I'm happy! And I don't know why!
And I could write some more, but I think I'm greedy for my privacy now and it's best if I hold true to not wanting to!
It’s 2.a.m right now, and I have a captive audience of, I don’t know, a bunch of you people who — for some reason — are subscribed to this little email service where I send out fragmented, vague and sometimes tortured updates about my life, but I just thought today: why don’t I actually use this email service like how I imagined I would when I first came up with its name? Like twitter, but a very long brain fart, about anything (and hopefully something surprising, or wise, or eclectic and maybe conceptual), without having to pay for twitter premium, and without having to pay the time tax of even attempting to write a thread on twitter these days — with its constantly glitching interface.
I just got out of a 6 hour session binge session of watching gossip girl, and so I’m speaking a little bit like I just got out of a taxi on the tv, and colour-blocking, statement belts and Teenage Magazine was still a thing, but I feel frothy on this feeling of girlhood, this normalised messiness which precisely made life exciting and MTV worthy, and a wistfulness for the girl in me who would smuggle these books by Cecily von Ziegesar and then — for the next couple of years whenever Gossip Girl was brought up in a conversation — would just bring up, slightly smugly, that I had never watched the series because I had only ever read the books. And by the way, the books are so different from the movies, and now that I’m half a month to turning 27, finally watching the tv show, after years of bragging about this little cultural omission which has now been filled in with detail, and colour, and I know now forever what Leighton Meester looks, and what it means when they say that ‘she was iconic’ beyond just whatever that was reposted on Tumblr as mic-drops. Why do we keep having to go backwards in time in order to talk about how we’ve somehow gone irrevocably forwards?
I love my life, I don’t know why. First, the voices stopped, and after a long period, it seemed like the Faraday cage which encased me lifted, and once again I was within that ceaseless chattering of signals which, we can say, is the world, and the self I felt I had to look so closely at, narrate, simply vanished. Why do I find Gossip Girl so comforting? Why can’t I stop watching Gossip Girl? Thinking about it in the shower, it’s probably because every episode is constantly surprising despite each permutation of entanglement being totally predictable. It is because we know, that no matter how many side plots occur, that the people within the centre of the orbit cannot escape each other. That even when they wander away from each other in pursuit of different bonds, weaker links always eventually rupture, and then we see that a simple brush of hand can rekindle old relationships that we were always waiting to begin, for real, until the next break-up makes us doubt its inevitably all over again — and yet, even then, not really.
All this to say that the pressure cooker of the Upper-East Side, and the tightly networked circles of the powerful are dense particle chambers, and any sort of chemistry between radicals are at such high likelihoods of occurring they might as well be definite. That the camera (and the plot) follows the lives of these people even when their bonds breathe with the looseness of evening pearl strings, interlocks the stories of their lives into a single show despite totally separate journeys, to make an argument that these presently disjoint lives will somehow return to each other. It is also why the most satisfying episodes of Gossip Girl have to do with all the characters sharing the entire stage. It is why Gossip Girl, the mastermind behind the tapestry of social whispers on the Upper East Side, plays the role as the omniscient narrator to unite these lives together. But these scenes are always tantalisingly short — I think it is always because moments of clarity and integration should only last a beat. Only so you recognise that most of life is the time you take the long way around, even if it’s just to arrive at a fleeting moment of pure insight. And then like achievement once achieved, feels disappointingly minor after it’s gone. And once lost again, feels suspiciously like a hallucination.
I didn’t manage to catch the Perseids; it came, it visited Singapore, or more like — you could have seen it from a beach in Singapore if you were there when it was dark, but really, the Perseids was always outside of Earth, happening, and if you were somewhere on the dark side of the blue gem, you could have caught it happening outside of this tiny ball which contains us. The last time I saw a shooting star, I saw so many of them, it made me think that shooting stars were actually common, but maybe I was looking at a meteor shower without even knowing it. We were overlooking the caldera, atop Mt Bromo, I was there as part of my freshman orientation in college. We had woken up at 4, taken a bumpy jeep that was sweeping its fan-like beams of light over the brown, sedimentary terrain, and my eyes were burning, my new roommate was nodding off and it was weirdly my first time having someone who was basically a stranger falling asleep on my shoulder, and across me was someone I eventually loved deeply, still very skinny and unknown with his own history, and another boy, riding the car up the winding mountain side, to catch a sunrise. The funny thing is that we didn’t even catch the sunrise, but the sky was so clear when we reached in the empty time between night and morning. And everywhere the sky was stippled with the light of faraway stars that could have been quasars, but we were so far away we couldn’t even tell, and then there were people covering the brightest light of Jupiter with just the nail of their thumbs. Then between the stars, sometimes stars would draw short, quick lines of white light, like little hashes of something pure passing.
When I saw my first shooting star, I was surprised that it came without a warning. I was looking up in the dark sky, which was like a flecked blanket that seemed to drape over like a convex lens when I relaxed my eyes and tried to hold the entire planetarium of light within my gaze, or cape that was slinking into the concave of my vision, when I simply focused on the empty space between two poles of light. I remember letting my pupils drift this way, a sort of breathing act between visual contraction and relaxation, and then the first star came and went. And in that split second, I remember realising that it was a star, regretting that I had seen a star, that it made this soundless appearance and I hadn’t made a wish, and gasping from the shock of seeing something that — in the books I read — were so rare. It was a shooting star! — I shook my now-acquaintance — We missed it! I had said. I remember feeling myself deflate, thought the sky remained bright as ever with the lives of faraway nuclear fireballs, persisting in their destiny of mortal immortality, twinkling and winking, indifferently. Then the next one came, and the next one, and the next one.
Looking into my mind now, retrieving that moment, — I know, I have a habit of being able to rewrite my memories through reliving them, then I suppose: that’s what makes me a writer. My gift of imagination — I hold up my hand and look at each shooting star pass through the blind curtains of my fingers. I feel their absence as it races under my finger. I get shocked when it re-emerges for a short moment between them. I deflate once more when it disappears, fades away after this accidental frisbee of speed. It’s brilliant — I think to myself, light, life is. The light of a star that speeds across the sky, only appearing for a brow of a second, must be so hot, it burns slightly blue. Something in its expiry was like a racquet that volleyed it somewhere it was accidentally witnessed. A light that is like a flame that burns from clean gas without interference. A smokeless combustion, only interrupted by matter, and distorted by ash and wind. I close my fist over that area of sky, as though the path of light was a thread that was sewn through fabric, closing around this tunnel of time where something important happened, wanting to even rip it out of the stratosphere, take it with me like something of a keepsake. But of course, it’s gone. And of course, it was never here with me, for me, to begin with. It was only something I was allowed to see and experience in this life, as with everything. And there’s no bitterness at all; just the wry acknowledgement of the laws of physics, and the interminable distance between that split second of yearning to be united with the light which symbolised a wish, the suddenness of its appearance, and the reality that a human being would have been burnt in worse ways than at the stake, should they wish to be crushed by the empty boundary of sparse air, the atmosphere, gravity, then nothing.
‘There is a moment after you move your eye away, when you forget where you are, because you’ve been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the sky;’ a poem by Louise Gluck, Telescope. Every time I write something like this, I am always filled with a swell of undirected longing. I’m pining for something, I want to profess that I love someone, I want to — it is the same feeling I get when suddenly the memory stops and then I enter the dream scene, and I become the person that I was witnessing the past, and I become her and I begin to do unrecognisable things. I begin to reach towards the white hands of people I have not seen in years. Like a phantom, I think my feelings can be worn like gloves slipped over their skin. I feel them, and in my mind I am running my hands over the arms of old lovers I could never treat well, and then again, I am holding your beautiful face, even though I can’t even picture it clearly and I only know how you look as though your gaze was an afterimage of a perfume. And it is this trail of memory I stumble across, I am following the lights that Sei Shonagan recounted when she was in a palanquin taking a detour from a directional taboo, towards the monastery where a ritual must be done, and all of the right and noble men and women of court cleanse themselves in prayer, basking in the light under the of a overhang kirizuma, amidst the solid darkness of trees and numb innumerate spaces between them. I’m following these lights, going somewhere to be cleansed, and the magic hysteria that occurs when all the people in a room believe in the same thing at once, and then they’re howling and howling about what surely must be real, then suddenly divinity strikes and a visitation is immanatised by a lightning strike. Then the flame blazes brighter and the tale of the dragon emerging from the pond comes true, after a false fable brought all through the land into this centre of come.
Well. I’ve lost myself again. I think to myself in third person, that the cross near my house has gone from blue to white. They must’ve found it hard to find a new neon craftsman to make it just right. And so white is its replacement, though I’ve lived there almost all my life. My heart is pounding, I got excited from that trance of feeling. Sometimes it gets like that. I think of you, all of you, and then the empty time of summers in balconies, and ‘last chances’, and this incredible life that is like a piece of paper that keeps folding into tinier and tinier squares only to impossibly unfold into an infinite number of windows when you zoom out and take in the bigger picture. I keep ping ponging between riding the horse, looking at life blurry and up close atop a flying mount, or somewhere far away, where it is so clear that everything unclear was simply part of a larger pattern. And in these moments where I’m not out of breath that life presents itself to me as this moment, where nothing is happening, that this night that I choose to write about this which is really about nothing in particular, is also just what life is.
I like speed walking to places, in general, but also in thought. I do it a lot in my room. Today, speed-walking around my room as I watched tv on my laptop in my hands, I walked into my bathroom and was shocked by my reflection. It’s not that I don’t know how I look. It’s just that somedays, you become unfamiliar enough to yourself that you can look at yourself like you’re looking at them as somebody else. And when I looked at her, she gave me such a quizzical but enthralled look — like, of course: what are you looking at? She surprised me. When I was younger, I used to think I was pretty, but now, I think of myself less and less so. That judgement of beauty melted off my face, leaving me to just see the features of my face as just consequences of flesh and other assemblies of fat and hair. Proportions of eyes, and slightly crooked teeth. As if now I am attending purely to expression. Then I looked at myself and giggled, pulled tight at my skin and laughed.
—
(By the way, the very real update is that there is nothing in my life that is certain right now. But I’m living happily. I’m spilling out my life, I’m relaxed, and I’m living life in a way that I ran away from for very long but turned out to be inevitable. I’m happy, I trust completely in the material of who I am. I think I am brave, sometimes inspiring, and capable of being noble to the extreme. I’m playful and passionate and funny and surprisingly, very happy being alone, even if I sometimes yowl about my aloneness. I don’t listen to music when I don’t want to, and time passes easily when I’m living in a manner that’s true to myself. I don’t apologise for my lifestyle, and I don’t apologise for my personality. Everything that has ever happened to me I chose. All separations I had were inevitable, and all the people I’m meant to love I already love, and will eventually meet. I suppose I could write more with more detail, but I do have a habit of compressing the vagaries and mundanities of life into short aphoristic visions that may mean something tomorrow, someday, or maybe not. The truth is that I actually barely remember anything that I’ve ever written, and I’m constantly surprised by the record of my life I leave behind, even if in every moment everything can seem perfectly clear. I’ve had dreams, I can be precious, and in fact, I’ve been very, very precious. And I’m fond of others and many are fond of me, even if some can be cruel. Life is always worth living and I am, today, a bon vivant that needs very little to be one. Last night I had such a wonderful sleep I couldn’t even feel guilty that I slept till 12pm, and I’m making new things and not reading enough. But there are seasons in your life for everything. If life becomes hard again, then that’s just the prerogative of the boulder, but even then, I know I’ve had happy times. And every happy time starts and ends and begins again. How wonderful, isn’t it? All the pain I felt, and tears I cried, in the end resulted from me being stubbornly sensitive and responsive and true — to life.)
(I dreamed of a life on a Japanese boat gliding between worlds.)
this made me cry so much, you’re incredible
this is beautiful