A loose thread

It's already been more than a month since my unraveling started. I've always had a few loose threads but they only started getting pulled when I found out early March, my dad had thrown away many of my old room possessions.

The thing that made me most shocked were the dreamcatchers an old friend had painstakingly handmade for me. This bad-dreams thing has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. But nobody had ever come close to even thinking of making or buying one for me. Not even myself.

And this friend, who isn't on social media; I never knew if he is still alive and well. When I started pulling this thread I read back old conversations and remembered the way I had left him hanging, the way our friendship was so important to me and I only made it last less than a month. 

I do believe everything is connected, so all my emotions from then are more than the throwing of dreamcatchers. I started thinking about the personality that had reeled my husband in back then, the dark sense of humour and slight eccentricity. The way I think I do not have either anymore. 

It sent me further downwards, forcing myself to starve and down caffeine every chance I could. I forced myself to read old posts and listen to old favourite songs in a desperate attempt to get my old mind back. At home I hid our kitchen knives, I was reaching the point of wanting to cut myself open, hoping I still bled ink like the writer I want to be. 

Where was my husband in all this? He laid beside me in bed, his snoring not as loud as the returning voices in my head. I did find out a long time ago that having somebody to fall back into doesn't make you immune to depression. I still hit rock bottom despite having somebody doing everything he could to prevent it. 

And in the past month, there have been instances I think that is one of the problems. In the past, loneliness was a big part of my personality. It was the loneliness that sat me down to count trains and pick moths up with my bare finger, that made me skip to work and always show up even with migraines and eyepatches. 

It was the hatred for the world and everyone in it that made me read lists of most gruesome deaths and profile myself if I was a serial killer. It was the lack of exterior emotion that identified me as an android and that made my smiles more rare and valuable.

I feel nothing special anymore. I don't spend time alone anymore and I don't write well on the good days. The trains I take now are underground and I am in cars more often than public transport. When I take down customers' names on enquiry forms, my hand shakes like I'm still learning how to write.

Where have all the flowers gone? Is there really no way to have both happiness and identity? 

Maybe I've been wondering this deep down but only the loss of my past possessions pulled and pulled and pulled until I am left naked. 

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.

Marinate

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backstroke

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

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

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

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

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

6. Anti-hero (2016)

 (the playlist)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Bigger than the whole sky (2015)

(the playlist)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: 6. Anti-hero (2016)

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

(the playlist)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dreams, landfill. landfill, dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.