Hey, All

For every person who has ever, in the depths of a fight that has gone on seemingly forever, spat "times infinity" at the end of a statement, there should be another who gently condescends: "times love". Because how can a million poets and novelists romanticize the word without knowing it in both comfort and spite? In tennis when neither player has a point it is known as "love all". Zero all. Zero = love = infinity because that how long it lasts.  

The Long Way Home

Loss stirs a heartache
I finally reach home, past
Evanescent storms

Thank You For Forgiveness

I wonder at the miracle that is the relief when you call me after days of silence with not a single trace of bitterness or resentment lingering long in your voice. I listen while you divulge your secret fears and feelings to me just like old times, but do not speak for a while in response when you ask me what I think. Because I was under the impression you might never speak to me again, but here you were calling me on a Friday afternoon asking me to listen to you ranting about yourself. For once I am glad to hear the very sound of your voice.
And you seem upset. You have been speaking in words too fast, too rapid and too tear-strained for me to catch, so I whisper to you to slow down, calm down, a million times over. Eventually your breathing begins to deepen and not catch midway down, and I can practically hear the flow of tears drying up and being wiped away by your ever-callous hands. Then, in this moment of silence, I speak and tell you I have missed you.
I never realized till this day that quiet words spoken into telephone receivers could ever echo so greatly once repeated.

Fool Again

I admit that too long I have used lies as excuses, tried to fool people around me. Try to make them believe I am more than all I really am because maybe that's what I wanted in the first place. But I haven't become that imaginary alter-ego who owns the life I want to live. I haven't managed it because it takes a strong will to face the music and I haven't got one of those either.
Occasionally I take a break from lying and begin spouting various words that sometimes impress people but I realize more often irritate them. Perhaps that's a self-deprecatory comment but I'd like to believe that by sometime soon I will be able to make a statement out clear that I mean fully, with no hidden meanings shyly staying undercover. Incognito. Beneath the sound waves of my voice float so many layers of meanings. And when you begin lying you don't stop so all you do eventually is confuse your lies with the truth.
There is a certain pity in my own gaze when I glance in the mirror. It is the kind of pity one uses when looking at someone who has only been trying to fool herself.

Tightrope Walker

A little spurt becomes a stream or an ocean of inspiration into which you are suddenly but not unpleasantly plunged. The next thing you know, you begin following this stream wherever it will go, doing a great many things you may later find extremely foolish in order to keep with the whim of the moment.
Every little thing from a single word from someone you secretly admire or are jealous of to a single failure on your own part sends you off on another wild goose chase. Only you aren't chasing birds of any kind - you're chasing the success they tell you waits like light at the end of the tunnel. I tell you that that could just be the train racing towards you poised for murder.
And you realize with time that chasing time isn't the hardest thing to do on earth. It's balance, maintaining balance, that is truly difficult. Because you must have enough control to neither take one side nor the other but to take the middle path. Yet don't sit on the fence - the aim is to be strong enough to walk upon it, with your head held high and nothing to stop you from continuing on. The aim is to grow and be yourself no matter the winds that blow and the winds that try to change and erode you. Ignore the itches and ignore the sweat contaminating your brow. Ignore the rains when they come or at most see them as blessings to wish you good luck upon your lonely way.

How Many Times

I want to be the one to tell you it's alright, it's okay, when you wake up screaming in the middle of the night and you're drenched in cold sweat but more importantly drowning in old memories of the black and white that lived long ago. Those days are extinct now but your recounts of them live on despairingly despite your continued efforts to forget. I pity that you suffer now from the atrocities of other people, other men under orders from their superiors up there in ivory towers who see nothing but what they themselves receive because long ago they realized how easy it was to fool. I want to be the one to stroke your midnight black hair back from your face and rub your back soothingly as if you were a child again because even if I spend the rest of my days with you it seems it wouldn't be enough not being there for you. And I know it seems strange but I wish your skeptical nature would accept and believe just this once to let me love you. I know you've been hurt before and all that other shit everybody uses as lame excuses to avoid commitment. I know that you don't lie until you want to conceal and not to deceive but please conceive of the idea that some people do still have happy ever afters. I can say this despite having been knocked to the ground and having shattered; having loved and lost: but all that matters now is you and me, and us. And I want to let you know that in terms of math, I've never passed exam when I'm still clinging on to the idea that you and I added together should equal one since we are the same, inside. I want to touch you and melt the wall of ice you've built around yourself because I understand you only erected it to see who would be brave enough to knock it down. Does it scare you that despite your valiant efforts I know so much about you? It scares me to know that there is still more to you, that I have barely even scraped the surface in all my actions and words. So upon my farewell I hereby bequeath to you all that I have and all I have given to let you know:
I want you and I love you.

Viva la Vida.

Put Your Hands Together

I feel sorry as I watch the others rehearse that our audience on show night will never know these memories as they observe the polished final product. I feel hurt and pained at the knife needed to scratch away the surface to reveal the diamond beneath. I am glad that we and no other group of people have come together and have created something out of nothing. A certain comradeship undeniably glints under the stage lights, obvious in the way we speak together even when opposing and the similar fashion in which we shiver from the cold and from the sheer adrenaline of having a time, though meager, in which we can speak and people will listen - although of course the aim was never to have people listen. The aim was always to simply put up a good show and entertain people, satisfying yourself. And it will not ever make a difference how loud the applause is or whether you receive a standing ovation - it will always have been about the root.

We Steal

The Kite Runner contains a glorious passage depicting a great many moments of backstabbing, of lying, cheating... Stealing. We
steal things so often we barely even recognize the crime. No copyright infringement intended here, but this is golden to
describe the current situation with me.

"...there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness... There is no act more wretched than stealing."

Past

OUT of the blue you attempt to make a contact. I realize now that despite past promises to pacify and reassure we have reached the point where the nickname I vaguely recall once labelling is a tongue-twister to me, and it's sound hanging in the oppressive atmosphere rings of guilt like bellchimes in an abandoned old church. I am sorry for everything but I am glad that we are.

Human Error

I envy and pity you the ties that bind you, that may very well break you. I am glad and sorry that you aren't aware of the danger posed to yourself by allowing someone this close to you. I wonder at the ease with which you whip out your phone or allow your picture to be taken because that's leaving a memory behind in permanent inky pixels. I hobble along behind your laughter, face turned to the ground and smiling to it instead for the scene I see before me. Your gazes have summed each other up then elaborated again, a stretch-release-stretch-release-stretch motion allowing maximum knowledge of the other. You joke around like this is a competition about who's the best comedian, and then you ask me to join in.
I gaze so deep into the distance you assume I am looking away; you let it go instinctively and safe again I pray: it's alright, it's okay - ask me about tomorrow? I'm only here today.

Industrialization

How do you still call creativity what is is when you gauge it with criteria in rubrics and try to plot out your world into a couple of graphs, try to summarize it, oversimplify it, into nothing but a couple of tables exploding with listless numbers leading identical lives watching people gawk in wonder at them. When actually these people could be watching the real world around them, maybe even changing, affecting the real world, instead.
Peel your eyes off your damned computer and phone screens and attempt to realize that while the city's lights are never put out, the sunlight you see now must be treasured.

From Mo To You

HOLDING my hand used to be every time we went out together. You gave me a fresh start; you were this flower of a body, this poem of a life... And sometime later in this life of mine, all your Mama's going to be able to give you back is this crumpled old shell, this liver spotted face of a mask hiding what lies undulating gently beneath - a blemished, scarred and fractured soul tired of tasting nothing but bitterness but afraid of straying away from pain, because at some point in time I realized that when you have nothing else to tell you that you're still alive, that you're still breathing despite no longer having any reason to. And angry. Yes, angry. Angry, at myself, for just not being able, anymore.

At this point in time, I turn to you, my child, you who yet relies on me with the ease of taking things for granted, because your heart has never had to be picked off the ground in bits and pieces then glued back  together so it looks quite the same but has definitely changed. Because even though I try to let you feel and taste and touch and smell the world you have not really seen what kind of world it is. And so I ask you now, maybe because I want to have the luxury of being selfish for just a moment, today, and ask you in that voice you surely find annoying, leaning towards you in that way you surely find mere pretending: "Are you going to be around, when I can no longer stand by myself, to take my hand, hold it tight, and not let go?"

Clear

ephemeral clouds
darken my old backyard view
then leave, defeated

Carry On

When everything becomes a competition do you forget what you are fighting for? Because you're so blinded by single-mindedness, do you tend to forget the reason you started the whole fiasco in the first place? Originally it may have been a good reason but after a while is it less about that far-off prize they keep telling you to believe in and more about the little battles along the way? About the many other people running the same stupid race.
When you think about the material wealth you enjoy you wonder what is really important. Living life in the fast lane shouldn't become an excuse for not stopping to smell the roses. If you travel long enough on a highway you're bound to get tired of breathing in the toxic fumes fed into your aching lungs by jealousy, hatred, fear, anger, hurt - all the backstabbing and unseen glares that result from feelings like those. You're bound to die one day from it though you deny the cause of your departure was the very thing you felt kept you alive. Because that's what being a workaholic is like. It seems once you give it up there's no going back. Lose your momentum and lose your life - that scrap of a consolation prize you call a life that you could easily have brought in for an exchange had you just been a little bit more brave.
And maybe it sounds pessimistic but at the end of all that what have you got left? When your last breath had abandoned your empty shell of a tortured body what have you got left? The knowledge that memories of you remain in the minds of some, at least.
Whether they be good ones or bad ones, it's up to you now.

Girls

YOU know, 'princess' used to be a compliment. Used to be that hearing someone call you princess was just the tip of the iceberg. The final piece to a jigsaw puzzle that without it would have made sense but always seem incomplete. Perhaps the mere word, the suggestion that a special someone, at the very least of all people on the planet, considers us unique and beautiful and almost like royalty itself, is the thing that makes those normally fair cheeks to go a secret abashed red. Maybe it's the immediate reaction of the thought that we are definitely unworthy of such a name, that a word like that is wasted on us when it could spend its airbourne life depicting someone or something else more. Although of course oftentimes when we make self-derogratory comments like those, most of the time we mean the exact opposite of what we say; as if matters of the heart must go through an inevitable, inescapable translating filter that reverses everything so the words we speak come out warped and yet seem true.
Just like the words you, yes you, speak sometimes, like at times when you call us 'princess'.

Unscene

A lonely instrument, hoarse from hours of desperate over-playing, weaves its solitary thread into the night. Only occasional does its murky iridescence get perceived by a casual observer, a passerby - and even then most would turn away after a moment's careless reconnaissance. But the very soundwaves that grace the air are enough to travel the length of the difference in social level, because the occasional dreamer who walks past will recognize them as works of an artiste worthy of being recognized.   

A Beautiful Mess

You've got the best of both worlds
You're the kind of girl who can take down a man
And lift him back up again

You are strong but you're needy, Humble but you're greedy
Based on your body language and shorty cursive I've been reading
Your style is quite selective
But your mind is rather reckless
Well, I guess it just suggests that this is just what happiness is

And what a beautiful mess this is
It's like picking up trash in dresses

Well, it kind of hurts when the kind of words you write
And kind of turn themselves into knives
And don't mind my nerve you can call it fiction
'Cause I like being submerged in your contradictions, dear
'Cause here we are, here we are

Although you were biased I love your advice
Your comebacks they're quick and probably
Have to do with your insecurities
There's no shame in being crazy depending on how you take these
Words they're paraphrasing;
This relationship we're staging

And what a beautiful mess this is
It's like we're picking up trash in dresses

Well, it kind of hurts when the kind of words you say
Kind of turn themselves into blades
And the kind and courteous is a life I've heard
But it's nice to say that we played in the dirt
'Cause here, here we are, here we are

Here we are, here we are
Here we are, here we are
Here we are, here we are
Here we are, we're still here

And what a beautiful mess this is
It's like taking a guess when the only answer is yes

And through timeless words and priceless pictures
We'll fly like birds not of this earth
And tides they turn and hearts disfigure
But that's no concern when we're wounded together
And we tore our dresses and stained our shirts
But it's nice today -
Oh, the wait was so worth it...

- Jason Mraz

A Little Like Spaghetti

I used to have this teacher in Primary One. She was my Chinese teacher and my form teacher that year. I suppose she didn't consider me a bad student - just one who didn't apply herself enough. I managed to top my class in Chinese every test - if you counted from the bottom. She didn't want to force a young kid to study or anythng I suppose but in some ways she tried to motivate me.
I remember mostly the times she came so close to scolding me that her face went all red and she had to hold her breath before letting it out in one huge sigh as if to release all the tension in her body. And the times afterwards that she personally volunteered - or rather, took it upon herself - to retie my hair which has always been and will always be in a state of disarray comparable to an estate recently ambushed by a mega hurricane. Her hands gently combing my hair together and pulling it into two slender ponytails (a puerile style I didn't mind then) seem to flutter even now, gracing these locks which by now have replaced the actual ones those fingers once condescended themselves to. And it's at times of reminisce like this that I recall the real weight her work-calloused digits have carried in my life and in their own. For she must have worked long and hard to see potential in a little girl when everyone else just saw trouble. Trouble in the form of unstoppable daydreams and absentminded spells. Trouble in the form of stubbornness and immaturity. Trouble in the form of messy hair and unkept fingernails and generally the impression of stupidity.
But I think back now and I wonder if even she will be able to recognize what her little mess has become.

Climate Change

He notices the lamps had been left out in the rain and are now both dripping with water. He stops and asks if he thinks it's alright.
Yes, it is.
Solar-powered lamps. Meant, destined to absorb sunlight.
You leave them out in the morning to spend a quiet day absorbing copious amounts of sunshine. How are you supposed to know whether it's going to rain or not?
You can't get sun without the rain.
You can't take heat and not feel the pain.
But when all else is lost you may just have found your name.

Suffocate

I started out optimistic, I guess. But when the going began getting tough I didn't and couldn't get tough. So now that maybe leaves me
stranded. Marooned on an island by myself sustained only by what little energy I can make for myself out of a hope kept burning by the turning of these waves and the imagination that perhaps they are getting bigger and higher because a ship is coming by to my rescue, and not because they want to drown me, as well. I'm grasping for seconds and groping for hours, hoping for days and longing for weeks.
Sometimes when I speak I no longer hear a voice outside of myself because it's being pushed down by all the other ones in a crowd.

Grow

THINGS caught in the middle of growing aren't ever perfect. They have their extreme faults and weaknesses which are noticeable right away even as these problems are sorted out gradually before one's eyes. But perhaps it is in these tiny faults that we find the kind of perfection we were seeking to discover all along. This perfection isn't the flawlessness of the surface or the achievement of precise ratios; it is a measure of how much beauty we can find in ugly, how much ugly we can find in things people would normally, judgementally assume beautiful after but a moment's careless glance. This kind of beauty is the kind of impermanence of form brought about by permanent changes continuously made to improve and the prove.
Plants can seem to change and grow overnight, sprouting a new creeper or the beginnings of a new leaf, the first signs of an approaching flower bud. Maybe if we bothered to look more carefully these changes wouldn't surprise us as much. But somehow plants manage to surprise me everyday when I look outside my window and wonder how they can hold on strongly, trusting a steadfast earth to stay and nourish them. They surprise me when they do not look as though they are crying even when the great thunderclouds begin rolling in and making a ruckus, squeezing and wringing their joyous rain out to moisten the thirsty ground. They surprise me when trees always seem to hold their branches up into the air like they have always known that they will someday grow tall enough to reach whatever they are trying to reach and in the meantime they must keep their arms outstretched in anticipation of a bright new future.
And children. Children aren't quiet at all. They won't bother to attempt to mask their own faults; they will crave to know their world and gaze up at night onto the universe of stars their parents got painted onto their bedroom ceilings, wondering how come when they try to grab ahold of the stars in the pond out back they just shatter away. Children won't hesitate in silence to laugh or cry or sing or dance because to them the context doesn't mean a thing: situations are for grown-ups to be trapped by, and they will do as they please even if it may seem inappropriate because who else would break the ice?
Perhaps these things gradually begin to sound like mistakes, but even if they are, these little things know in their heart of hearts that they only have to ask to be forgiven, and thanked.
And perhaps this is why we remember our time spent growing and changing the most. We praise it, we reminisce about it, we envy it and we yearn for it. The faults we have in our growing will not remain in the corners of our memories but become but the shadows and echoes of a time long past.
And when I think about these times I wonder if history will repeat itself, again.

Move

I've spent almost my entire life trying to make life work as if it were a book, where the characters have their good and bad moments and there's always a decisive ending: happy or sad, and where everything is either black or white with no grey in-between to be confused by and to get lost in. I've tried to imagine that sometimes things do happen like they do in fairytales, or musicals - like when the two main leads have one of those touching (and cliched) moment together basically reveling in each other's loving arms and one starts singing first the other one always knows what to say. In real life we know what to say so little of the time. And even when we do know oftentimes in order to gain things for ourselves we don't say what we should.
And time flies but somehow there's always enough time in books and movies for the starcrossed lovers to make up or die a tragic death and be together after it; there's always time in stories for the heroes to save the world while fighting off bad guys against all odds; there's always time to accomplish the impossible. And I wonder why if humans are so smart why don't they write themselves a realistic situation, write it so well they could disappear into it and never have to face the challenges of old age and everyday struggles again. In books people only get sick with terminal diseases because no author would write an illness in for no reason. And if we are looking for some form of escapism why do we write ourselves so many spare fantasies to imagine ourselves into, instead of writing realities to imagine ourselves out of?
Things don't happen like they do in books and movies we must carry on even when it seems that the ideal ending has passed us without stopping to give itself to us. We must try until they bear some vague semblance to the kind of happy ending we would like, or at least imagine that we have what we cannot, for another day or another life.
Things don't happen like they do in books and movies. There's no use pretending or spending too much time pondering over what it would be like if they did. So we must learn to make things happen for ourselves. So even when they really don't turn out well, it wouldn't be because we didn't try.

Cold; So Cold

SHE only replied:
"It's like how there are no ice cubes that never melt."