at odd moments i catch myself surveying the scene in the hopes of finding a potential someone.

then, in the heady mob of heaving bodies, one feels inexplicably lonesome and for lack of a better word, empty. this was not the way i'd envisioned myself; it was plain old fun, surely. the music inane though irresistible, the body relinquishing the week's stress. but each trip to the dance floor harbored an irrational grain of hope, always. i don't want to keep returning to a scene like this over and over again. demeaning. contrived. impossible. 


horrific to think about - would my years ahead be filled with more of this? 

because it always starts the same, prolonging the wistful hope over the duration of the night, and inevitably ending with a leaden heart that implode a little more each time.

happiness is many things.

it is going grocery shopping with the partner.

a homecooked meal with everyone present.

that everyone finds time for each other.

watching your sister grow up (though this one's a double-edged sword.. i just want her to retain a child's innocence but it slips away more and more each year)

reading a really good book filled with sentences that tongue your soul just right

doing nothing, simply lying in bed, head on his chest and listening to his heartbeat.

perhaps happiness is really just knowing that you have someone with which to bury your soul and all its myriad of troubles, worries, secrets.

we bled into the same pool of tears, pain dissolving into collective memory borne by each heart. 

We’re always looking. It’s human nature to want to be found.


Ryan O'Connell, How To Get Rejected By Your Crush


his most acute article yet. it's my life buoy these days - thought catalog. 


in other earth-shattering news, i'm very pleased with my new loans from the library. whatever singapore's faults may be, its library system is inviolable. 


i'd spent all day at work feeling bitter and longing to come home to expel it all out through writing but i'm not in the mood for inspiration. i'm in the mood to be mollycoddled and told there's nothing wrong with me. i am angry. i am bitter. i wish i could simply have all the wonderful books in the world drop into my lap and they'd be ones that i instantly love and they'd tell me that despite this, despite all the crap that has transpired, they'd be my temporary refuge from solitude's insanity. a temporary refuge is better than no refuge at all. 

no, i won't

the jesus and mary chain - just like honey

for you, 

i'll be your plastic toy

i'll be your plastic toy

for you

i've been thinking of this song for the entire day.

... passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud's sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. but now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. mrs.dalloway, virginia woolf.


who's afraid of virginia woolf? i certainly am. i'm still trying mrs.dalloway.

never let me go

my baby sister hanxin and i, she (then) at two and i fourteen. this was taken at Goldcoast during our family vacation. i even remember that jumper i'm wearing - it's Topman. those days when there was only one in town and that was located at Wisma Atria. i thought it was the absolute bomb then.

anyway. now, nine years later, i sent her off at the airport today; she's flying to Australia once more, only this time we're not accompanying her - it's for a school enrichment course. oh the kids these days.

funny thing is, Ivan revived that photo of the fourteen year old me just today, of all days. oh ivan. he'll always be that boy that the fourteen year old me thought of as a demi-god.

nearly a decade has passed and we've progressed from Friendster to Facebook but he's the only boy i've never met in real life. we talked on the phone for well over a year, hours upon hours, every single day, a nightly ritual neither of us neglected. yet we never officially met. oh he did spot me occasionally, he being from Anglican High, which is all of three minutes' walk from my place. but i was never as lucky to spot him. omnipotent and omnipresent. hence the demi-god thing.

the nightly ritual was shattered when Ryker came into my life. if there was one thing i regretted, it's the loss of a faithful companion on the phone. i really miss that, talking for hours into the wee hours, every night, despite waking up at six am for yet another day of secondary school (the horror.)

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.

i'm petrified of boring the person at the other end of the line. i crave it though. i crave the connection, the relationship, the person. it occupies my thoughts - no, it would be more accurate to say that it invades and monopolises my thoughts ruthlessly, ceaselessly.

i don't know what to do about it.

"But I still have to face the hours, don't I? I mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that..."

yes you guessed it. it's The Hours again. always.

If I were thinking clearly, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat of my extinction, I live with it too.

The Hours

meandering

Nude Study

When your body and my body
Lie together under a white sheet
Your head on my arm
Your leg thrown over my leg
The whole long continent of you
The pale ridgeline of your ribcage and hip and thigh
Neighbor to me
There is nothing that needs to be explained
Or accomplished, the world is at rest and complete
And though
We drift apart in the eddies of the day
We will find our way back
To the slight hollows that mark the place
Where we lie now, astonished, saying nothing.

Garrison Keillor


this morning i stumbled upon his journal. he dances a beautiful dance; i found myself enraptured in a thunderous reverie. an oxymoron to be sure, but the silence that fell upon me ached to shout of approval, of admiration, of agreeability, as Miss Austen would say.


"violently in love", wrote Miss Austen. could that be considered to be another oxymoron? 


i am reading Pride & Prejudice for the third time, and have rented the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley for the weekend. i do think she makes a rather apt Elizabeth Bennet, not incapable of that vivacious wit and "fine eyes", that so captivated Mr.Darcy.


on a side note, i found both book and film versions of The Jane Austen Book club to be charming. highly recommended for fans and non-fans of Jane Austen. non-fans shall soon be tempted to pick up an Austen and be transported to somewhere slightly delirious and magical.


he is so very beautiful in so many ways. i am listening to his selection of songs as i write this and it couldn't be any more agreeable to the soul.