“We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery."
We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out.
We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball.
We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all.
We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
- The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
“Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.”
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
this is perhaps how i feel these days. or perhaps it was already there all along and only became more pronounced over the years. i dont understand why this anxiety grabs hold of me when the occasion for conversation comes around. it seems to victimize everyone. there comes a point in the conversation where the fear sets in and i work feverishly to find a topic.. just in case. like a score card i have to slot into memory banks to caution against the looming, awkward break.
it happens with everyone, even with people i'm very fond of and am pleased to run into. it goes something like this :
"HEY! LONG TIME NO SEE!"
"OMG HI!"
"how are you?!"
"oh i'm not doing much these days, army you know... what about you?"
"it feels like you've been in army forever! i'm blah blah blah"
i smile. a brittle smile.
and i can't think of anything else to say. once the pleasantries are over there's a pause. a very pregnant pause. too audible to ignore. and once you try again, the cracks are obvious and a flimsy coat of effort just falls flat. i try very hard to keep that awkwardness at bay but the more i try the more it rears up.
i am genuinely pleased to see the person - the spark flares, incandescent initially but sputters and stutters its way into a slow, feeble death. the other person is perhaps left confused, memories of good times, jovial times swirl up but are dissipated by the faltering reception they've encountered. it's come to the point wherei'm afraid to be left alone with most people. even in camp, i actively ensure that i do not end up doing my duty with another individual. i'll trade, barter, sweet talk others, angling it just so that i either end up alone or there's company. i hope no one notices. but inevitably, even the newcomers recede away from me and i know i'm the one building up the Impenetrable Zone, ever so steadily. three people's fine. just not two.
even with writing i'm struggling. recently i had the opportunity to read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. and his writing was so alluring, executed with such precision, that i'm left in a stupor, as if i myself had been in love with the Lisbon sisters. perhaps i am trying to see if i can effect a semblance to his style but it is not even a pale shadow of Mr.Eugenides'.
i just told nick that i don't think i even know how it feels like to be romantic anymore. it's being gnawed out of me, the bit that concocts the ingredients a heart needs to go on.
now i am so out of touch with something so pleasant and simple that i wonder what we had to talk about at all. i wonder if i can even fill up ten minutes worth of talk time now let alone five hours.
"Prudie had a bit of lipstick on her teeth, or else it was wine. Jocelyn wanted to lean across and wipe it off with a napkin, the way she did when Sahara needed tidying. But she restrained herself; Prudie didn’t belong to her.
The fire sculpted Prudie’s face, left the hollows of her cheeks hollow, brightened her deep-set eyes. She wasn’t pretty like Allegra, but she was attractive in an interesting way. She drew your eye."
- The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
"Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between "perfection of the life, or of the work"). When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic."
Keep still so I can find you at your whim. Breathe slowly so I can breathe with you.
Leave me alone, We all want to feel at home. Find me sleeping, My inner dialogue's a drone. Keep...
Don't cry for me, I can't either. I can't weep. Remember these moments, They're all we have And all I can keep. Caught in a lie I want You to keep me to yourself.
Keep running deep under my skin I want to shed. Don't keep it in keep it on the thinnest of all threads- And I won't break you, no, no...
*
for Gigi and Jiankai.
i cannot honestly say that i knew Jiankai all that well. the number of times we've hung out could probably be counted with the fingers on my hands. but he was markedly different from Gigi's former boyfriends - more studious, more quiet, more serious, more intent on helping Gigi stay on the stable path. i last saw him on the Tuesday before he died. we were having a birthday dinner for Van at Saveur. i hadn't expect Jiankai to be amongst our number, but there he was, clad in a intricately patterned cardigan. he told me he got it from Bangkok when i admired it. all throughout our dinner, Gigi and Jiankai were loving, but never overtly blatant or in your face about it. when i ordered the foie gras, she consulted him, but he demurred. each action was gentle and considerate, you could see it.
i'll remember that we were all about to dive into the citrus-based dessert but jokingly held back for Jiankai to snap a shot of it so he could upload it onto Instagram. he was always the photographer on the occasions that he joined us. i dont know if he ever got round to uploading that photo but i'll remember that he was there with us that night. i don't know if you were unhappy or troubled, Jiankai - you seemed the picture of the devoting partner ever ready to place a steadying hand around Gigi, and i'm truly sorry if i was too dense or inattentive to pick up on it.
but you were there, on monday morning, when i had to go back to camp. the irrevocable fact that you were gone, gone - it wandered round my head bitterly, round and round. i don't know why, but it kicked in harder on monday morning than on saturday, when we first heard the news, disbelieving, or on sunday night, when we attended the funeral.
it seemed the world ought to be suspended. one never thinks such matters would ever occur. it was something to read about in the papers, to sympathise from afar, to mull over temporarily. with one flip of the page, the news goes on to the next tragedy occurring in Uganda, in Somalia, in some far away place that while occupying the same planet, seemed alien and sequestered, contained to that very page.
i found myself fretting over what to wear to your funeral, Jiankai, if you can comprehend that. i was having difficulty in finding something black to wear. while i was trying on clothes, the thought came suddenly - WHAT WAS I DOING?
after all, what were clothes compared to a permanent absence of someone you knew? a person was dead, was irretrievably gone, gone to where no one really knew - how could i still function normally, still ascribe meaning to such mundane matters?
even now, i am unable to cry. perhaps it's because i do not know you well enough, Jiankai. i don't get the chance to know you anymore, except perhaps through Gigi, who has started to share with us more anecdotes of the times you two spent together, of your habits, your tics. it is a filtered knowledge we've gained about you, that is true, and i do not think we will ever get to know the entire truth. perhaps you would not have wished us to know either. but thank you for being kind to Gigi, for loving her. in return, we got to accept your friendship, brief as it was. i do not know of your musical tastes, though i could probably hazard a guess or two, but i hope you like the song. it came through the night we first knew, entitled "Track 2". i was desperate to uncover the name, and when i eventually unearthed the name and googled the lyrics, it seemed suitable. i'm sorry i can't give you more, but whenever i hear this song, i will hold it to your name.
please, rest in peace and do not worry, we will take care of Gigi in your stead. i hope you are happy and free on the other side. there's not much else to be said, but thank you for extending a hand of friendship to me.
you are the silence in between what i thought and what i said
no light, no light - Florence + the Machine
everything is wrong. i am well aware of my severe limitations. i am just particularly in love with the lines that nick presented; the hands have it all - as a child's when asleep, a tender, unbridled innocence unfurling, the unconscious seeking another. the heather gray sweater falling away, permitting a bashful sliver of skin to permeate. the ruffled hair, the untameable brow. it's one of my favourite photos of nick shot by ban.
every time i think i'm done, he reels me in.
"The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage."
1984, George Orwell
"Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man."
a quote from Aung San Suu Kyi in Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin
Sunday, July 8, 2012
"We got to see how truly unimaginative our suburb was, everything laid out on a grid whose bland uniformity the trees had hidden, and the old ruses of differentiated architectural styles lost their power of make us feel unique. The Kriegers' Tudor, the Buells' French colonial, the Bucks' imitation Frank Lloyd Wright - all just baking roofs."
the virgin suicides, jeffrey eugenides
Friday, July 6, 2012
"... and for a time the tree stood blighted, trying to raise its stunted arms, a creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along."
