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.

[Drafts, 05/2021]

 leave it all behind

and there is happiness

Things to do before I go [Drafts, 04/2017]

(1) write a letter to all 6 girls from secondary school

(2) write a letter to my favourite girl cousins from both sides

(3) donate books that I loved

(4) donate my favourite book, We Were Liars (this is gonna be difficult)

(5) donate my 2015 diary to the one whom I call the wind

(6) take the train from Jurong East to Marina South Pier and not shed a single tear May 2017

(7) take bus service 858 from one end to the other (it's the longest/furthest bus service)

(8) compile all my poems and send them to local publishing houses. (It's okay if they don't get published)

(9) ask the girls from the wind's secondary school out at least once asked, but never executed April 2017

(10) hand in my resignation letter

(11) get a tattoo of a bird between the scars left by the wind

(12) get a tattoo of a rose behind the ear which the flower tucked my hair into

(13) at least try to find out where her graveyard is. May 2017

(14) face my fears and visit my grandfather at the nursing home June 2017

(15) tell my colleagues everything I've kept in for 2 years April 2017

some small things

 I made the interviewers laugh,

but when they asked me what my biggest weakness was

I'd said I took things to heart

and they laughed again, because that isn't a good thing in the service line

But I take criticisms just fine, 

customers say the meanest things when they know you are at their beck and call,

they are gone once they pay, and only linger around while you rant to a colleague

It is the little things that stick around,

papercuts are the most common comparison, as if the pain comes from random brushes against the corner of a note,

not from the pinches from others that are small to give but sharp to receive

It starts from the ticks in conversations, your mood copying the blue

You say I lack communication but when I talk, I'm playing victim

I'm crying before you, my throat hurts from trying to hold it in, you lose your temper within half a minute

I'm trying to understand you and you don't even want to talk to me? What the fuck?

I tell you the things that happen at home, you are the older sister I never had,

but suddenly you're not on my side, 

suddenly, you're not replying when I finally start telling you exactly how they treat me,

and when I ask why did you ignore this?

the whole world doesn't fucking revolve around you

??????

She calls you crying, and suddenly I am the bad guy, and you dare to intervene despite being absent most of the time?

Where were you when they were getting violent, your guests and my housemates?

You made me your bridesmaid, 

the first and last time I would ever be someone's, 

the lonely father's among the mother's and stepfather's,

3 best friends and a cousin from the other side whom you call your love,

Me? 17, socially awkward, lost, confused, drinking the champagne that our grandmother would never believe you'd served me, for you were always so perfect while I was the nonsensical one

Eight years later, wedding anniversary, the sequence of old photographs from a day I remember clearly for all the wrong reasons

I finally get to the picture of your bridesmaids,

and it is the very one I was not in.

_

It starts from

the countless plans we made that divert because you had a fight with your man,

you weren't feeling it,

you had last minute assignments at the exact same time we planned to meet,

or simply because you decide to keep quiet, relieved when I didn't seem to remember either

Your lack of enthusiasm, you couldn't seem to care less about the places we could eat

it's so hard for you to reply even though you're on your phone all the time the few times I see you

The same thing, I keep to myself until I explode, but when I am truthful,

I am accused of not accepting you for the way you are,

for not accepting that you are a terrible listener, I am uptight for getting annoyed after you make the same joke a few times in a row

Our engagements, 

June, you were the first person I texted before I went to social media,

I asked you to be my bridesmaid

December, I waited for you to personally text me a picture of yourself, in whatever colour you wore, whatever ring you picked out, whatever picture you took

No texts came, and now I am having seconds thoughts, 

it would seem to make both of us happy if you were just another relative at my wedding

All along, the countless reposts from your other acquaintances, the very same girl you work with everyday, posing by the same conveyor belt again and again

I am never in your stories

We went into a photobooth 4 years ago, my copy remains on my wall while you lost yours a long time ago

I run to your house for comfort sometimes, but I feel unsafe again, seeing your corkboard

choked full of photographs with your other friends

Wait, why do I say other when I am not a friend,

only now I know you put up with me because our parents are siblings,

and we just happen to be born in the same year.

_

two smaller reasons why death by draining blood seems ideal