the ground for the bittersweet memories given by both family and peers. I believed that the strongest form of love was only for life when you have nothing.

The walk to the beach after sundown, skipping along kerbs and sitting by breakwaters. At the time I felt like it was just a crossover of my new and old lives, that we weren't alone and the ghosts of my past would always be surrounding and following me. 

But the good dominoes already fell into place when he showed up that night, and with it a brighter side of pasir ris. He brought me on a version of the expressway that was less lonely, out in the road with my clothes fluttering and with no choice but to hold on to him. It was the second time I stayed out late, but this time, there was no reason to doubt anything.

He gave me none to doubt or fear, and from the very first night he was always easily making me laugh. Just as well for the other way around, I still think it strange that he finds me funny. He brought me new friends who lifted the dark out of me in their own ways, and he still manages to remain the brightest one.

Of the many things I've said about him, both the bad and the good, this rings the truest: He's everything I never thought I deserved. There was no hesitation to trust him, and he jumped in with me instead of pushing me off first, and that was how I fell in love with someone new after years of hurricanes. 

I always knew my mind was a labyrinth, but it was only when I met him that I knew there was a way out after all.

11. Midnight rain (2018)

(the playlist)

The year I turned 23 I was lucky enough to find the two nicest guys on a dating app known for notorious fuckboys. Of course this came right after my being unlucky enough to be dumped by yet the same person for the ninth or tenth time. But well. 

Among the many other matches, the first thing these two had in common was the pictures of cats on their profile instead of themselves. The second was the gut instinct I had that neither of them had an ounce of hidden intention. The third was their taking me seriously and choosing to start a friendship despite my dark humour and negativity. 

If you don't know, I would come to marry one of these two. Here's the story of the other, one of the forms of friendship that I somehow managed to find in a place people usually only found rebounds. 

When you've been shipwrecked you will do anything to survive. Some of us prioritise finding a water source, or building fire. Some of us forge weapons to fend off live danger. But we tend to forget also keeping our sanity intact, there being no sign of humanity anywhere. 

When I was marooned, my sanity subconsciously became my priority. I talked to friends both old and new, I had one-sided conversations with my notebooks, my version of stray volleyballs. Somehow they all morphed into one person, a living, breathing human that restarted my life on a Wednesday night. 

He was the very first from the app that I met in person. Late night conversations that made me feel like we'd known each other our whole lives. He became my best friend in that short timespan, somehow knowing me the way nobody else did. Somehow liking me, despite my negativity I thought would only repel.

I will always owe him for understanding me wholeheartedly, and I know he liked me for me, among all the girls in his life. I will always owe him for the dreamcatchers he twined together after I mentioned my constant nightmares. And I will always owe him for leaving him stranded, for being his hurricane after crying to him about mine.

I ended up choosing somebody else, but he will always be the first friend I had at the end of my years-long tunnel. A friend who wasn't an ex's first, a friend who simply accepted and understood. 

The long walk beneath the train tracks, coping forks from a convenience store for the cheesecake he bought. Petting a stray cat in the middle of people's bungalows and unintentionally making him laugh. Driving home, him letting me choose the music and the flow of the conversations. These are the ways he will always be the sunshine I remember him for.

Saying out loud that I didn't see anything worthwhile in life despite his support. Slow replies suddenly one night, he was sick and I was with someone else. All the laughter we shared wiped out with a few swallows of his whiskey. There is no way to replace his last memory of me anymore; I will always be the midnight rain he remembers me for.

10. Maroon (2018)

 (the playlist)

maroon /məˈruːn/

adjective: of a brownish-red colour

I'm audibly sighing while staring at this blank page. From the moment we met I've written about nothing but you and the trails you've left behind. I was your fire going mad but you were always my gasoline. What more can I say about you now? 

After your thirteen missed calls I thought your arc was over. No wait, after I moved on when you broke up with me in April 2017, I thought your arc was over. No, wait. After I moved on when you broke up with me in June 2014... No, wait, after I moved on when you broke up with me in January 2014...?

Your story was getting old, but I always found a way to bring you back. As if our relationship was a timeless piece of clothing instead of its stains.

I may have been smart enough to close the door on you the last time, but not enough. It didn't stop me from leaving the room myself every other day, looking for you, talking to you. My feelings for you sat on a spectrum, floating around on good days.

After five years of breaking and reconciling again and again, things get old and colours start to fade. What started out bright red will wash out and rust eventually, no matter how hard we try to prevent it. And after a while we really weren't trying at all. 

I saw bright red walking home from Ikea, carrying new pillows and trashcans for the room you started renting. I saw maroon in the fact that you now lived in the very place I hated after having been separate entities. I saw bright red in the time we could now spend together without you having to rush home through customs; maroon whenever you chose your friends over me instead. 

Red in the night we went drinking just the two of us; maroon in the night we drank with your new friends in City Hall. Red in the time you joined my family for dinner on Good Friday and maroon in the way you had decided that you never want to have anything to do with them. 

Red: the way you waited with me while I was watching out for a snail on the cycling lane. Maroon: the conversation you had with your mother when she called. 

There was a part of me that still thought I only deserved someone on the same level of poisonous. But I'd be lying if I say I didn't have love for you at all. I was at constant battle with both sides of our past, and I wasn't selfless enough to not let it affect you.

You made the choice for us again and finally left for good. For someone who had gone through the same copy of heartbreak like nine times already, I still didn't react well right off the bat. The feeling of suddenly waking up and not having the same person to text anymore; you will always feel confused and lost.

maroon /məˈruːn

noun: leave (someone) trapped and alone in an inaccessible place, especially an island

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.

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)

3. Vigilante shit (2014)

(the playlist)

The fun was fun while it lasted. Then Jurong East hit like a meteorite and I started making friends with its debris. 

First I went back to Pasir Ris after more than a year, stayed up late to avoid being asleep during the witching hour. Having conversations late into the night with any mutual who was also awake. Texts in the middle of classes I would come to regularly skip, with the other stragglers who had to repeat modules with me. I pierced my ear twice more and then my septum, trying to prove something to someone.

I went from drinking alone on waterfronts to drinking on carpark rooftops with people I was meeting for the first time. Infiltrated a years-long relationship, but the girl evened it out by naming me anorexic, and we formed an unlikely friendship. And I taught her how to live without him the way I'd learned the hard way to live without mine. We both have children now, with people we met long after.

Casually became friends with an ex's friends from all walks of his life. I fell in love with his best friend and then with an ex-schoolmate he never liked. Then I walked down his school halls and made myself comfortable in his second home, plainclothes among the uniforms. 

I became close friends with the one who called himself rebel, exploring his hometown, watching movies and beach walks in mine. Long online conversations with a Brit-Thai, about anything and everything except our one mutual. Unintentionally continued existing on the timeline of someone who would rather forget me, wondering why I wasn't still at the spot he had left me.

All this innocent and vigilante shit in colours I hadn't worn, colours sharp enough to blind men. All while hiding behind memories that will remain crystal clear nine years later. 

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

2. Bejeweled (2013)

(the playlist)

Have you seen these two houses side by side, emitting different aesthetics? One painted completely black, and the one beside it in an obnoxious pink and purple? That's exactly how I see the transition from my 17 to 18. From black hoodies and that terrible one-eyed fringe, to pink cardigans and hair pushed back. You could say I polished up kind of nice.

I really snatched the chance to start anew, unknowingly. Wrote my aunt's address on application forms for school and parttime jobs. A school on the other side of the country I was suddenly turning heads in. A text to my friend, "the girl beside you is pretty", messages from module classmates, "you don't have to glare at me to get my attention". All this whilst having a boyfriend I had too much fun putting in the back room sometimes.

Even my music went from dark bands I pretended to like, to anything on the radio in the bakery I'd worked at. Enough to influence my outlook on the days, so comfortable in school presentations and so driven in parttime holiday jobs. Scoured thrift stores for clothes I hadn't worn before. Scoured friends for things I hadn't done before.

Not bad for someone who'd just got kicked out of the house and was living among junk. Not bad for someone with social anxiety and whose classmates she'd chosen to stay overnight with went back to seeing her as the weird girl.

Saying the words "I live in Paya Lebar" did feel strange, an unfamiliar taste on the tongue. And there were weights on my shoulders the few times I visited my hometown to see the very friends I ignored just the year before. 18 was practically the peak of my youth, and I truly deserved that bejeweled year the same way I deserved the cursed year after.

Next: 3. Vigilante shit (2014)

1. You're on your own, kid (2012)

(The playlist)

Sometimes I think of you back then, so oblivious to what was coming. From my angle I really do wonder why you took so long to get over such a mediocre guy. It was blindingly obvious no good would ever come of waiting, but wait you did. A whole year gone.

For 17, it was the last time you would be surrounded by other people your age. Before paths finally split many ways, before you and your classmates would sit in different classrooms learning many different subjects from one another. Not the last time you would look around your peers and wonder why you didn't fit in. 

A whole year gone, but not a whole year wasted. I know you did a good job trying. There were many instances you chose anger, but I see the times you chose company instead. A very big step for someone who felt so much hatred for the world and herself. 

So many paths to take, with people showing you the ropes. When you still hadn't realised there was a whole world outside Pasir Ris. Sitting in McDonald's with an alumni, looking through the portfolio he prepared for one of his courses in poly. You climbed seashell pavilions with a friend who had moved on to ITE, routes that both seemed so far away.

You let two of your classmates see you at your most vulnerable while teaching you how to cycle, and when you finally got it, it felt like flying. You flew past ghosts on breakwaters who still followed you home, but with the ocean wind in your hair, you didn't care.

Saying yes when the class chairman invited you to sit at her friends' table during lunch. Staying out late in airport cafes with one of the cool girls, who said she could never beat you in English no matter how hard she tried. Who laughed at you good-naturedly when she saw that you weren't smoking your cigarette properly.

You, lying down on rooftop basketball courts with the group of boys who used to bully you, talking about ghosts in the late of night. Passing cigarettes and confessions around.

And I know you saw something in every single one of them, even the friends from home who didn't know what to say. Who sat quiet on the chalet porch while you smoked. I know this one decision changed your entire life, when you chose to turn off your phone and stay overnight with the classmates you would only have a few weeks left with.

There's someone ten years older looking at you from here and she wants you to know you're on your own, kid. I see exactly where each of your choices will take you, but I won't tell you where to go. I want you to see for yourself how it all pans out, because we both know you can face it. 

Next: 2. Bejeweled (2013)