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.

The first time

Ever since my first full-time job I've had the luxury of liking work so much that it became more than a second home, it became a safe haven. 

But I've also had a healthy amount of unrelated emotional turmoil at work. Someone passed away or someone stole my money or someone broke up with me, or someone broke up with me again. I would cry my eyes out before punching my timecard and my agony out of the orbit.

Before you; crying on the bus rides home, crying on the bench outside the store. Before marriage; crying in the toilet cubicle when my uncle passed away. Crying with my head in my locker after text arguments with my father, and crying by the smoking area when I saw something in my room that morning that made me not want to go home.

Despite all these workplace tears over the years, it was always too easy to collect myself and continue smiling to customers and colleagues alike. To continue shelving and finding racks to rearrange and listen to different colleagues complaining about each other. I just never would've thought you'd be the reason for any of my distress. 

It's my second time wishing I was dead since we were married, and I wish the reason wasn't you. I wish your voice wasn't the weight on my mind that slowed me down while doing one of the few things I love.

I'll have you know you sounded exactly like my older brother when you screamed at me. It was the exact same voice he used before he threw punches, all left to complete the scene was for my life to flash before me. And the more I explained myself, the hotter your blood boiled apparently.

Was that split second of anger worth it, all because I "embarrassed" you in front of your friends, for telling you not to curse around your son who is now learning to speak? Then why don't you scream at me when I post stupid pictures of you, or when I'm the butt of the joke, or when I'm squatting on kerbs talking to cats? Aren't I embarrassing you then too?

And I can't forgive you yet, for the way you had screamed once, taken a second, and then screamed again, louder. Making our son cry, right after we'd had the conversation about babies understanding emotion. Even if I can forgive you for shouting at me despite knowing my hatred of loud noises, can I ever forgive you for scaring our ten-month-old before he should know what fear is?

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)

Melonsoylia

05/04/21

One of the darkest days in the universe of my life. Can of worms opened when my most trusted person casually said yes I think you could have handled it better.

This story started from childhood like all of mine seem to, my older brother eating the snacks I'd bought on the supermarket trips with my mother. Extended to my youth, 17 when nothing in my life was going right at all. I'd bought a six-pack of Vitasoy only to find out he had drank a few boxes when I'd only got to one.

Now imagine using your own school allowance on this, only to be stolen from your older brother, who at 21 could definitely afford his own? Twitter had to bear the brunt of my rantings, because I'd already figured out by then that talking to my parents about him was useless.

I'd also like to add that on top of stealing my consumables, my money was also being stolen. This I did talk about with my mum, and she would defend against any accusations of my older brother. It went two ways, either she was really adamant on protecting him, or it was her. I never knew which was worse.

Fast forward to age 25, 2020. More dark days in the form of circuit breaker. A niece and nephew screaming in the living room, scooters banging against your bedroom door. Every single day. Making your migraines worse and what remained of your mental health depleting. Why do I have to live like this? 

The year of age 26, 2021, they finally moved out. You would think I didn't have to deal with things like that anymore. Living with parents and a younger brother who wouldn't drink the things I did. I could finally feel like my things were safe when I bought them. But of course when have I ever been right?

This was also the period where both my parents weren't talking to me because of wedding-planning issues. Where my father was slamming things on counters whenever I walked into the room. Leaving the dining table when I sat at it. Your younger brother, the one friend of the house, at camp most days of the week and nobody to come home to. Something you thought only teenagers went through, not a working adult two months from marriage.

My older brother tended to pop by the house on his Grab errands. Maybe I should have thought of that, like a proper victim would. On one of those times, his kids were there too. More than one Vitasoy gone, plastic wrinkling against the fridge door. The ONE good thing I had in that house. Everything had accumulated, but of course it was my fault for letting it. 

I really did cry so hard in the bathroom after that. You can imagine how hard it is to be as *nice* as possible when you can't breathe but you really want to fix the gaping hole in your chest that is a few boxed drinks. I'd post screenshots if I didn't have this thing where I don't put pictures in my posts.

Me to my sister-in-law, in the midst of tears: Did naqib take my vitasoy?

Sis: Alamak that's yours!! I took it sorry2!! I thought papa bought it! 

Me: Please pay me back

Sis: Okay can how muchh?

Me: Ask him to buy 1 packet and bring it here next time

Sis: Okay anything i'll update you when it's there

Btw you want the same flavour or choc

Me: The melon

I'd decided to leave the house to the biggest library in the area, found an armchair by the window on the highest floor. A few hours went by and I was already calmer, lost in the blurry words of books I'd just hoarded.

My older brother: Eh cibai kau kurang ajar message kak nabilah macam tu. Just becos of air melon? Fuck it i dont want to be ur wedding witness!! U cN fuck off!

And of course I went back to crying in front of those dank shelves. A very loyal fiance who came down looking for me, but the childhood brokenness wasn't his to fix.

Some bit of faith in my mother made me text her, but it only disappointed me and made things worse. Finally I sent her screenshots, both conversations with brother and sister-in-law, honestly telling her that "if your son ever kill me I know you will just say it's my fault for making him angry" and "that's how much you love him and how much you hate me". Things I now feel so heartbroken to read again. 

It didn't end there, I wish it did. But the next time my then-fiance visited to talk about the wedding, my parents brought it up. And they actually told him off for my behaviour. 

"It's just a small thing", they said. A small thing that has amounted from childhood and youth and the optimism from difficult days. "He wouldn't react like that if she didn't text first", they said. "Her brother has never said he hates her", they said. Ignoring the fact he had said those words with the kicks and punches he blew throughout my life. 

I constantly laugh about all my pains but this is the one incident I could never joke about. Maybe not yet. Melon soy tastes so bitter to me even though I could now flood my own fridge with boxes and they would remain untouched. 

This one ties with another story, if I could bring myself to revisit and write it. But a witness is a clue. Maybe someday, when her time comes. I was once so close to carving her name on my tombstone, it would be nothing to write her deeds.

september sleeps

I've always been working, my first full-time job when everyone around me was still in school. I never looked back, and work became a big part of my personality. But the month of my twenty-seventh was my first birthday being unemployed, and it was mixed feelings of lost and free. The last time I felt a combination of the two was that last break-up almost five years ago.

September this year would have started with my legs wide open. A health checkup to be exact, because my body hadn't been the same since giving birth. But the nurse advised me against it, something about results not being accurate until after my first postpartum period. Something that I hadn't gotten since July last year.

The first Saturday of the month was a simple trip to a secondhand book barracks, but I made it complicated with the tomes I left the place with. An adult fiction, The School For Good Mothers, you can already tell by the title, and a young adult superhero novel. My two main persons at loggerheads. I was my old person, books and public transport, before leaving to be my new, husband driving us home to our baby.

Less than a day later I would get the news that my other grandfather had passed away. I cried a few tears after hanging up the phone, my son wiggling in my arms. The newest addition to my father's side of the family, oblivious to the death of the oldest.

He had also fought long and hard for his life the way my maternal one had, but this time I couldn't recall much. Everything I remembered or knew about him was through my father's stories. I didn't have one on one memory with him that stood out, apart from a random moment when I'd gone up to him and he rejected my attempt to salam because he had wudhu. Only many years later as an adult, I realised as his granddaughter, I had the right to have contact with him, wudhu or not. 

I had to attend the funeral with my clearest memory of him being rejection, but seeing one's many aunts in tears is enough to do anyone in. Sniffs and snot everywhere, and then surprise and some admiration seeing my younger brother one of the men carrying my grandfather down. Alot of love for my grandmother, who had just lost her husband but still managed to ask me about my son.

That was the very first death on my paternal side that I know of, in all my years of life. My very first time in this country's Muslim cemeteries, as my mother's father was buried in Johor where he was born and raised. But this time was short-lived because it started raining heavily, my black jubah rustling in the wind romantically for a while before we all started getting completely drenched and had to disperse. 

Then I stayed at my parents' house for two nights and sewed parts of my past and present together. Woke up before everyone else to pray, something I hadn't done before in that house. Gallivanted the way I used to do while my mother took care of my kid for me. Taking the bus downtown with music in my ears. Drinking sweet coffee that condenses all over the table while writing. Trying on jeans that could barely go over my new curves, when I used to complain about finding a decent pair just because my legs were too long.

I walked all the way home from there, like the way I used to from my secondary school. Taking the route by the roads without a care for anyone or anything. Walking alongside my ghost, sometimes she was alone and sometimes with a friend she wished was more than. I used to walk in the sun as much as I could without breaking a sweat, but now I struggle because pregnancy has truly changed my body.

The day after I returned home from my parents' house, my first period since last year finally came. I couldn't be happier to see so much blood between my legs, when it was the very same sight in December that led to a dramatic chain of events. It came and went uneventfully, putting alot of my worries to rest, up until one week later where I contracted Covid.

My husband tested positive first, maybe a bug from work. I still showed up negative, but I'd immediately given our child to my parents-in-law to minimise his chances. The sore throat and aching joints came the next day, until along came the dreaded thin red line the eve of my 27th. Sleepless night, movements I don't recall asking my body to make, fever dreams. Constant vomiting, just like all the fevers I've had since childhood.

Woke up many painful hours later with so much regret, having waited ages for my first birthday with a living child. I couldn't put it into the spoken word to the one person who could be in the same room as me. I heard sins are erased when one is sick, but how true is that and to what extent? 

The many hours spent sleeping, struggling to leave bed, were reminiscent of my days before marriage. All too familiar. So many more emotions and secrets I could not write out anymore. Embarrassment, like I have not moved on, despite being years older since they last spoke to me. I'd always thought my Junes were the roughest, the most maddening, like lonely school holidays and Ramadan fights. Sometimes my Octobers too, like first kisses and national exams and estimated due dates. 

A higher being looked down on me this month and thought it best to stir my sleeping waters. And yet here I write, here I think of it all, and that was all of the twenty-seventh September of my life. There are more warped versions to come.

the men of folklore

in which i realise the songs on the eighth ts, folklore, seem to represent the men in all walks of my life

(for greater understanding, listen to the album)

the 1

the rose

i haven't uttered his name in a long time, when it was once what kept me going. 

it was never meant to be, some people die before their novels are written, and the world apart from them will never know the greatness of their words.

we dismissed the almosts so easily, but sometimes i still thought about it, just curiously.

deep down, i know i only saw him so romantically because it never happened.

we all know if it did things would burn out the way all relationships do, like the very one that brought us together in the first place. 

thank god i didn't pluck this rose, for if i did, i would be returning him dead and broken where i uprooted him. 

cardigan

the hurricane, 2017

i tried to run all around the lines, but he was everywhere. 

even in places he hadn't been, like workplace offices, like the space beneath my bed. 

he was even there to replace other men i was sitting with, pilots on piers and strangers on trains.

i once realised he was a better manipulator of words than i was, his sweet nothings and empty promises, using me like outerwear. 

but i fell for it every single time, even after i took so long to break free. he does leave like fathers and run like water, things he was almost.

and i stay there in my brokenness, almost as if i was waiting for the next hurricane to hit, until one day none did. 

the last great american dynasty

the fantasy

i don't know where i get these daydreams from, perhaps from the many books i read, the many songs i listen to. 

i imagine things, i imagine tall, brunette protagonists each time, despite their descriptions, blonde or american, i put myself in these narratives. 

having the times of their lives ruining it, even with something good going on.

that's how i picked myself up each time, leaving things burning in my wake and laughing in the midst of it.

plowing through souls who tried to help me, mine included, until i upend their lives like nothing.

now i have two males in my life i am truly afraid of losing, and i don't want to know how i will cope when if when if 

by laughter, by delusion, by anything but tears, and i'm not sure if it shows strength or plain derange.

exile

the hurricane, 2014

i know my coping mechanisms were not just daydreams, knowing one other person was affected, from the outside looking in.

seeing me thrive without him did him in.

he knew me as an awkward, social decrepit person, so where were all these friends coming from?, he couldn't help feeling betrayed, missing out on something.

it didn't help that his friends had turned into my friends, conversations by the beach and phone games on train platforms.

i knew he read my pages, and there was an underlying sadness that missed him.

it was easy to replace it with anger, to erase it with nights spent with online friends i would never meet again. 

my tears ricochet 

the hurricane, 2018

if you didn't know me before hurricane season: you can see by now the bane of my old existence.

this was the one that did it, after five years of returns and grudges. 

he finally made some sense of my metaphors he used to laugh at, he became a steward, taking to the skies and finding new loves there. 

i caught a glimpse of my diamonds glinting on his uniform before he lowered me into the earth.

i keep wishing he is the one to cry sometimes, but we both know it has never affected him as much as it did me, i was the only one buried after all.

(https://109blackaxesii.blogspot.com/2020/08/my-tears-ricochet.html) 

mirrorball

the brother, older

i have very little pleasant memories of my childhood that involves him, a living perpetrator.

watching tv together? would turn into screaming over the remote. 

walking home from school together? he left me crying at the void deck as a little girl, knowing i was afraid to take lifts alone then.

he bought me a diary for my seventh birthday, a hobby i keep until today, one of the causes of the rifts between us.

for he rebelled loudly in his teenage years, with punching matches and cigarettes, my time to rebel came, and it was only through written words and pens. 

what a disappointment i must have been.

i sadly don't have much happy memory of mine, but i imagine how older brothers should be, through books and movies.

i imagine him trying to make his little sister laugh, antics, i imagine him hunting down the guys who break her heart, things which he never did.

but he cried so hard at my wedding as he hugged me, things i could never imagine.

seven

the uncles

my mother's older brothers, she had so much more than me in that sense.

i remember jumping into their arms when they came to visit, crying from the fourth floor unit when their lorry drove away.

i remember the older uncle staying with us until he couldn't, because he didn't contribute to the bills. 

even though he contributed to my childhood, he gave me slightly more love and attention than both my older brother and father did. 

i remember me staying with the younger uncle, my mother trying to hit me and him so quickly coming between us.

something my own father couldn't do between my older brother and i.

as much as they made my mosaic, they couldn't come to my wedding, for one was stuck in johor and the other passed away a few months before. 

august

the loner

a coping mechanism from 2014, he remained a friend despite how he was treated.

the way he cancelled plans for me, someone he wasn't sure returned the same feelings. 

did things i merely hinted at, handwritten letters and phone lockscreens.

he was just like me in ways, maybe those were some reasons why i didn't fight as hard, his arms around me on bus interchange staircases, waiting around for me to pick up the phone.

i know it could have been something, but i extracted petty reasons to make sure it didn't, and that was all he remained, a single raindrop.

this is me trying

the son

he doesn't know words yet, the thing i know best. 

but he turns excitedly when i call his name, sadly reminding me of the times my voice didn't matter. 

i get talked over and i politely stupidly allow it, i get cut off even through text, you know who you are.

sometimes at my wits end, the only place for me to talk was here, where my words go uninterrupted; but it becomes a breeding ground for misunderstandings. 

i hope this relationship will thrive on equal grounds, i hope we appreciate each other's voices when needed. 

a relationship only five-months long now, but i take an oath that i will always hear him out first. 

after years of falling flat on my face, deprived childhoods and awry youths, i'll find a way to give him the good things that i didn't have,

even through the long days at work and longer nights in my old voices, he is all that i'm trying for.

illicit affairs

the ghosts

i can fix relationships that aren't broken, by pretending to be the missing piece.

i am not ashamed to transparently say, i was once the third party. at first i didn't know, but when i did i still didn't stop myself.

sneaking into second-storey houses, creeping around under blankets, i still feel dirty passing by its train station.

so it's my own fault his pet names started making me giddy with disgust instead, that his cologne is ingrained in my brain, i can still recognise this popular scent anywhere and it makes me go haywire with regret.

and it was this very ghost that i kept looking over my shoulder for, hurricane's hand in mine.

one of the things that broke the relationship, the paranoia, voices in my head that weren't mine, that belonged to his friends both men and women.

invisible string

the partner, before

i didn't know true happiness and calmness until i met the person who would become my husband. 

before him, only chaos and pain and many loose screws, but there was something at the back of my mind that kept me going.

only after i met him did i know, it was the feeder bus that went through both our streets, it was the block thirty up from mine, it was the supermarket situated between our homes.

it was airport coffeeshops, rainy expressways, 2013 relationships. 

these were the things that kept me going, and where our strings had crossed without us knowing.

and while i was holding other people's hands, laughing at other friends' jokes, i was already loving him before we'd met. 

mad woman

the friends

i remember people i have never met, by their spoken words that they usually don't even remember saying, it does make me think i'd made it up through paranoia and insecurity. 

after each departure friends took sides, it goes without saying they all flocked to him.

do they know the things he kept from them, the pulling into unisex toilets, the groping hand beneath hospital gowns? no, it's part of her victim play.

the worse part, i know some friends of mine think the same, even my blood relations, and i know the more i tell my story the less of the truth they think it is. 

you'd think i would move on with all this peace i've found and settling down i've done, but there are times i scathe.

days wrapped up in my own thoughts, swallowing the screws that had dropped out of my head years ago: i know they see me as the perpetrator in spite of the many i have myself.

i embraced it before, i don't know if i can do it again.

epiphany

the pilot

the awards hanging all over his home and head didn't matter anything to me.

not as much as the street he lived in that i visited only once, casuarina trees and dark gloomy skies.

i felt more romanced by the singapore flag blowing in the wind above his domain, by overhead bridges with train track views.

more impressed by his route from west to east in his uniform, more so than what he actually did in camp. 

his academic intelligence didn't help him with a broken girl, a failure as both daughter and mother. 

hour-long phone conversations that didn't push anyone together, a common affinity with words that still contributed to difference. 

i know nothing about him then, i know nothing about him five years later, but i imagine him the way he imagines me. 

In progress

betty

the twin, younger

i thought i would never write about him again, but he is the lowest of the rungs i have climbed.

for the way he had burned me before i knew i was a flame myself, i'd like to think there was a time his feelings were genuine.

even when we were holding other people's hands, back when tweets were still school hall whispers.

i'd like to think he had looked at me with some form of longing, that it wasn't just hidden intentions.

that the rooftop conversations and beachside hugs meant more than hoping i'd put out.

only then i can look back without feeling a year-deep embarrassment. 

peace

the partner, after

my favourite, the one most positively lit, the reminder that fire can be good despite it all.

all of it, from the romance of midnight rides to the reality of living habits; i will share the burden with him.

i laugh whole-heartedly to give him good memories, i scream for my life to give him a son, but it will not stop my nags and stresses, things which make this bond so real.

we both know there will always be demons in my head and goosebumps from old colds, his he had easily gotten over, but he takes his time with me. 

i have found a kind of peace where two voices matter on the same amount.

a relationship with my many ghosts roaming any mall or train station we go, but a house free of any hauntings, where our silence is comfortable. 

hoax

the father

he kisses my forehead again now, but it doesn't erase the ghosts of his bruises.

the many times he chased me out of the house, flying chairs and wardrobe doors tearing off hinges.

a language barrier in our fights, i used words while he used his fists.

for a long time i excused his actions with the blood in our veins, i didn't want anyone else for my father, and his words of love every raya softened me.

i didn't know if he really loved me, up until my wedding, when i came back out after my dress change to see they had all left, because he had somewhere else to go.

he made other plans on his daughter's wedding day.

up until the birth of my son, he didn't come to visit until two weeks later; there was an apology, some understanding on my part, but there is a little disappointment. 

if i had to have one piece of sadness in my perfect world, it's him.

end

green light of forgiveness

I've stayed at my parents' for the past two nights, and my father says it's from my missing them, missing home. I had to laugh and agree despite the fact that my old stresses came back when I stayed here for awhile in June, despite the fact he is one of my living traumas. 

It isn't a childhood home without ghosts roaming, even when their human counterparts are still living and have started treating me kindly. I still see the past in used toothbrushes and limply hung cardigans. In the mess of fridges and countertops, old post-its on dusty corkboards. And these material reminders are enough to haunt me back 23 years. 

Moving out, a day after my wedding. My parents and I hadn't been on talking terms for at least a few months, a father slamming doors and things down on countertops whenever I entered his peripheral. But when I wasn't his responsibility anymore maybe it was a breath of relief, he finally realised the treasure that I used to be.

My father was shocked to see my books completely packed into boxes, shelves empty and ready to move. After the way he had treated me the past few years, I didn't quite understand his surprise that I was waiting to move out. All the times he had screamed for me to get out, November 2012 when he finally disowned me for more than a year, even the time he shouted at my then-fiance to take this burden off him. 

Seeing my entire life packed into boxes and family members helping out, in contrast to the times I'd left home unannounced with a backpack full of pens and notebooks. Hearing my father tell my husband to take care of me, that I'm scared to sleep alone at night sometimes. 

Now he kisses me on the forehead and calls me darling again. Though I can never forget the long-gone bruises and deleted messages, maybe I can forgive them for the way they have made me who I am today. When I moved out, I finally said goodbye to one of my perpetrators, and that was the only way for him to be the father I always wanted.

the other shade of red

Everyone knows my many metaphors that replace the names in the stories of my life. I don't know the exact post where I wrote a name for the last time, definitely years ago. But I know where it began, and the Grass, Fire, and Water Type love triangle wasn't the first. 

2012 was loneliness and confusion, and with it came alot of writing. I brought diaries to parks and terminals, sometimes with a red and black hoodie slung over a shoulder. Somewhere along the way I found significance in the colours of my jackets, and borne were my first metaphors: red and black. 

They were actually the favourite colours of twins, the younger and older, respectively. Two characters who were so significant back in their chapter ten years ago. Sometimes it feels like a distant dream until I look through Facebook memories and see harsh reminders of seventeen-year-old me, the one most impacted by them. 

The colours were so symbolic of their contrasts, and I only got to know this from one teary night with black. So overshadowed despite being older, so burdened with expectations. I could see a bit of what he meant when they were still in secondary school with me, black walking around prim with his councillor tie while red ran around with the other rebels, a cast from a fractured arm.

I never hung out with black much until after he graduated, but I was one of red's rebels I guess. We climbed seashell pavillions and ledges to get onto rooftops in our school uniforms. That was what landed us into detention together, cementing our friendship until it gradually evolved into the three-month relationship that would be my demise.

It was really hard when the breakup was still fresh, but it didn't improve much until I graduated and moved on to poly. You know me, I could still see the ghosts in school and all around Pasir Ris. He blocked me on all forms of social media back then, which was all for the better. I didn't realise, somewhere along the ten years that have passed since then, he had taken the time to unblock me.

Of course I was curious, it'd been such a long time. What got me to stop scrolling was a group picture of red, black and two other boys. What got me to start searching up his name were the words: one is married, the others on their way. As above everyone as I always think I am, my curiosity gets the best of me.

What do you know, red was the married one. Looking at their picture I couldn't help but wonder if she knows everything about his past no matter how insignificant, something like a three months long relationship from ten years ago? I kept nothing from my own partner, even the smallest interactions with the most random of schoolmates. 

I felt nothing looking at him, maybe a little embarrassment that this was the face that caused so much turmoil for a year? My ability to travel back in time leads me to the days when all I heard was it will get better, he will not matter anymore in ten years time. But here I am now, ten years older and it is a shock to see for myself that he means nothing more than a boy from the past. 

10:34

 I think my water just broke.

But those weren't my words. After the December scares of threatened miscarriages, the stitches deep inside me worked too well. Even after untying my cervix again in March, my April thirteenth baby showed no signs of coming out.

I was all too familiar with the cold gel smothered on my belly, the straps around me and the posters pasted on the walls by the bed. The same way my husband might be familiar with the chairs and sounds in the waiting room.

Somehow the both of us were very calm at triage, even when another couple walked in and told the nurse that she thought her water just broke. We exchanged subtle wide-eyed glances, while the nurse cheerfully told her to wait because she was attending to us. As if I was more important than this woman who actually had signs of labour.

I was even able to walk back out to have a late dinner before being admitted. That I did, good-naturedly rolling my eyes when my mother called my husband crying. Bilang dia kita semua sayang dia tau, while I continued munching on fries. 

When I get back into limbo it was already time to be admitted. I was told the process of induced labour, parts of which sounded very similar to what had to be done seven years prior. But I truly did not have any fear, not with the amount of trust in the person sitting next to me this time.

My contractions started out so strong at the hospital, after weeks of unsure tightness when I was home alone. It was late afternoon of the fifteenth, my organs getting twisted. I thought I could handle it, I'd been through so much pain and was the strongest person I knew after all. The nurses kept asking, do you want to take epidural now?, and I kept saying no, eventually through tears and desperate head-shaking, still with the belief that I could plow through like I did everything.

But soon the twisting went to the point of blinding, shrieking pain, my body writhing on the hospital bed. My mother and husband took turns abandoning their buka to comfort me in all my monstrosity. The girl she tried to raise sweet but grew with so much rebellion, the girl who was so negative when he met her but now laughs at everything he does.

Through the pain I was still conscious enough to realise, to have everyday things running through my mind. I still had it in me to think of scenes from possession movies, very aware my body was resembling the victims in them. I grasped onto anything, any railing or unfortunate hand I could find. I asked myself if this was my karma for every drop of alcohol I'd consumed, every word I'd yelled at my parents.

I was lucky to already have been hospitalised during contractions, it was a struggle from level to level. I held on to my glasses for life, of all things, while I was being wheeled to the delivery suite. I wasn't exactly ready for labour, but I'd neared the desperation for epidural, anything to get this pain off me, I'm not very strong after all.

My mother had to go because visiting hours were over, as much as she fought to stay, and secretly, I'd wanted her to stay too. I continued moaning for my life on a different bed while random hands changed me out of my hospital gown into a backless garb. 

At this point my eyes were shut tight from so much pain, but I still heard the voices around me and in my head very clearly. Husband can't be here for now, we'll call you later. Calm down, turn around and stick out your back for me, do you have scoliosis?, just hold still for a minute and it'll be over. 

But it wasn't over. I felt a cold, hard needle whispering against my skin and I pulled myself away again, this time crying. I was about to say I wanted to poop, but just in time, a voice in my head said that wasn't what I wanted to tell them. I want to pu.... sh.... and I collapsed back into bed, and that was when panicked voices arise. 

For I was suddenly dilated to four, when the last time they checked it was barely one. I was clutching things so tightly that the drip in my right hand was stabbing me so hard from under my skin. Something that I didn't even realise until later, a large bruise and dull pain with every movement.

Through my closed eyes I knew they'd called my husband back up, and then suddenly I was seven. I knew he had walked across the room to stand on my right, instinctively I reached out, knew it was his hand that was holding mine back.

By then it was too late for an epidural shot, so I had to dive in with no painkiller. I know I had little to no fear, knowing it was exactly what I'd expected, and maybe because I'd gone through worse for lesser. I'd fought so hard meeting the first love of my life standing in this very room, I'd do the same for the second. 

I knew my actual fight was less than two hours, having my mother chased away sometime after visiting hours at eight, being wheeled down and not having an epidural shot after all, and then him being born at 10:34 pm. 

All the pivotal moments I've had in my life, from being on the red line for the first time to having all eyes on me when I walked in wearing a white dress. Washed away by the moment I heard him cry for the first time, shaking his clenched fists, eyes tightly closed and mouth wide open. The moment he instinctively stopped to suckle on me during our first skin contact. 

I started trembling myself before bursting into a fit of giggles. At the same time my husband lost his balance and had to be escorted to sit down from all the giddiness. Our own ways of breathing in relief, after which he was given hot Milo while I had to have my perineum stitched. 

I remember thanking the random doctor before she left, a very happy congratulations from someone who has to stitch up privates for a living. For a while it was just the three of us in the room, almost midnight, the two loves of my life and I. After some deep breaths and some sips of Milo there was only one who was still capable of bustling about on his two feet. He jumped to and fro the tiny incubator and the horror site where I winced in pain with every movement.

The first thing that stood out when I first met my husband was his caterpillar eyebrows, imagine my pleasant surprise when my baby came out with eyebrows just as bold. The top half of his face resembled my husband when he was younger, while his chin and sulk were reminiscent of mine. And I hope he grows with our height, with a father's logical and a mother's creative. 

I forgot about crying so hard when we found out we were having a boy, I forgot about all my troubles and mistakes, I forgot all my imperfections looking at the perfection I'd had a hand in creating. Only now I understand why parents say the best moment of their lives was the birth of a child. The usually weak is at their strongest and the strongest exterior goes weak in the knees with so much relief.

It took me a while to recover physically, with the amount of vaginal activity I've had since December. Since 2015, if you want to count from there. But I was lucky not to have any postpartum depression despite it all, despite my history. I could sleep relatively well even though I began waking up startled again, with panic until I saw the gentle risings of his chest. I couldn't handle babies until I had my own, it comes so naturally. I still fear thunderstorms, but I now cover his ears instead of mine. And I can't wait for the years to go by, to see how much more I can change and grow with him. 

pain for pain

As if my dreams haven't already been vivid enough, they get better in definition and worse in aftertaste during my third trimester. It's nothing that I'm not used to, but not with the the twenty-four hour discomfort that comes with a life growing inside you.

Usually I ignore these dreams, occasionally story-telling them to my husband, peppered with laughs and 'the fuck's. But this time, the words "I" said still ring in my head long after I awake, after getting pulled so violently by an elderly man trying to sell insurance. I don't like getting pulled, especially to handicap toilets.

I haven't gone to work since mid-December, my last Afternoon shift before I was rushed to the hospital for breach. My calmness that night doesn't surprise me, not when I'd been in the same place for worse before.

The first term they used: threatened miscarriage. I was still calm, even with my red-soaked underwear on the floor and even more blood getting on the doctor's gloves. That night I curled myself up in a strange new bed, separated from my husband for the first time since we were married. To make it worse, it had started raining, and occasional lightning lit up the room. 

A nurse came to my bed to ask, This is your second pregnancy right? I answered with the truth that anyone who is reading this should know, and she patted my hip, a comfort. Another nurse came with the things that my husband had driven home and back for, and the first thing I took out was the giant polar bear. I slept with my face buried in it. 

There were familiar things scattered over those eight December days. Walking barefoot to the toilet, drips being shoved into my right hand, reciting my name and number again and again. But the lack of tears was new, the husband constantly by the bedside, kissing my forehead before leaving, the mother crying before I was wheeled away to surgery were new. How I would do anything to keep this one safe was new.

There's nothing much to do when your legs are numb while your phone is rooms and levels away. Nothing much to do when your legs are spread for pain and with the urgency to save child. Staring at those lights in the surgery theatre, I both remembered and realised things. 

That this was my karma, knowing one of the causes of breach was exactly what I did years ago. And why should I give him the privilege of forgiveness when I had never and will never give that to myself? Even with the overdue money finally paid back years after, even with the happiness and safety that I finally found with someone else. 

Only now I've learned that coercion is not consent. Deep down I do not forgive both the partner and the friends who cry playing victim. It had to take another trauma in the same place of the previous trauma to realise such a simple thing. And today I awoke from a dream that reminded me of my unusual fear of unisex toilets. Not sure if I'll ever get over that, what more the initials tattooed on my stomach.

from reds to greyscale

I'd left the house with the kitchen and laundry room in disarray, telling myself I would continue after my afternoon appointment. What made me think I would be in the right state to return home with cleaning on my mind? Who was I to think so positively, someone with so much bad luck her whole life?

November didn't go down without a fight, from screaming familiar lyrics in the car to holding back tears about to blur a sonogram. November went from the ups and downs of shades of red to shaky greyscale screens. And now while I was supposed to start December with ocean hues and my husband's favourite colour, I am starting it with disbelief and grief in baby blues.

I believe the blue is my karma. I grasped onto too much hope that the reds will mix with the white of this new slate to form ribbons and braids. How could I have forgotten everything I've done before this better half of the year? Who was I to think the colours of my twenty wouldn't haunt me again?

My friends say it can't be karma when this one is already the product of two better people: a man who has never laid a finger on her and a woman who doesn't live with the ones who did anymore. Time is supposed to be the medicine but I don't understand it now when I had to feel everything at once in the moment I saw a protrude between its legs.

And here I am now trapped in this nightmare, baby clothes and room walls don't matter anymore yet still hurt me to the very core. I have to hear the desperate pleas to be grateful, he still has a beating heart and he has his ten fingers. He has his feet which I've looked at with so much love but whose pictures I can't bear to look at anymore.

Nobody has died and here I am grieving, ungrateful. December is off to a grey and blurry start and I don't understand anymore the ways of the clock. I was prepared to feel pain again but that was supposed to be in the far future, when you grow up to skip school behind my back or ignore my calls or get into arguments with your father.

I was not prepared to have my heart sink shortly after seeing yours beating so strongly. I was not prepared to cry curled up in bed again for a long time, tears too fast for me to bother covering my face. I was not prepared for this excitement to die out short of meeting you. I'm supposed to love you, and here I am once again a terrible mother. How would you feel eighteen years down the road if you were told how much your mother cried to know what you were?

once my novelty wears off

A certain brilliance with talent for words and voice taught me about hidden messages. I hid confessions in the first letters of the poems I wrote and truths in two-second clips of the videos I edit. The novel I wrote and never submitted had tons of these Easter eggs, from the dates to the stations each character spent a certain amount of time in.

I'm not as brilliant as the songwriter who taught me this. Every single line she writes is studied meticulously for hints or foreshadows. But mine are skipped or scrolled through without a second thought. Maybe I'll get there one day, maybe my secrets will be decoded, or they will continue being overlooked, just like me. Maybe I'll even stop writing one day.

But I came here to talk about my newfound form of hidden messages: the little things we write on our profiles, product descriptions. Everyone already knows I'm made of trains and books, the occasional insects and the things I've been through. But nobody here knows the depth of my feelings right now, so I thought I would use lyrics from songs that currently resonated with me.

How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?

You may think at first glance I am referring to age. I truly did knew everything at eighteen when I was living without my parents and in a relationship both serious and immature. And I truly knew nothing again at twenty-two when I was left behind by the same person. But as much as those years have molded part of me, they aren't my everything anymore. 

The truth is, even with this new peace and happiness, I still have my underlying fear. It is after all one of my many pieces, and with so many changes from living in a house overlooking the expressway I once felt so small in to having another soul to take care of on top of mine, I am secretly scared. 

And with that, in 2018 I knew everything. I knew confusion when I begged to be with somebody I didn't love and I knew freedom when I walked beneath train tracks with someone new. I knew depth when we talked about worries and shallowness when we laughed over things on the Internet. I knew worry when he was taking too long to reach his destination on his motorcycle and I knew love when we watched television with his parents.

But in 2022 I will be back to knowing nothing. I will not know the concept of time with your unscheduled cries. I will not know leisure with my two hands occupied by you. I will be back to not knowing the simple things like heartbreak or disappointment, both of which you could only give me when you're older. And I can try, I could soldier on or reminisce on the times I survived all these things by men and women, but nothing would prepare me for getting the same treatment from my own child.

Even with everything I've done and heard, I know I will not be unfazed by the things you throw me, for it is different coming from someone who is half of me. Am I looking forward to it? Am I looking forward to the years when you dismiss me and find someone else whom you think more of as your half? 

She's right, how can a person know everything at twenty-three but nothing at twenty-seven? 

red tv

Years ago I wrote about my solitude, more of in pain despite it being my own choice. I was seventeen, and at that age it was normal to have thought the world against you, but I didn't know both better and worse were intertwined in the path to come.

At times I look at the words I once wrote and there grows a bitterness. Of how my alleged wisdom then makes me groan with embarrassment now. Or the amount of youth and hope in somebody made of stupid decisions. And when there were no words, the pictures of a girl who somehow exhumed humour out of her loneliness.

I could not call any music mine, for I was using somebody else's favourite songs as company to get over the heartbreak. I try to listen to this band today but it's now the opposite of both the music I like and the person I have grown to be. Why the shame back then? The sadness wouldn't give in to upbeat tunes the way the morsel of individuality to a sameness with the crowd.

But I look in the rear view mirror now and as blind as I can get sometimes, I can see the distance I've come. I now see no shame in loving a pop artist who is ashamed for ordinary things but whose lyrics are so hauntingly twisted. Today she is the main inspiration behind my twists of words, yet I never grew alongside the majority of her work. 

At seventeen, I'd referred to a now meaningless shell as Red. It was merely his favourite colour and I had gotten to the point of hurt by his name. Months later a renowned American singer released her fourth work with the same name; I just didn't realise it until years later. 

The destination changes with every switch of the tracks, memories scattered with every song that passes. There is one for the evening on the expressway, another for the walk towards the blue line, one for the night in the hospital. And all these happened years after the album was let out into the world.

And though I was a few years late, I was shown harshly how the colour red is never always love. Red is knives into your heart in the form of words. Red is the rash that slowly develops on your skin over five years without you realising. Red is the blood staining the hospital bed, red is the block you grew up screaming and crying in.

Today at twenty-six I am red, the train line where I learned laughter and tears, one of whose stations is now my second home. I am red, the laundry detergent we are trying in hopes of a stronger scent. I am red, the prayer mat I lay my head upon in his shadow. I am red, traffic light reflected on my husband's face in the car he drives us home in. 

I don't want to write about anything or anyone new. I want to stay in the bubble that is me, made of past likes and dislikes, stations that changed and construction sites that finished without my knowing, people long gone. For I am not me without the hardship of the past nine years. 

But at the same time I want to revel in the new things, from friends staying over until two in the morning to snoozing two sets of alarms to resume sleep in each other's arms. It is these little things, the scattered flashbacks and awry train tracks that formed my kaleidoscopic view. There is still heartbreak and loss somewhere deep within me, but I won't let either go for it is both the negativity and newfound happiness that formed the mosaic standing in my place today. 

That I have learned is red, and it's time to listen with someone new alongside, with a new mind and new perspective of myself.

what won words

 The key was pain.

The kind that came with the usual sadness, sometimes anger. Even some forms of happiness come packaged with pain. The way new opportunities bring goodbyes to old colleagues. The way births of nephews come with the deaths of uncles. The way heaven shifts to a man you have known only three years from a mother who put up with you for twenty-six.

With the three years of a better partner and two years of a better workplace, the three months away from blood relations was the last piece of the puzzle. While tears were shed and severed ties clumsily mended, I am not shy to say their absence is one of the reasons to my newfound happiness.

I've gotten to the highest I could, now taking the lift double the floors than before. Now my bedroom window goes from curtains that are never drawn to a view down an expressway to my old neighbourhood. Now there is no hoarding or bedroom lights buzzing, things getting fixed quickly. 

But this form of happiness comes with its own underlying pain. There is silence outside the bedroom door when midnight strikes. There is silence outside the windows, no background noise to lull me to sleep or crying of roosters to shock me awake. There is silence under my blanket instead of my throaty tears, and silence in my head instead of words, words, words.

I don't have many words when I'm coming home to someone who treats me well everyday. When my things in the fridge and money on the dresser are left alone. All the pent up anger and nighttime sadness were fuel for my writing, and it's hard to have either when you live with someone who only makes you laugh.

So with this separation from the ones who have hurt me comes formalities, the kissing of hands, niceties, the odd question of how I've been. With this new life comes goodbye to an old comfort. I think it's time to lock up this eccentricity the way the train tracks have been boarded up. Now I am learning to occasionally bleed ordinary red instead of dark ink everyday.

Until next time, when I find a new fear or lose someone else that may as well be myself.