Spray Censors

People always say Singapore’s this horribly strict city. Gasp! You can’t even chew gum?! And it’s true that sometimes living in the clean green dot does shelter us from the varied wonderful terrifying ways the world can be run.

Like how I always forget how amazed and in awe sometimes I get at the art on walls, on park benches, in alleyways, streaked there in surreptitious defiance in other cities. And the bare washed surfaces of Singapore have never seemed odd to me the way bats never question the absence of light.

Then one day, a candle in the cave is lit. The small flame accentuated by its singularity. You realise there is such a vast emptiness around. But the candle will die out, or will be snuffed out. And you might just forget that moment of brilliance as you settle back into darkness, or that light might sear its way into your retinas and haunt you forever.

I feel as though the afterglow is fading, the burn in my mind’s eye slowly healing away. I wonder if anyone else will light another candle.

By Cycle

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them… while in a motor car you would have no such accurate remembrance of a country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. ”
– Ernest Hemingway

Best way round Siem Reap – By Cycle

As King Solomon said, nothing is new. I wanted to talk about how it was only after I started really cycling anywhere and everywhere that I became intimately acquainted with the topography of my island city. Nothing like balancing on two wheels, not even strolling or jogging, to tell you the subtle sign of a slope. Every mound is resistance and every dip is relief. And to top it off, each tread on the pedal brings a ribbon of breeze to breath through. No helmets or windshield corners to interrupt your view, it’s just you, your handlebars, your legs and the road.

Well I guess Hemingway got that first.

Notes aren’t entering the brain matter

Something just hit me like a fast cab coming from behind a bus. I just figured my lecturer might be secretly mocking my unintelligence and inane comments in class.

Source: simple-green-frugal-co-op.blogspot.com

There’s this other guy who makes all these duh comments, and comes up with some great analogies sometimes, but he’s also the joker in class who’s in charge of spouting the most random things with barely any link to the topic at hand. Our lecturer never shows irritation, maybe a little amusement does escape onto her features, but no judgement. 

Just the other day another of our classmates told me how Ms. Lecturer once mentioned how she hated American students who just talked without treating the words travelling from their brains to their lips to any processing at all. Laughed about how she might be totally patronizing random duh guy.

And then I realise that’s how she treats me too! Am I a pickled pumpkin!?

Don’t say the words

It’s a cold night, I’m staring out into the darkness beyond my window before me. I feel like talking to somebody, someone in particular. Perhaps I only feel like talking to this someone because I have become so accustomed to spending cold nights in the companionship of his conversation. Perhaps it’s the desire for something outside of this life of mine that is chugging along like a train. Perhaps it’s the high of that delicate dance of romance I crave.

This love, infatuation confession event is a dangerous thing. Don’t say you like me cause I might fall in love.

Train Travel

Aranyaprathet west to Bangkok.

The third class carriage was our warm capsule through the wind and rain. The tracks were bolted to the ground, but really, it was the start of our flight through adventure.

Am I proud? Am I weak?

I am at a loss.

I am unconfident, where once I was brash.

I am worried, where once I was free.

I am slow, but I have always been, that has not changed. But still it gnaws at me.

I wonder if I am narcissistic, and if that is my downfall, if my pride has blinded me to the fact that I am proud at all.

Touch

Desiring touch, to touch and to be touched. Been thinking of skin on skin, flesh against flesh. Wondering what my fingers would feel like pressing down on those veins that stand softly out on that arm and wrist. Wondering why somehow somewhere there comes this pervading propaganda that females should be smooth while males have the hair. Where? Why is your skin smooth? Tan and smooth, I wonder how it would feel.

Is my gaze male? Do I devour with my eyes? Why is this gaze male? Why are females philosophized as soft fruits? Receive and bruise. Throw a female against the wall, see the splatter of tomato juice and pulp.

I want the pressure of arms around me, of a hand gripping my arm, of a squeezing of my neck. I want to pressure, press down and into something, no, someone. I want the heat of somebody else. Give me a warm body.

Warm Bodies

The weather has been making me rather melancholic lately. It’s been my favorite (or not) emo-jacking weather. When the gusts of rain reach you even in the middle of the corridor, and the wind manages to creep into your room to chill your bones, it’s completely normal I would think to long for a warm body to surround you.

Peapea: elephant who’s always watching

But in the morning when the sun shines again, and the chill subsides, I sit at my table and wonder where the wracking desires of last night came from. After all, I already have the ultimate companion God, and I already have Peapea.

Simplicity

Would you be complicit to my crazy idea? Would you join me in an unimaginable adventure? It might seem like a commonsensical choice or a self-explanatory lifestyle but many people have rejected it as unpractical or unwise.

Really, I just want a simple life.

I would like to wake to birdsong, stroll to the market, have a filling breakfast of nasi lemak or vegetarian beehoon and have a chat over warm soyamilk. I dream of afternoons filled with smells of egg and butter in the oven or the steady chug of the sewing machine and the weave of cotton under my fingers. Fantasies of evenings in cafes under warm lights and between cool breezes accompanied by mouthgasm-inducing cakes haunt me.

But everyone today has dismissed such domestic dreams and yet others have also managed to perpetrate the idea that such a myth is attainable. The practical advise work and slogging to earn your keep and that the simple lifestyle can only be sustained through large amounts of inheritance or a sugar daddy. The feminists cry foul, that such domestic desires undermine their efforts at female liberation. And then there are whole cook-book, cook-show, home-making industries selling you the perfect simplistic life, hiding the complexities of said industries.

But whether I have fallen in headfirst into such manufactured lives, or I simply reject the radical feminism plaguing us, I think such a simple lifestyle is entirely attainable. We have to get out of the viciously busy cycle that we hamster run through.

I just want a simple life. For a day.

A Donut

‘A donut’ she introduces. A peach donut.

A fork stuck in the soft pale flesh, a flash of wine red. Lift it up, from hand to mouth, lip to teeth sink in.

No resistance. Juice down my fingers, up my chin. Suck it in.

A donut peach.