392: something in the air tonight

It’s always a hard choice deciding whether you feel worse that you needed to be lied to, or whether you just weren’t worth the truth.

Damn, I think I need a drink. Or five.

391: five hundred days is pretty long

The only people for me are the mad ones.

(As usual, cut for spoilers, 500 Days of Summer.)

386: to know it, and love it for what it is

There was never a greater moment of happiness when I looked at my shadow on the wall while the piano was playing and I was singing at the top of my voice watching everything go by. There was never a bigger smile on my face, and I knew it for sure. The lights were changing and the stage was empty, and all around the voices churned. As somebody fiddled with the camera we leaped across the stage like children, scrawling words into the empty air. Sleepy faces were turned up towards the ceiling. I heard all this music flowing out, into the stage, into our heads and minds. Yet somehow at the other end of the stage hung a deep and pervasive sorrow. There is something tragic in silence, in juxtaposition, in contrast.

There will be no other time like this time. It is one of the greatest things in life, I think — to feel joy, and recognise it, at the very same time.

379: 可惜时光不会逗留，转眼飘走

It always strikes me as somewhat strange, the way age changes and defies logic. Over time, the wrinkles appear and the cheeks sag. Voices become rustier, more hoarse, tired from years of screaming at children. Movements are slower, the legs stiffen, backs bending increasingly over the weight of dreams. Recently there have been so many movies dealing with age and loss, as if the two must come together, but increasingly one accepts that the two are necessarily inseparable. With time comes loss comes age, and a painful process of maturity; age becomes wisdom becomes regret.

378: and when the storm comes, hold me close

There are few people I can listen to as readily as you, knowing always that you will have something worth hearing. Even though you’ve come — and you’ve gone — quite a few times, you’re here and I’m here and nothing changes. As you waltz back into my life I’m beginning to realise that you’d never really left, and the distance that separates us is painful and wide and altogether too long. I was surprised there was anything left between us, and not just anything, but something, in a way that is strange and unfathomable.

377: people are like electrons

374: lifelong ambitions (让一切随风)

373: i’d rather dance with you

You’re so unkind, he sings. And he replies, well, you’re out of your mind.

It’s easy to forget that you’d ever left. Yet everything seems somehow different, somewhat changed in the meantime — things have moved, been torn down and rebuilt, or reshaped into different things, people have come and gone and drifted further away, and we’ve all descended into a strange pool of awkwardness we don’t quite know how to get out of.

372: es muss sein

371: but i’m not shedding tears

I thought about it.

It’s like getting thrown back in time. There are things you love, and there are things you love. These things stay with you throughout the entire journey, and they always take you back to that particular period when life was a bit less complicated (but only on hindsight) and love was a little easier to believe in. We toss these things back and forth like rubber balls in the hope that one day someone is going to catch one of them and realise they were there too, at that same point in time.

It’s great to have a passion. Better to know I haven’t lost it. It’s our last chance, for real this time. I wonder if that’s why it happens every year, the way it does, because we all know there’s no turning back — we’re standing on the brink of something far more permanent than what we have now. It chills me more to know this will not be the rest of my life, because this is one of the last few times I can feel as young, or as free, as caught up as I am doing things that have absolutely no relevance to anybody. And these songs are ringing in my head, on and on, as the music plays and the dancers fly. I know these sights will be one of the last, and I can’t help but stand there and take it all in. I’d breathe the scene if I could. I’d store it in my lungs till it became part of me and it would never come out.

I want to take in everything. The light of the sun as it sets over my house, the way the leaves fall across the avenue. The way people bustle across streets, waiting impatiently at traffic lights as they go from red to green. How cars honk indignantly at each other on the road, or how the ice in my teh-peng melts into nothing. Black eyes, black heels. Marble floors, ankle socks. Uniformed girls, men in ties. The smell of the rain as it stops, conversations that only involve hysterical laughter. Murmurings over coffee. The taste of duck rice. How the five-foot ways seem more poignant, the shophouses more quaint.

I feel like a tourist in my own country, and that’s not exactly a bad thing. The past few months have been fraught with a sense of finality I never knew myself capable of; yet everything is more beautiful because of it.

370: the sounds still wait to be found

And we’re all junkies, and pushers, and pimps and hookers. You never know what you’re in for. And you can shake it, try to forsake it — but you know you’re gonna take it. You never know what you’re in for.

I nearly cried when I watched this today. Dear Jorge, I will miss your guitar forever.

369: i said, maybe

I’m back home; it’s a bit surreal. After the sunsets, the harsh and lonely winters, the dream is over, and with it the heartwarming, heartbreaking, and life-changing moments. It was difficult at some points, dealing with things. It was mostly happy in others, watching people sing and play the guitar, to see people speak in rapid-fire French, strange mannerisms and language quirks, to remember not to take everything for granted, secrets shared (and unshared), playing games with each other for no apparent reason. To realise at the end of the day that everything must go, even the daily routines and the weekly dinners, the 9pm days in the library, cycling back in the cold. I’m back to where the sun beats down like the rain and the rain beats down like the sun, and both are equally harsh and unforgiving, and leave no room to breathe. The air is humid like a sauna and threatens to wrap you up and choke you. Everything is familiar and unfamiliar, people remain the same, but things are now so different. The mosquitoes are everywhere still and the ants steal up silently against the table and overwhelm your untouched food in one fell swoop. In any place we go, the old wounds resurface even as we make new lives.

368: youth’s elixir fills our veins

366: and you exploded in my heart

 

The weather needs to get a grip on itself. It keeps alternating raining and not raining, the sun shining and not shining, the sky being cloudy and then not. It needs to stop sending me on rollercoasters because I don’t like being taken for rides.

365: when i look at you i watch the sun rise

I’m not counting. 

363: 等下一个天亮

As I get older I realise I am less and less prone to subterfuge. It may be a good thing or it may not, but somehow I can’t find the energy to hide behind words anymore. There used to be a time when I took great pleasure in making everyone guess what I was talking about (strange how people put up with me, sometimes) but nowadays I’m tired of mind games and second guessing all the time.

358: 心会痛，心也会感动

从没有放弃过心中的理想

… 不知不觉已变淡，心里爱

354: what you are is beautiful

I said, maybe Sally can wait this time. Every time I turn on iTunes and listen to the old songs I’m reminded of why I love music. The other day I had a conversation with someone (who was it, now?) about whether we would still be listening to new music when we were old. Of course, he replied, why not? Our generation is different from our parents’. I thought about it but we’re not so different after all. It’d be weird to find out my parents were listening to MGMT or whatever the equivalent is, and though this generation appears a lot more exposed to music than the previous one, some things, I think, change slowly, if at all.

 

339: remember 2008

The year has been eventful, to say the least. I ushered in the new year at the beginning of the year (last year, now) in a variety of circumstances; every year with the Hwa Chong people, screaming “Happy New Year” at the top of our voices around the swimming pool, and then drinking Raffles beer at the front of Block B, our cars parked in a perfect straight line along the parallel parking lots. I was wearing a red dress, I remember, and the rest were happy and drunken.

336: the sky will soon be full of suns

Time takes it all, whether we want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bears it away, and then there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, sometimes we lose them there again.

Stephen King

Everything must have a Before and After, just like a person is meant to mark time passing. Once gone a person becomes a milestone, and everything narrows to just a passage of time, and a bunch of labels. Memories are boxed away, stored for safekeeping, hiding themselves in the dust under the table, waiting for the time they may be taken out without pain or awkwardness. The person who stays may shed tears, hurried and quiet, furtive. Once the tears are gone, the ache dulls. Everyone heaves a sigh of relief as the epiphany eventually comes. They have been holding their breath hoping they too do not die waiting in the process.

One does not keep loving photographs of the past. The magic hurries on, even when the lovers remain, solitary as they are and separated by a world of nothing, and the label disappears. Though change is often imperceptible and sometimes fatal it is inevitable, and this is at least the one truism we are resigned to have to accept, even if it nevertheless cannot become our excuse. The past is a video game, the chase blurred in time and with memory; it makes things better, or worse, than they were. The night lights will seem brighter, the air cooler, the kisses gentler and more filled with love, and suddenly the light stronger, the words harsher, the shadow of a back darker, the actions more cold. One learns to stop speaking in the present tense. “Are” must become “were”, “is” must become “was”, and even “we” must change to “I”, “ours” to “mine”. One is never more aware of how the semantics of language must change for one to adapt, to survive, to avoid looking back what it all was. One must forget the old words, make up new ones. Descriptions must change, and so must greetings and goodbyes. Nothing is the same, and it must stay that way, a fragile truce to keep from breaking back into dangerous waters.

But words are words, and they only say so much. Photographs are photographs, and cannot be altered or reshaped or erased; they nevertheless remain moments from a previous life that may not be resurrected, but cannot be ignored. Most of the time they are good photographs: there are laugh lines, twinkling eyes, wide grins. In uncommon moments there are downcast looks, a melancholy forehead; and rarely, a tear or three down a cheek. Grief is never as easy to capture in a moment, knotty and tangled at the beginning as it is at the end, skilled fingers teasing away each painful memory as they continue. And one cannot pretend: that there is no pain, nor guilt, nor a love as measured and wonderful as it was sour and bitter. The moment remains, and so does the truth, and memory cannot make things better or worse. Forgetting is as big a crime as remembering too much.

As we twist and turn in our sorrow, the day becomes more beautiful. The sunrises may come later, the sunsets earlier, the day shorter. There is less time to do anything. The weather turns cold and the snow begins to fall, strange and wonderful as it is to have it at this time of year. As the year enters its darkest days the air fills itself with sparkling lights and festivity, the churches begin to open, and hearts themselves try not to close.

334: baby do you remember when

When I turned 21 I wrote somewhere that this may have been the best year of my life. More than 2003, when the world was my oyster and I thought I could do almost do anything, or 2005, where I was older, slightly wiser, proud of having overcome my pain. In 2005 I found friends, friends that have supported me till now, even if I didn’t find love. I worked my ass off and made it to where I am today, I had fun, I laughed. When I turned 21 I had the best birthday I ever had, possibly ever. It was the first time my mother realised, how many people there were besides her who loved me. 

It was a beautiful year, for the most part. I studied hard, I did well, the world was out there, and for once there was real promise, a real hope, a real future. There were friends, amidst the long hours spent in the study room. We spent beautiful hours together, beautiful days, beautiful weeks. I thought I was never more content when you came over and rocked me to sleep, like nothing else mattered, only me. With you I was everything and nothing, and I could be who I was. There was nothing to hide, nothing to run away from. We spent hours on trains, traipsing all over Japan, just you and me and the world out there, waiting for us to explore. We were young and happy, and in love, and I thought we would last forever. In those two weeks there were ups and downs, but I came back more convinced than ever that my choice was right.

This year has been full of decisions, of realisations, happy and sad. There are so many that I have made, and there are so many that I am unsure about now. This year I decided I wanted to spend a year in Europe. This year I decided to make my second year count. This year I decided to rebuild my old friendships, because something is better than nothing, and we have all grown up. And love is a strange thing; it creeps up on you. This year I was never more sure of my feelings. This year I decided who I wanted to marry.

In August Europe was waiting for me, and you, and it was going to be you with me. I wanted to spend these long wintry nights with you, huddled up somewhere, fighting the darkness and the cold.  It would have been just you and me, and love. There have been ups and downs this year, people have changed, people remained unchanged, people died. But everything has been fine, and I pulled through, because I have you, and you have always been there. It would have been 26 months yesterday.

This year I grew up. From intense happiness, to intense pain, I have felt everything there is to feel. I have not felt anything other than happiness in a long, long time, and I have not been alone in equally long. All those nights that I went to sleep with a smile on my face, I remember fondly, and I think about how it is like now. Many things have changed; but many things haven’t. I still think of you everyday, but I cannot tell you anymore. 

Be strong, I tell myself. The world is not ending. But there are walls between us now, walls I can’t climb. There was a time I prayed that these walls, not having to be built up, would never have to be torn down. I remember how we began, those slow, tentative beginnings, and the way we ended, quick and hurried and brutal. In between the beginning and the end there are all these memories, which don’t just drift away and die. Everything that I am has part of you in it. Everyone we love changes us irrevocably, but I wanted it to end with you. 

Between us there has always been the years, there has always been the love — and still, there are always the hours. I’m a selfish idiot, and maybe I’m crazy and stupid, I know that, 

but I love you

332: where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about

… we’ve got so much to do, but only so many hours in a day. And we can dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true.

I have decided to update this post everyday for a week with the things that make me happy everyday. It is time for some POSITIVITY! Also, strange how they say people only blog when they are either 1) very depressed 2) very free 3) very busy. I suppose this must be true, because I do it all the time. 

330: one night in beijing

Things begin, things end, things begin anew. The logic is the same and it is always the same cycle, and everything appears to be a game. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play. You win again, or you lose. There are never grey areas; everything is one or the other. Still you play. Everything defines itself by something else, and when there are only two alternatives there is always something that has to give. Rarely are we faced with more, and like most life-changing decisions, there is really only one way to properly go about it, which is to say, not at all. Nobody thinks. Nobody cares. We remember the times that we sat together by the riverside, thinking about our lives, wondering where we would go. We eventually came to the conclusion that there was nothing we could do; this is the way it is, this is the flow. If we make a mistake, so be it. It is our life to live. We win, we play, we lose. Everything is a risk and we pursue the exciting rather than the familiar, because we are free, because we are young, because we can. It is the reason why nobody turns back, why nobody wants to be faced with regrets, why everyone looks forward and keeps going, because the past is painful and hard to bear. There are only two alternatives. And yet everything in the present must also have a past, in the same way that it must also have a future. It may not be better, it may not be worse,  just — different. And then how much remains the same is the scariest question, because it is possible to come full circle and realise one has never moved from the same spot. It may be the same as watching someone sit quietly by your side, not saying anything, but understanding. It may be that someone’s back is turned away from you, someone who doesn’t look at you anymore, who doesn’t say anything and will never say anything anymore. It may be the case that having someone is like not having anyone at all; or that we are faced with the ghosts from our past all the time, pretending all the while that someone is there when they are not. 

329: distance has no way of making love understandable

One year ago I wrote about winter. It was exactly a year ago, give or take a day. It was after exams and I was emotional, I was high, I was thinking about a lot of things. It was a year ago, and I made my choice. The other entry’s title seems strangely and funnily ominous now. It’s funny how my feelings haven’t changed, not at all. But people do, and then I remember that I am not enough, not anymore.

It’s snowing outside and I wish I was warmer and had less work to do. I wish for your sake, that I could be happier in this silence. I am trying to be strong, and give you space, because it’s not my world anymore, but it is so hard. It is unbelievably hard.

327: 永远高唱我歌

What somebody said to me today; it was the nicest thing someone’d said to me in a long time.