you buy the flat for its sea view.

you show this new home to your daughter.

she asks you what’s in the big sea?

nothing to fear, you say.

cutter suction dredgers. marine barges.

bulldozers and dump trucks.

though there are some stray fish with a persistent cough.

some resilient terumbu karang

latched on to water pipes. trying

to use the arteries of the city for their own ragged breath.

your daughter wakes up with nightmares that first week.

in the jugs of water in the kitchen

she says there is something swimming through.

and the walls. long and slithering

branches climb, twist, contort into great

towering mangroves. engulf the house in a blanket of darkness.

then sometimes scuttling across the floor.

tap tap tap. occasionally a whoosh.

like a bird’s wings zipping past her ears.

she refuses to sleep alone. asks if this house is haunted.

this beautiful, expensive flat with a sea view.

weeks later she tells you that they have voices too.

they whisper in garbled tones and pained gasps.

spotted fish that drowned because they breathed in

more sand particles than oxygen. a lumbering mangrove tree

clutching severed limbs in his hands. blood trickling and forming a pool

at his limping feet. corals with fingers reaching towards the sun

but meeting only thin streaks of light clouded by sedimentation.

whole reefs buried alive in the excavation process.

she tells you these stories with a hard, penetrating gaze.

you tell her furiously

we did it for you. for more flats with a view.

across the sea there is always a faint sound of drilling

like a first newborn cry of nascent islands.

to house not people but power

energy, they say.

this cry unto the world accompanied by the shuffling of ghosts

(trees and reefs and amphibians and mammals)

dragging their maimed bodies into your flat with a view

of massacre across the sea.

your flat, now an asylum-seekers refuge.

they join the ones that moved in when this place was built on

reclaimed land. a home built on a home.

soon you spend more time outside your flat with a view.

you come home to a daughter laying out tubs of water

for the spirits of crabs and fish to swim in.

scattering soil for the hutan bakau to rest

and the lamun laut’s ghostly tendrils to take root.

why should they be staying in your flat with a view?

you ask your daughter. she asks why we should

be staying in their home.

so she builds a little ecosystem filled

with ghosts of the past. constructs a tomb

of apologies. asks you to help make room for them.

these ghosts are as much yours as they are mine,

your daughter murmurs.

this is but a weak offering of accountability

made sour because what is lost

cannot come back to life again.

you can’t come back home

without insulting some wallowing spirit or sleeping phantom.

you ask her furiously if she’d rather have displaced people

or displaced animals.

she says we’re all refugees in this flat with a view anyways.

and soon enough there’s a twenty year old asking you what the twenties are like. you want to tell them the world is a beautiful and smelly oyster but instead you smile with a wistfulness you hadn’t noticed you’d carried and you just tell them these will be the best years of your life. you are telling the truth, but you don’t elaborate on the details.

she could not find her hair tie. I’ve lost more than ten in

the past two weeks alone, she thinks.

She walks to the cafe. Scans the streets. It infuriates her that 

she’s never seen a hair tie lying in an unassuming crevice,

nor on the road, nor in a mall, nor 

any of the places where hair ties could end up.

I can’t be the only one losing hair ties, she sighs. 

She wonders, annoyed, where they all go.

She sees the homeless man

whose cardboard says “ex-forces looking for

a home for the night”. He sleeps with his chin against 

his chest. Warms himself with his own body in this winter. 

The busking man playing a saxophone on the street.

Careless whisper and the likes of it. Humming a tune of love to

passer-bys who do not stop to listen nor

give him money. She hurries by.  

A man in a suit. It is wrinkled

as he rushes past with his Americano. 

She wonders if he knows that his pant leg is still 

in his sock, and why no one has told him. 

She thinks of her cold bed absent-mindedly while listening to

I’ll have to say I love you in a song on her AirPods.

Before she leave she uses her phone

to check if there’s spinach in her teeth. 

She glances skittishly back at the cashier. 

Wonders why he drew a heart on her coffee cup. 

Her stare is a plea, almost. 

When she leaves, her hair falls on her neck, itchy. 

If she’s lost her hair ties surely 

other people have as well. Maybe all our

hair ties end up in the same void. 

No matter where it all goes. She concludes that

they must lose their hair ties as well. 

We’re not all that different, she affirms herself. 

On the way home from the cafe, the homeless man

tells her that her bag is open. 

He tells her that a hair tie has fallen out too. 

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To centre a piece about cathedrals on asymmetry seems to be horribly missing the point. Symmetry is axiomatic for the beauty of these churches after all. It is the six disciples on the left and right of the doors, marble pillars that bow directly towards another in a perfect circle. Symmetry that, if folded in half, would fit like a perfect puzzle – this is the formula of beauty. .

In my time in Europe, however, I’ve realised that the beauty of these churches is not underpinned by its intended symmetry. The wandering tourist that stands at the centre of the church, enveloped by the wooden pews on both sides, captures the symmetry with their camera and here thus is beauty bottled in their picture. It is less publicised that the wandering tourist soon meanders off to one of the wooden pews and heaves a sigh and transforms into the weary worshipper. It is this view that visitors spend more time in – an asymmetrical one. 

2 

I often wander into these cathedrals to escape the chaotic streets of vendors and cars and buskers and reality; I heave a sigh of relief when I walk into those doors. My first offering is thus fatigue; already I am worshipping with injustice. I have paused five seconds to crane my neck up at a glorious exterior that glistens in a setting sun, cast an apathetic eye and nod. Maybe I offer a that’s so pretty. Already I have ignored the saints that pose together with their stone cloth draped over their shoulders, or a depiction of the resurrection carved to the slightest detail of the hole in Jesus’ left rib. Glory is etched into every geometrical pattern, carved flower, painted recollection, whispering to me to caress each curve and crevice with my gaze, to draw my finger over the undulating ebb and flow of marble. Instead, I cast a fleeting glance of neglect.

Inside, I stare at statues and try to read plagues with names of kings written in alphabets I recognise but semantics that slip through my fingers; I gaze at hyper-realistic paintings with mother Mary’s bright blue robe and realise I don’t know which scene in the Bible it is depicting. The artist’s hand is out of reach even though he has severed his fingers and soul to paint this. The sculptor’s loving caress has breathed life into this block of carrara marble but I gaze blankly into the eyes of the prisoner that he has freed. All I have is a vague sense that there is glory here, at the tip of my fingers, though what is glorious I am still unsure.

There is more, I know, if only I could stay here for an hour, two, maybe a few days. If Michelangelo spent four years painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, shouldn’t I spend double the time gazing into the eyes of the 343 figures that are frozen in paint? What I should be offering is a plea – drown me in these scenes of genesis and death and resurrection; encompass me in the antiquity etched into every corner of this church. Instead, this glory is swallowed in my packed itinerary; I am sampling glory.

3

Every church has a different atmosphere; a culmination of its history. The Greek monasteries leave me feeling disturbed; I think of how the Ottomans brought Christianity and created churches, the Persians brought Islam and converted those churches into mosques. Now I stand in a place that feels more like a temple but pictures familiar saints. I am standing on the consequence; the liminality; the complex and unseen battle of various spiritual forces. St Mark’s basilica in Venice makes me feel only empty, perhaps from the fellow tourists that are also trying to scramble their way into this glory. 

When I walk in, I try to breathe in the church in its full entirety. Does it smell of incense from burnt offerings? Or feel cold from the lack of embrace of a pilgrim’s footsteps? Or perhaps beat with ancient weariness from its centuries of standing tall? I close my eyes and try to align the rhythm of my heartbeat to the slow pulse of the church, to hear what lies beneath the chatter of tourists. Is there reverence here, as it was built to encompass? Or is it empty from each flash of the camera slitting the throat of what majestic beast of glory once roared here? My interrogation of the space is an inadvertent plea for instruction. Tell me what to be: a fervent worshipper, apathetic traveller, searching historian. Tell me who to be if my weary self is not enough. 

4

This is what I can tell you about the basilicas/monasteries/churches/cathedrals that I’ve visited. 

I cannot tell you a detailed recollection of the famed history of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, but I can tell you of the warm glow of red, green, and yellow hues that mix softly on the stone walls. It was windy that day and this concrete tower enveloped me in light and stillness; the gentle curve of the smiles of saints gave me a break from the harsh view of Barcelona’s uniform streets. San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan is famous for the skulls and bones embedded into the walls because a small cemetery beside it ran out of space; but this is what I learnt from friends later on. I had stomach cramps that day and slept in the adjacent room for an hour, and I can tell you that the seats were warm and I slept well. The Pantheon in Rome was built with an eye towards heaven and walls that curved to form a dome; if you tap your foot on the floor at the centre, an echo thunders back a second later. It is the Pantheon that taught me this, and when I found a dome-shaped church in Thessaloniki, Greece, I did the same thing and heard the lagging echo. There was nostalgia in that echo which resounded in a burdened heart – I remembered how my sister and I whispered and giggled and our laughter echoed off the walls in the Pantheon and I thought of how she would love this church too. I sat down and rested my head on the walls and missed her with a silent ache.   

This, then, is the asymmetry that colours the beauty of these churches. I am asked for awe that I have no capacity nor comprehension to provide, but I am given more than I can offer. I think the glory of these sacred spaces lies not in the grandeur of its architecture, but in the way that thousands of souls have wafted through these walls and received peace, or clarity, or refuge, or reminiscence. In the way that the weary cathedral tells us: it’s okay to be weary too. In the way we are cradled in sacred, glorious silence. 

1. An Other

Just as you become accustomed to holding yourself up on your two feet, you are thrust with the great responsibility of holding an other.

Some part of it is what you picture. Holding hands. Willing your eyes to pierce, steadily, into theirs to disguise the quiver. Tracing a vertebrae on the spine and letting your fingertips feel the resistance of a bone. Placing the palm of your hand beneath the crown of their head and clutching it tightly.

There is more to holding than this.

When you feel a body pressed against yours, you don’t just hold them physically. You notice the silent rise and fall beneath the skin. A palpitating heartbeat. The quiet disturbance to the air upon an exhale. The tremble of a leg muscle and a twitch.

You are ultimately holding breath. You are cupping it tenderly, gently, and realising the enormous weight of the implications your hands now carry. Breath implies existence and being and sentience and an other.

Maybe you’ve gotten accustomed to the symphony of your life, a single drumbeat that you’ve learnt to hold rhythmically and steadily. This new beat sounds strange and unfamiliar; this breath is clearly not your own.

You fear because you cannot promise that you’ll be a good caretaker. After all, nurturing your own soul has been a difficult task, so who is to say you can hold another?

Your fingers sometimes tremble at the touch of their warm skin. You shudder at the reminder of breath against your face. It is a stark reminder that you are cradling something real; someone real, an existence embodied and encompassed in your arms. It calls for a shy reverence; a trembling worry; an awed gratitude, for who are we to really be entrusted with breath in its full burden? Who are we to say that we will be good caretakers and guardians and lovers?

Feeling another’s breath reminds you that you are not separate from this world; that you are feeling the full weight of being as well. You are no longer a creature of solitude, but one that feels the world reach back to you when you try to reach out. And maybe this is what growing intimacy feels like. Two hearts that inch themselves closer to each other, gradually, is an exchange of pleas.

Let me love you, you are pleading, and trust me with the burden of your breath.

At the same time you realise that reaching out to cradle another has left your own heart exposed, out in the open, plain and stark for them to see. At the same time, you are learning what it’s like for your soul to be cradled, poked at, examined; you are pleading for them to hold you gently.

What does my heart sound like to you? you ask. Is it an ugly melody or are you enjoying this tune?

To hold, you have to be held. A breath for a breath; a soul for a soul. Maybe this is what they mean when they say love is a transaction, because in asking for vulnerability we are mandated to give it as well. You are careful not to bruise this breath, this soul, and in return you ask for them to treat your soul tenderly.

This is the great responsibility of holding an other. We are caretakers of breath.

2. A Space

There are different spaces that we try to hold, struggle to hold, and yearn to hold.

You find, for example, that the spaces you used to hold are slowly slipping into oblivion. It used to be the space of the playground, for example, where time would bleed and blend together. You used to observe centipedes trudging across a floor and it felt like a day had passed but it was perhaps only ten minutes. Or maybe it was noticing how the steam above the pot danced with the white light above in a wispy ritual, where time was warped by colours of enchantment.

These crevices of magic in these spaces are eluding you. Maybe when you waited at the station you might have wondered which monsters fester in the dark abyss ahead, but now you grumble at how the narrow tunnels prevent air conditioning from being built on those old London trains and make you sweat under all the winter layers. Maybe you would have looked at the flowers that stretch through the asphalt in a desperate attempt to escape and think of what fearful beings are hiding below, but now you think of them as emblems of neglected road maintenance. These spaces used to hold magic. Or rather, you had a heart that would seek it out.

There are other spaces you’ve ceased to hold. At the end of a scheduled dinner with a friend, the clock hits the 1.5 hour mark, and you think of the washing that needs to be done, and the essay due tomorrow, and the corner of the room that has yet to be cleaned. But there are words that linger on your tongue which crave a space to crawl out into; which long for ears to be heard by. You regret saying good to the question of how are you? At the beginning of dinner. Now the words burn on a tongue that burns to release them: I’ve woken up only with a sigh and a heart that feels too heavy to drag around. Your ears have become stiff to the burdens of another’s heart, and your impatience causes blindness – what your friend really needs is a hug, even though she doesn’t know it.

Maybe also the sacred spaces. When it was just your mother, father, sister, and you, every night after school or work, seeking rest in home-cooked food and a dining table that was always full. This was a communal retreat into the presence of those who found comfort in each other. And in this silent solace a sacred space was being built – that this time, this dinner, this space is ours to hold. But we forget that spaces, like tables, need all its hands and legs to hold them. If one is pulled away – work dinner that can’t be shifted, a friend’s birthday party, I need to study in my room for the test – these sacred spaces quiver, unstable. The solace is penetrated by the sorrow of a lonely figure at the table, eating less dishes with a single plate. Only once they become coloured by the monotone palette of memory, you realise it’s been a while since you’ve sat down for a meal with your family. And there’s almost a grudge you hold towards that younger self. You ask her why she didn’t just stay, five minutes more, to chat with her father about his work day; why she didn’t fill those silences up with all the questions in the world; why she didn’t realise that her presence was her offering to this sacred space and she failed to give it most of the time.

Some of these spaces are hence resigned to a corner of our memory, to be held by a day when you can afford to reminisce. They say: look at the balcony that was your only escape during Covid-19, remember how you laid those silicon planks that mimicked wood along with your father? You recall when there was a swing at a hidden garden in your condominium that ceases to exist now, and you etch it tightly in the grooves of your memory. And even though you’re studying in another part of the world now, and sitting with your family after school is no longer possible, you can smell the steamed fish and hear the clink of ceramic in the comfortable silence of those childhood dinners, if you really think about it. These spaces are not stuck in the past, nor do they cease to exist in the present.

They persist–if you would only call them forth from the point in your timeline they belong to–and say: I need to hold you now because you once held me.

3. Various Histories

As time passes, our role as historians weigh heavier.

It used to be simple. Back when you were five, it was what’s your favourite colour and when I was four I knew I flew for a few seconds when I tried really hard. Then when we were in Primary School it became what’s your favourite subject? then maybe do you have a crush? and what do you want to be when you grow up?

I’m in my twenties now and the questions have shifted to do you think you’ll marry him? And how do you think you’ll raise your kids? And do you think all this makes you genuinely fulfilled?

If the ocean of history has gotten exponentially bigger, it makes our jobs as historians exponentially more difficult.

You find yourself meeting someone new and finding that the fifteen minutes you have isn’t enough to piece the pictures of a life together. Yes, you major in English and you’re doing your PHD at university now. But also why do you put pencils in your hair like that, and why do your boots have mud stains that have solidified over the years? Who gave you that laugh that comes from the back of your chest, could it be your mother and do you still talk to her?

You find that conversations err on the edge of interrogations; of archival research; of pleading: give me the itinerary of your life and let me stitch it together. Because the act of learning is an action of advancement, of stepping towards intimacy. Then maybe you won’t be a stranger delimited to these fifteen minutes I have with you, and when you walk away I’ll see a little girl inside the woman I just met.

Beyond strangers, you discover new things about your friends that tumble out given the right circumstance. Since when were you allergic to avocadoes and how did you find out? How have you been sustaining a six hour sleep schedule for three years? So you did love that person you called a friend all those years?

You are holding a whole history. And as time ticks slowly, there is more to hold, more to ask, more facets and layers of complexity.

Perhaps the most difficult historian to be is a lover. Since intimacy is bred through knowledge, a lover is always a historian on a quest to piece together a past. In a world this big you have met them and thus you have been endowed with the responsibility of holding someone else’s history. You are compelled to slowly notice, remember, ask.

You notice how they hold your hand with fingers laced through rather than palm-to-palm, and you wonder if this is a natural pre-disposition or if someone else before you had taught them to do so. You are incredulous that they don’t use microwaves because they “don’t believe in it” and you ask who taught you this? You learn what they like for breakfast, that they don’t eat crunchy vegetables. You learn how they like to waste their time and invest it and you ask to be part of these routines. You realise that these are tendencies and beliefs held long before you entered their life.

Now to love them is to ask persistently: who were you before this, and how can I hold that piece of you? You cook exclusively hot food on the stove and cook only soft vegetables now; you learn to buy what they like for breakfast from the grocery store. You want to waste time with them because it becomes invested time. You are being gifted with these invaluable pieces of their history and drawing a map of their life. You are promising: I will love you in spite, despite, and because of, even if it’s a bit ridiculous that you don’t use a microwave.

To be a historian is both a joy and a tragedy. You find delight in piecing together the puzzle, in knowing that you hold the key to these epistemic archives. You are sometimes hit with sorrow for what has been lost and what will never be uncovered in knowing a person. The pursuit of the epistemological person is never fully achievable. But historians do what they can to battle with the hungry mouth of time.

Over here I find myself startled out of my own body. A vessel which has somehow transported me here, 8 hours behind the sun of familiarity. I was shaken awake in the bus the other day as the wheels dipped sharply into a pothole, and my first intake of breath was cold, and my hands brushed a side window serrated with winter.

My dive into this unfamiliar environment is mirrored by the autumn that plunges drastically into winter. I used to imagine days like this, where it isn’t sweat that envelopes my skin when I step out of the shower into the Singapore humidity, but the whisper of wind blown about in dipping temperatures. In those dreams, my body is light and my mind is not perpetually irritable because of the warmth clawing in from the outside. The body of those dreams did not know the cold that cracks the skin and the lips; the sun that bids goodbye at 4pm. It’s a strange feeling to try to hide within myself; bury myself in clothes and jackets and outerwear to mimic the warmth that fell so naturally and unselfishly under the Singapore sun. It is the weather I have always wanted, but my body seems to be reminiscing the warmth it once regularly cried sweat to.

Morning Routines

The hardest thing to get used to was the five seconds between waking up and the point at which my brain realises where it is. During those five seconds, I am utterly lost. I hear voices in an accent that I used to hear only on television; I turn to a room that isn’t mine. This is the most jarring part of my day, because I think of my home in Singapore. The worship music that plays every morning. My sister who will always make breakfast if I ask her to. The morning sometimes starts with a sigh, an ache, an acquiescence to the now.

But then I get up. I walk to the kitchen and make toast or a bowl of yoghurt. I remember that I’m making a new home, slowly but surely.

Bodies Kindle Bonfire

I’ve realised that bodies are the best fuel for warmth.

Here, I seek out people in a way I never did in Singapore. Perhaps because I’m far from family and the familiar, but I think two or more shivering souls find some comfort when huddled together. I search for it by knocking on the doors of my friends who stay a staircase away; by huddling outside Jack’s Gelato with ice cream that ironically ignites warmth because it has brought us all together; by clustering by the heater with friends late at night; by finding one friend, seeing another appear for a game of Clash Royale then disappear, while another one appears for a chat that lasts two hours.

I find myself avoiding sitting in my room alone. Something about the cold makes it easier when there’s someone there beside us, radiating the heat that has escaped the atmosphere. We cluster to kindle that warmth.

Selfish Sunlight

Here, I have to plead for warmth.

Sometimes I look out of my lecture hall and catch a glimmer of leaves bathed in a golden blanket. I am silently praying, begging, for the sun to be just a little bit less selfish today. When I can catch those moments of generosity, I have no choice but to run out of the library, my room, or wherever I am. The clouds will eclipse the warmth soon, and time is ticking.

I stand in the open and marvel at how the warmth changes everything. Suddenly the wind isn’t so biting, the weary cobblestone floors seem to leap to life, and the grass shivers with bated breath. I am a beggar for warmth along with everything else, everyone else.

The sun only comes out for a few minutes, half a day if I’m lucky. Though the English sun isn’t so generous with its warmth as the Singapore sun is, I always look forward to days where I will be bathed in its embrace again.

Dreams of the Past

I’ve been to Cambridge twice before enrolling as a student here, the first time as a tourist and the second time for my interview.

There are flashes I remember from both trips. A pavement corner cradled by a puddle. A man and woman sitting at the edge of the river as the summer sun set, her heels set by her side and a bottle of wine in her hand. Stone buildings that seemed to arch forward in their greatness, towards the tourists celebrating their antiquity.

I’m now a student and a cartographer, categorising these memories, placing them snugly within the city I am slowly mapping. I learn that the beautiful red bricks across the river cam where I sat watching the punts is actually Magdalene college, and that it is beautiful on the inside as well. I learn about May balls and the absurd prices we pay to dress up. I learn that my shoes will almost always be wet here. I learn that King’s college is still unbelievably beautiful although I get the privilege of walking into its embrace every day.

I see the past vividly still. The first time I walked into King’s, I paid £16 as a tourist. The second time it was fear that I would never come back as I trudged towards an interview. The third time, and every time after, I watch my past self walking in, and I am flooded with gratitude that this is now my college.

My memories are woven into the ever-expanding map of this city. I smile because I hear echoes of the hopeful footsteps that tread here those years ago; I know I am living in answered prayers.

The Present is a Site of Yearning

The present is a construction site of yearning. Every lived experience amounts to a moment that will cross my mind again one day, and I will look back, reminisce. Ache. Yearn for it again.

I walked back through Sidgwick site after the sun set the other day and the place was empty. I had never been there beyond the morning lecture hours, and its quiet made me think that this will one day be how I walk through this place. Not walking towards Lady Mitchell Hall with a sigh and tired morning eyebags, but with a longing for what it used to be to me. Looking at my former self build these sites of yearning and aching simply through the act of showing up; being. Watching how she forgot, in the veil of present reality, that she was building cathedrals of memory to look back at.

I don’t know if you’re supposed to feel nostalgia in this way — as an oncoming storm, with a sense of impending doom. To be so grateful for my current reality that half my soul already despairs at it slipping away fast. One eye is always watching how I’m spinning the yarn of yearning.

Strangely, that friction between the present and its quick metamorphosis into memory is what ignites that warmth. I like stopping mid-moment to say to myself: how lucky I am to have moments I want to clutch tightly to me, to keep warm within my embrace. It is a blessing.

Touches of Home

I was lucky enough for my family to help me move in to my new dorm.

There was an element of practical benefit, of course: I had more hands to move suitcases, to unpack, to figure out the chaos of Matriculation.

But I’ve found that, most of all, their presence has lingered in a way that I never imagined would be a source of warmth. In the bedroom slippers that I didn’t actually need but my parents bought for me. In a random nail clipper I found at the corner of a shelf because my grandmother had more foresight than me. In the three mugs I have in my kitchen, because somehow my father was right and I did need more than one mug after all when all my friends were down with freshers’ flu and I would make Pi Pa Kao for them. In the bottles of essential oil my mother left for me, which I smell less for their healing properties but because they remind me of her.

Two months later, when my sister came to stay with me for a week, she would be a witness to this little home I’ve built. She would chide me for cooking with a mildly carcinogenic pan. She would be adopted by my friends who she says I’m lucky to have found. She would make bagels for me in the morning, just like she did in Singapore.

I thought University would be a time of my life where I would be in charge of myself, helming the sole burden of anxiously making a home to feel warmth all these miles away from Singapore. And still, all these miles away, this home is not built by myself alone. The people I’ve shared a home with for eighteen years are here, too, somehow. In that way, I’m not inhabiting the unfamiliar. I’m still at home.

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— Merrily We Roll Along, “Old Friends” —

[CHARLEY]
So, old friends
Fill me in slow, old friend—
Start from hello, old friend
I want the when, where, and how
Old friends
Do tend to become old habit—
Never knew
How much I missed you till now

…

[FRANK, CHARLEY & MARY]
Hey, old friends
How do we stay old friends?
Who is to say, old friends
How an old friendship survives?
One day chums
Having a laugh a minute
One day comes
And they’re a part of your lives

New friends pour
Through the revolving door
Maybe there’s one that’s more
If you find one, that’ll do
But us, old friends
What’s to discuss, old friends?
Here’s to us
Who’s like us?

Damn few.

When do new friends become friends, friends become old friends, and old friends become memory?

It’s never a formal contract nor an official separation. the most organic friendships peek around the corner at first, till, without you noticing, they come to inhabit your world. It’s seeing each other in the corridor, waving hello or goodbye, stopping for a small chat. Perhaps going to the 7-11 downstairs which eventually turns into a weekly, daily routine. Maybe the three hours at the Year 6 study tables, never planned, but runners in the same marathon necessitates a type of solidarity. An understanding that after I finish these three hours of math and you finish a lab report, then we will treat ourselves to a breath of air and a train ride in silence. Or if someone casually mentions a movie night and sleepover, it happens eventually, though we always drink tea instead of watching the movie. The formation of friendship is clandestine and quiet and a whisper that’s perpetual but never heard.

We barely notice the first few brushstrokes till we turn around and it’s a finished painting of spontaneous moments that have stitched the fabric of our worlds together. What a strange luxury to be afforded — how proximity allows us to hear the same melodies, capture the same moments. To feel like we are in the universe. And even then, we wouldn’t call each other friends. A more fitting term is that you are the cohabitant of my reality and I am of yours.

And one day when we stop to realise that there is someone else that has shared in the world the way they have, it’s because the tightly stitched fabric of proximity has begun to come apart. Beside us is no longer the person sharing in the same melody of stumbling into the hall right before 7.50am, of the empty silence of the library at 9pm, of the rigour of the same race. Suddenly someone is on holiday across the world, another lives in a hostel you’ve never seen, another begins a race you can’t really watch as a spectator, let alone take partake in. There are too many veils between us — timezones, or to do lists, or clashing schedules, or just a bad habit of forgetting.

Then, suddenly, we struggle. Our language begins to shift from can you get me the string cheese from 7-11 to what do they sell for convenience there where you are? We try to picture new friends, their major, what they like, but no matter how hard we squint, those realities feel foreign, far from our perception. Rather than cohabitants and neighbours crowned friends by the smile of shared spaces, we’re forced to build each other’s universes from scratch. Tell me where the blades of grass bend where you are; tell me what you think of when you stare out the bus; tell me the small things that ticked you off today; tell me if your soul has been alright. If we can’t see these moments for ourselves, we try with futile effort to build a world we want to plunge into but can only peer into. Maybe the recovery from sameness runs in parallel to the formation of old friends, and maybe those are just synonyms.

We then become craftsmen without the tool of geographical closeness, forced to stitch, to tie together, to build intentionally, in place of that convenience. We learn how to slice our vision, and we aren’t good at it at first. It takes experience to know which part of your day, your week, your month, to share; to fit the important moments within that limited timeframe. It takes a while to turn the responses to how are you? from I’m good to there is an emptiness that I cannot place a finger on.

And there is much in translation which will be lost — how I’ll tell you about how falling autumn leaves on the morning walk to lectures places a strange calm in my heart, but in translation it changes to the view is good. Or maybe how long your nights have been while studying for exams, but that solitude is hidden as you truncate it to the work is hard. A part of us despairs because it was just so easy last time. We’ve moved from the same neighbourhood and our souls try to find ways to live together again. What parts of my life should I segment — what is appropriate, what is truthful, what is painful, or what is mundane? Who do you want me to be — the person you knew years ago, the past neighbour who feels familiar, or the girl that has grown up?

We rely, then, not on the tool of proximity, but of trust. When you shorten the story you’ve been wanting to tell me, I trust that you’re keeping the funnier bits away, in the back of your mind, for a time we can have tea again and waste all our time on unnecessary parts of the narrative. When I tell you that these days are long and cold but I’m happy where I am, you’ll trust that I really mean it. Even if we can’t witness the world in the same lens, hear the same tunes, and go through the same motions together, we realise that we become better craftsmen than before. Our work is less lazy — we tell each other stories of our present painstakingly, intentionally. We take time to pull up old fabrics and gaze at realities that once was when our worlds were still intertwined. I suppose this makes us better craftsmen. And this is how we’ll stay old friends in this lifetime.

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-

her most distinct smell is mustiness. which is never a tender thing to say about a lover. pungent isn’t the right word, neither is sour or biting or acidic. Cathay just always had a vaguely pungent smell to it. when those glass doors parted, it hit our noses slowly, never enough to rise from our subconscious. but Cathay was always empty, and loneliness has a distinct stench.

-

there were different rendezvous points. if it was a late-day Thursday morning, it would be at Starbucks because that one hour before school felt like a breath of freedom. if it was after Tchoukball training and we needed a place to dry our sweat, it would be the Tree Cafe. other times it would be at the place that sold overpriced corndogs and Bingsu, after which we would complain that it wasn’t worth it, and the week later we would be back for more. almost always, if we came from SOTA, we would enter through the back gate at the loading bay. the secret doorway between Cathay and SOTA; our quiet pact.

-

i only realised through my research that Cathay’s official name is ‘The Cathay’, which we’ve probably never said in our six years visiting her. truncation is a symptom of intimacy, i suppose.

-

Julian and I visited Cathay two days ago.

it was strange to hear an orchestra of competing sounds, rather than the usual melody of silence and the shuffle of a cleaner’s feet. there was: “awards to be won at level 4!”, an old One Direction track blasting from a different direction, “this pillow will guarantee a good night’s rest”, the mechanical wheezing of a trial robot from those makeshift booths.

our time together used to be quiet. Cathay was a lot of things — ugly and bare on the outside, yellowed on the inside, escalators that would break down frequently. but she was never noisy, only ever a restful abode. fatigued arms that cradled the weary student.

-

i never noticed that those wreaths with placards on it are the same ones sold to the inaugural openings of shops, and weddings, and funerals. the huge, body-height bouquets are deceiving, so the onlooker may be tricked sometimes, which creates an awkward situation. when i walked out of Cathay the other day, i mistook the celebration wreaths for funeral ones.

it was coincidental that i didn’t walk in through the main entrance, but exited through it and saw, for the first time, the abominable conclave of wreaths celebrating Cathay’s new opening. as if Cathay herself was guiding my steps, telling its former friend that “this is not a celebration,” whispering instead, “look what they’ve done to me, look what they’ve done and mourn.”

how strange it is to throw a funeral amidst celebration. how ironic it is to mourn in the face of rebirth.

-

the thing i hate most about the new Cathay is how they built a four-storey high digital double-sided screen right in the centre. as if they needed to give her a new spine, which implies that she had spinal deformities in the first place. yes, she was old and weary and needed some fixing to stand up straight again. but it’s horribly bright, and if you wanted to look away, you can’t. her ribs curve around her new spine, and you can’t escape it. four levels of ghastly blinding bright pixels, whether you’re in a store or on the escalator.

you know what was there before? nothing. and in that nothingness, i could see the familiar SOTA uniforms clustered in groups in Starbucks, or the Tree Cafe, or buying Liho, or getting art supplies. i may not have known them, but in that nothingness, something was communicated: that Cathay was ours.

-

maybe disgruntled wishes do come true. for every time i walked into Cathay and complained, “when will they ever renovate this dump?”, for every time i scoffed at how plain the exterior looked in the dazzling backdrop of the city, for every time i laughed at how bad business was — i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry.

-

Julian and I had to check whether the secret back door to Cathay still existed. almost like asking: are we still welcome here, treasured here, special here, the way we once were?

-

i have decided that proximity is the secret ingredient to true love. do you believe in soulmates? goes the old supper topic. if my soulmate was born in Germany and i in Singapore then i’d likely never meet him, and so there’s no such thing as soulmates, but only lovers tied by the red string of proximity.

i would have never visited Cathay if it wasn’t right beside my school. but love created by proximity is still love, after all.

-

i met an old friend too. the yellow balloon dog sculpture which raises its hind leg, frozen in a crude act of pissing. it had been evicted from its place at level one, chucked to a corner of level four. Julian and I stared at it and we sighed, “you too, friend?”, a circle of three sad strangers who no longer knew the Cathay that once was.

-

i’ve been wondering about unconditional love, the love that makes the choice, despite. for instance — can i still fall into your arms the way i did before, despite how your face looks completely different? will i still hear your comforting whispers despite the blasting speakers and competing advertisements? are you still my Cathay despite how every plank and store has been replaced by new ones?

unconditional love is a lot of things—glorious, noble, tender—but possible may not be one.

-

history has a habit of slipping through our fingers like sand. how we forget to ask our grandmothers about their childhood till they pass, or how we think of questions to ask our lovers only once we lose them.

i only really researched about Cathay after that trip with Julian. i only learnt, then, that the building was used by the British to broadcast war updates, by the Japanese to host their military propaganda department, and was renovated from 2000 to 2006, where the art deco facade we see now was preserved.

our lovers have a history too. the deluded self-righteousness of a lover likes to claim a portion of their lives and assert that this is all there ever was. we forget that someone else has been here before us, just like someone else will come after us.

there will be future lovers.

-

we will hence be content with imaginary reconstruction. this is how we kindle the warmth of our memories into nostalgia rather than a former lover’s vengeful wrath. like how Julian and I stumbled around the new Cathay, superimposing the past onto the present. pointing, looking, staring, commenting like veterans who have faded into irrelevance: “remember when…?” or “do you recall how…?”

and this is how we reconstruct our Cathay, you and I. by remembering the quiet shuffle of a cleaner’s feet in our Cathay. by ingraining that pungent aroma of her former emptiness into our memories. by visiting the new Cathay together, and finding that back door to understand that at least we own one fragment of her new life.

once frequent customers of the building, we become architects of what it once was.

-

i know i won’t be visiting her often anymore. but she stands tall still for someone else. to them, Cathay will be a poem, a fortress, a sound, a home, a light, a thousand more faces that i will never see.

what we once held, we must let go, so that someone else can take our place. this is the lesson of lovers.

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Ask your mother to water your Bonsai infant that has nestled so comfortably into the corner of your room. Know that you cannot bring it there where the sky is a permanent blanket of gloom. Emphasise that temporary custody does not mean permanent ownership, and please mother do not throw my plant away if it looks like it is starting to wilt because I’ve trained it to be more resilient than that.

Instruct your friends to come caress your abandoned children once in a while. Shelves of deserted books that may or may not crumble when you’re not there to stare at them lovingly. Whisper apologies that SQ baggage allowance is only 30kg that must be used for more essential winter clothing, because divorce forces you to scramble for survival instead of the soul.

Ask, jokingly, if they’ll still save me a spot at the dinner table. Where there is always steamed rice, some sort of stir-fried vegetable, and warm herbal soup. Where my family’s faces form the familiar tapestry of homemade dinners that eclipse into an illusion of eternity. Say that maybe if 1 empty chair is present at their table of 3, and 3 empty chairs are present at my table of 1, maybe we are in fact sitting at the same table and my mother’s chopsticks are still extending over my plate to pass me the good parts of the fish.

Implore for bus 317 to remember you — when you were 17 and trudging home from school, into the cradle of a bus driving to its own destination while you worked hard to get to yours, all the way across the world. So that when you’re 22 and back from Cambridge, you’ll run back into the warmth of its exhausted sighs, where you’ll tell 317 that you did it, you’ve gone to the UK, where the buses are horribly ventilated and overpriced and how I’ve missed you, my dear friend.

Realise with gradual, horrific acceptance that there are close to no opportunities to use your Mandarin tongue over in the UK except the conversations you will have with your ah gong over the phone, or in your head. So you ask, Ah Gong, will you remember how my Mandarin sounds like in case I myself forget? Tell him that you’ll do your best to carry this chimeric Singaporean-Chinese tongue with you, that you’ll use it to explain “yes I am Chinese no I am not from China”, that you’ll be tongue-tied when they ask “are you really Chinese” in your strange Mandarin embedded with English tones because honestly, you don’t really know either.

Portion your memories with your friends. Assign one of them to remember the rotting brown bench where we sat at SMU to eat pasta during school lunches, and another to recall the hours of fatigue as we studied till the library closed. Tell them that if we all remember a part of our childhood, we will be able to reconstruct it together, and in this way, everything is still the same even if we are in different schools.

Say that you’ll write even in the separation. That you’ll send back exotic postcards from Europe boasting of novel adventures which disguise that small part of you that is empty, homesick, and longing to be back in the Singapore heat that has clawed itself into your pores and heart. That even if you can’t afford those small giggles with your sister at 12am, and the short conversation shouted across the staircase with your parents, and the impromptu dinners with your friends, you’ll paint this new city with your words. You’ll promise to write them into this new narrative too, someway, somehow.

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maybe only that the gold is peeling. rust underneath.

grandpa could weigh a hundred kilos or nothing at all.

he is also 3-11, which is my password to looking at him

in the eye. 3 tablets down from the ceiling. 11 tablets to the right

skip past all the other people’s dead grandpas and grandmas to my own.

he is a vague chinese character. i wonder every year why

they bothered engraving his name if they were going to place him up so high.

my neck cranes to try to read his name engraved onto that real/fake gold.

i have never met him. only on the the temple visit every first day of the lunar new year.

he smells like incense, which isn’t far off from when he was alive (he was a smoker).

he wasn’t tall, so placing him that high is factually false and gives us all neck aches.

when i think of him i think of the tablet. but his ashes are in another

part of the temple. and his soul is haunting another part of the island.

so in the end we’ve built an altar that isn’t accurate and gives me neck aches.

i wonder if he had a sense of humour. or if he’d find me frivolous and

would scold me for not comprehending the significance of all these rituals.

grandpa doesn’t say anything through the peeling gold and vague chinese characters.

in a strange way, i guess he’s watched me grow up. my apathetic gaze

stares at him a little bolder every year, my neck cranes just a little less as i grow.

he has journeyed with me, i suppose, in the capacity that a dead person can.

my grandma hurries around to place sweets and offerings for him to eat.

after my grandpa’s death a few years into their marriage, she remained unmarried.

i know that her real offering is commitment. the sweet incense of faith.

she always tells us that we would have loved him. but i don’t think

of him except on this day. and sometimes driving past this temple.

for now he is a tablet sorted in my catalogue of hazy memories.

my uncle tells me to tell ah gong about my scholarship and university.

i whisper to the tablet in my head. my uncle says he would be proud of me

because ah gong was a hardworking man.

and now he makes us work hard looking up at him.

my neck aches.

Stillness

What I thought about in file during practices for my Passing Out Parade (POP), a parade every soldier has to do upon graduating from Basic Military Training (BMT):

1. that my eyelashes are thick but still a futile shelter if my eyes burn like this. my pupils are a pool of acidity and salt and i think perhaps that there will be an ocean behind my eyeballs after this rehearsal.

2. that i used to scoff at those soldiers that march in NDP and promise myself that i would never end up like them because marching has to be the most boring thing invented. i think about how i ended up here; how the permanent melody in my head has become “left, left, left right left”.

3. that i had never traced before, with my mind, the path of a droplet of sweat down your temple. picture the winding river it would leave in it’s path. wonder which pixel of my uniform is a few shades darker because the sweat has melted off my face like wax.

4. that the audience perhaps will notice the fracture in the file if i lick the salty water running down my face with my tongue.

5. ask myself what is being paraded. certainly not me, but maybe us. our uniformity, and perhaps how our feet don’t hurt in these boots like they did 8 weeks ago, and how our fingers wrap more confidently around the steel of the SAR-21.

6. how my sergeant said that “if you don’t wiggle your toes the blood will stop flowing to your brain and this is why we have so many soldiers fainting every year so you must, must wiggle your toes.” i feel each stub one by one and count them. it occurs to me that the last time i counted my toes must have been when i was 6 learning how to count. it makes me smile that there is now a strange parallel scene in the timeline of my life.

7. i try my best to list out the occupations that would demand twenty minutes of complete stillness such as this. the only thing that comes to mind is wildlife photographer, and even then they can move if the animal moved elsewhere. for a while, i am intrigued by how i have never used my body in this way before. i have let my sergeant major slice it up into a mass of limbs and a pile of bones and stone me into a statue.

8. try to find the balancing point of my cheek on my rifle. sleek metal against a flushed face that presses in intimately in hopes of rest. the SAR-21 is not a weapon but a pillar and a pillow, just for now.

9. that i am forced to stop. stop and stare at how the 0800H sun crawls through the gaps in the trees and the light hugs the helmets and shoulders of the soldiers in my row. their frames are highlighted by a honey glow and it almost seems sweet, even through the smell of body odour. that stillness affords me this sight.

10. that it isn’t fair that if someone messes up on a command, the efforts of the 200 other people in file go to waste. and i think about how parades are perhaps the best lesson that we are only as good as our weakest link.

11. that it isn’t my brain, but my body, learning a language. malay commands like “kekanan lurus” or “baris sedia” do not register as syntax to my brain, but a whip to my body as i learn how to turn without thinking. perhaps muscles can learn words too.

12. that this is, maybe, just a whole dance. that my sergeant major is the choreographer and i am the ballerina, turning in step to the music and letting my body melt into the cadence of the commands.

13. wondering about how we all have the agency to just dash and break from the file. but thousands of people don’t. i think of military discipline with a little bit of reverence, and i march with a little bit more gusto.

14. that i haven’t listened to my breath like this in a while. or, ever.

15. that perhaps the parade doesn’t end even after our last march because the sun has burnt our uniforms onto our bodies, and we all come out in different shades. and the parade continues in this manner.

16. that i will never get to march with these girls, all 54 of them, ever again. that our boots may cross paths and walk the same ground but they will never step together in sync.

17. that for some strange reason, even in this rigour and grit, there is beauty here in the melody of togetherness woven by the discipline of parades. even in the stillness.

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We enlist into Basic Military Training (BMT) at Pulau Tekong, an island a ferry away from mainland Singapore, on 7 January, 2025. We do not know each other, but recognise one another through the same anxious look we have on our faces. We know we have signed contracts with the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) under various services. We sense that we have made a leap of faith separately, which has brought us here, on this day, together. Unlike the thousands of boys also enlisted into BMT as part of their compulsory national service, we are here voluntarily.

duffel bags packed with items of helmets and socks and insect repellents and foot powders. bags of standardisation. packages of a soldier. these girls in civilian clothing. lumps of clay. waiting to be moulded by military hands into warrior puppets. their sweat smells of fear and of faith.

On the first day, we say an oath, wave goodbye to our parents, and become recruits. We collect our uniforms. We arrive at our bunks, a series of 8 double-decker beds with metal locker cupboards beside them. We are allocated identities in the form of “Company”, “Platoon”, “Section”, “Bed number”. The word “recruit” is stitched in front of our names and our bodies and we are now dolls on the shelves. We will soon forget what our names sounded like before this. We drag our field packs and black duffel bags to level 5 and try to call this our new home.

they shed the civilian clothes. an uncomfortable metamorphosis. pixelised green smoothed onto pores. military boots too bulky or too small. jockey caps that symbolise the virgin soldier. these girls try to wriggle around in jungle green. uncomfortable in their new skin. they look at each other across the bunk. girls of different ages and races and backgrounds have suddenly become mirrors. mass produced clay figures. soldiers of the same platoon. these girls in army green.

We do not get sleep that first night. Outside the window, we see the beaches of Tekong and the ocean that separates us from our former lives. The person beside our beds may wear the same uniform but speaks a different language, comes from a different world. We are alone.

II

Over the week, donning the uniform becomes easier. We learn how to fold the sleeves better, look smarter in our helmets. They tell us to unpack our duffel bags and hiding anything that looks civilian. To bury the former and start anew.

they wear their uniform more. the army green is etched into their skin, fibres sewn deeply into their pores. boots that dig blisters and sores. black leather embedded into hardened feet.

We learn the basics of being in a uniformed service. How to form up in three rows and how to align our feet in unison. How to march in sync. How to respond to commands like “Sedia”, coming to attention, and “Senang diri”, being at ease. We learn as fast as we can. We learn to respond in unison with a “yes, sir”, or “no, sergeant”.

their voices used to sound of high and low pitches. of distinctive tones. these colours start to fade. they aren’t as fluorescent anymore. they begin to echo in the monotonous melody of a symphony with only one instrument. left, left, left right left, they march. a single entity is created by weaving differently sized bodies through the stitches of timing. minds strung together by commands. voices shaven down to monotony.

We slowly succumb to the military conditioning. We are creating a new subjective reality, one of social norms that exist only in this constructed world in this faraway island. Acronyms that only make sense to us — SOC, AVPU, CC, HR1. We nod and understand the semantics stuck in our cobweb of military syntax and vocabulary. We are babies out of the womb. We are not me or my or her or she but only this collective pronoun. We. Blended together in this military machine. Girls in jungle green start to become soldiers. Intimacy with the military grows as our selves are washed away.

III

We wake up everyday to different forms of physical training — endurance runs, strength building, combat circuits, obstacle courses. Our bodies change as our muscles firm up.

they have never seen their bodies in this light before. in the light of hardship, of trainings at 4am and drills at 10pm. where their hearts are tired but their feet carry them forward. a new sense of intimacy with themselves. limits turn out to be breakable, non-existent if they banish them with determination.

Our minds are whipped into resilience as we learn to just keep stepping forwards as the rain pours down during our runs. We press on because of commanders shouting in encouragement. We push forward because if the soldier beside us can soldier on then we can as well. It is an solidarity borne through suffering together, side by side.

they have never seen these smiles before. the bright grins after they’ve made it through training together and they can march to the cookhouse for lunch. the high-fives and nods of encouragement. the knowledge that they are in this together for 8 more weeks. these soldiers in jungle green who are learning to become an army.

Intimacy grows under the military blanket. The warmth of sweaty hugs and laughter after a long day. The understanding that we are doing this together as a platoon.

IV

We learn of the person beneath the uniform. We ask each other why we signed on. One wants to be a pilot because she likes sunsets. Another asks, if not us, then who? An infantry sign-on wants to turn off her brain and let her body do the work.

they exchange quiet conversations as they wait. rifles leaning on shoulders. chins against the muzzle. fatigue draws truth. lethargy charges confessions.

We marvel at the 18 year old that has just finished JC, to the 23 year old that can’t find a job amidst a saturated tech market, to the 28 year old who has two children already. We wear the same uniform.

the great equaliser. they have been cut and shaven down to their soldier cores. the difficulties of communicating across life stages has been trimmed away. intimacy through wearing the same clothes. breathing the same air of hardship by choice. soldiers merge and through this merger they understand each other.

We are less alone.

VI

We are not just connected to present platoons and current companies. We begin to sing songs written by men that enlisted thousands of batches before us, perhaps more uncertain and reckless and determined. We begin to realise that they too had their names stripped and the word recruit forced down their mouths, until these songs were the only words they could croak.

they sing a line that goes “why do we serve? because we love our land and we want it to be free, to be free.” the poignance drowns in how the melody has just become a background to their daily marches. they do not see how they echo an anthem sung with the setting sun of a Japanese occupation and failed Malaysian merger. they do not hear historical pain and injustices woven into these lines.

We march in the same way our forefathers did. We become, in that moment, a picture of every platoon that has marched for Singapore. If we take each individual soldier that existed since the 1960s and replace it with new ones, aren’t we just the same Singaporean Army? We become our ancestors, we embody our descendants. We are the past, the present, and the future.

they begin to carve their bodies in the light of excellence. they do not just adorn their uniform but the standards of a uniformed service. they remember that they are not he or she but carry the weight of the collective. they are a representation of more. in that way, each person carries the burden of another donning the uniform across the island. the strange knowledge of intimacy.

We feel the warmth and burden and responsibility and beauty of belonging to a military.

For someone with a high degree, severe astigmatism, and an uncanny ability to lose my things easily, the situation above happens very regularly. My spectacles could sometimes rest on my head while I fumble around my room for them.

I have been squinting a lot. In hopes that if I narrow my eyes, the glasses may materialise, the world may become brighter and clearer. In hopes that I will be able to find what I’m looking for.

I have been squinting at old places too. On a recent trip back to school, I stopped for a while in front of classrooms and communal areas that my body was once pulled towards for a meal or study session or conversation. They seemed lifeless, distant — I did not share a soul with them anymore, the outsider staring back into her old life. I squinted at old benches that no longer called my name, that housed other students and other conversations. I squinted in hopes of remembering what they once meant to me.

I narrowed my eyes at my own body — I thought that my own shirt and cargo pants may fade away in that eclipsed darkness, and my old uniform may materialise, and that the certainty in which I walked these corridors would replace the uneasiness in which I tread life after graduation.

Maybe if I squinted even harder, my best friend who moved back to Korea might even appear before me laughing in the infectious way she always used to, maybe we would still be on that familiar path to 7/11, maybe she wouldn’t have left at all.

I squint so hard sometimes that my eyes are completely shut, and in that dark illusion I still try to call this “my school” instead of “a school”. In that blindness, everything is the way it used to be.

There are times I squint at my room as well. I still recognise the hazy outlines in the cloud that covers my eyes — the straight edges of my wooden table, the black cluster that is my study chair. A sense of fear fills me because I wonder if this is how my room will look in my memories when I move out to study later in the year. If I squint even further, maybe I’d see my younger self bent over that study table, studying her hardest so she could go overseas for university.

Sometimes I meet old friends and squint at them. The little girl that once told me she had no clue what she wanted to do with her life is now applying to university. If I narrow my eyes, the doctor uniform appears, the fatigued eye bags materialise, and that little girl has a huge smile on her adult face. I don’t need to squint to see how she is becoming the person she was always meant to be.

And most of the time I’m staring at my future blind. I try to narrow my eyes so that answers would appear — the university I’ll attend, the friends I’ll find, the purpose I’ll discover. Usually, nothing materialises in that murkiness, only the feeling of being utterly lost.

There are too many things that have changed. I catch myself squinting at my world stuck in the liminality between terror and wonder, hoping that the universe I knew before would materialise, burying this unfamiliar land of possibility and risk and fear and the new.

In this new world, I am entirely an idiot, because I’ve lost my bearings. The newly graduated young adult stumbling around blind, searching for a tool to sight without a means for sight. I guess the irony is part of the journey.

Vultures are impatient creatures. There is an abundance of books but a scarcity of time, and hungry eaters who need to decide which books are worthy of purchase in a matter of minutes. The question then arises: How do you eat a book quickly?

For some, the title is a satisfactory appetiser. Thirteen ways of listening to rain: guided enough that one understands the structured manner of the work, knowledge sufficient enough for one to pick the book out and gobble it whole. Or, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and Spread of Nationalism: for the picky eater that knows their palette well. Or perhaps, titles like 1984 which have indisputable literary merit and will almost always appeal to a hungry eater who wants dearly to fit into the literary world, and will consume it whole simply for that reason. The title provides sufficient information, an alluring taster that leaves the tongue curling, writhing in pain for more.

But all too often the title fails us. The Road: what road? When? Where? Severance: what is severed? Who? Why? Or, How To Eat A Book Quickly, who eats books and how could a title like this reveal the self-referential jokes that the piece contains? In these instances, the title, unfortunately, fails the hungry reader. It is not enough to satisfy our tastebuds. Not yet.

Some of them turn to the back of the book for a taster. A summary provides a brief explanation on major characters, events, and themes. For some, a line hooks them in, such as “a bloodied door, a metal spoon, and three deaths seemingly unrelated to each other”, a classic case of Whodunnit? that leaves suckers for mystery novels drooling. Or perhaps, references to home, like “set in the Newton Circus hawker centre…”, clever words to build setting and invoke a Singaporean reader’s sense of comfort without even having read the text, pushing them to buy it not for the words but that sense of warmth.

Yet, summaries also fail in various ways. For instance, “an exploration of the indomitable nature of the human spirit”, “a commentary on the inevitable fatality of life”, which tends to spoil the hungry reader’s appetite. The reader ends up being unable to extract meaning from the book itself because the summary has condensed real exploration into the word exploration, ruining the actual meal before it even began. Summaries ruin the meal.

Maybe the more patient reader will attempt to flip the first page open. A first page might offer insight into a writing style, intriguing world-building, or hook readers in with events that are beginning to unfold. Yet all too often a first page doesn’t provide enough insight to the rest of the novel — a boring first line betrays mystery that will come to a climax only 200 pages later, and deliciously strung first words could disguise plots that fade into boredom only 3 pages ahead.

Worse still, those who read the ending first. In Blindness they discover that the characters regain their sight and they miss the feeling of hope produced only through the 300 pages of despair before. In All the Beauty in the World readers don’t understand final reflections produced only through 10 years of pondering upon great art in the MET museum in the pages before. Reading an ending first spoils everything before.

And those who rely on reviews start the meal off wrong, as if they use another’s tongue to sample their own food. An “innovative, the masterpiece of contemporary literature by the New York Times” plastered in gold hides the heart of the piece, and readers don’t know the personal gut-wrenching pain they would feel upon reading the book itself. Stellar reviews shape the way we perceive the text — the failures, strengths, and heart-hitting characters — before we even read it. The meal, again, is ruined.

So the only plausible conclusion, then, is that books cannot be eaten quickly. We must sit with our meal for hours on end. We must read and read and read until we’ve consumed all the words there is to eat. Maybe then, the growling stomachs of the hungry reader will be fulfilled.

References (in order of appearance):

[Personal Essay] Thirteen ways of listening to rain by Robert Anthony Siegel

[Non-Fiction] Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson

[Fiction] The Road by Cormac Mccarthy

[Fiction] Severance by Ling Ma

[Fiction] How to Eat a Book Quickly by Me

[Fiction] Blindness by Jose Saramango

[Memoir] All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

The means of bartering has changed, maybe from the currency of favours, maybe to gold, maybe to the escudo that was replaced with the euro.

Perhaps the words in the books have warped, maybe new words added to the Portugese lexicon, maybe new translations to other languages, maybe the syntax has tumbled along with tumultuous times.

The meaning in the books has transformed, maybe contemporary commentary is more biting than last time, maybe modern literature is less imaginative or far more fantastical, maybe the shells of these books blanket strange new genres like speculative metafiction or bizzaro fiction.

The covers, too, have replaced themselves, maybe from handcrafted spines bound by leather backs, maybe by old bookbinders who knew the gentle art of creating covers that would house immortal meaning, maybe to mass produced hard-backs that cost a little too much for the average person.

Even the types of customers have shifted, maybe from educated, literate elite who were able to afford the luxury of understanding, maybe to an old generation that remember the bookstore of their youth and wander through these doors to reminisce, maybe now a rare and precious few who bother to search within these vast ocean of words for precious seeds of meaning.

And perhaps purposes of travel here are pointedly different, maybe from a neighbour needing shelter in a bookstore, maybe to unknowing strangers that have stumbled upon antiquity, maybe to flocks of tourists that now search out the “Guinness World Record for Oldest Bookstore” logo for a photo rather than endeavour to gain a new book.

But we know this to be true: that in the oldest bookstore in the world, since 1732, for three hundred years, books have passed from author to shelf, shelf to hand, hand to home. And while everything else may change, books are still being bought under this roof. And that is enough.

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Most of the time, I am posted to the busy front desk with visitors piling in front of weary kiosks. My uniform engulfs my body, and my tone is tainted with the superfluous niceties of customer service helplines, my body language morphs to embody hospitable kindness, arms not akimbo but held behind my back. I remember that I am not me, but an extension of these grand marble floors that are nests to great artists and exhibitions. I make eye contact and smile, I nod, I wave to young children who come in. During these busy periods, I shrink inside this uniform, and I become part of the museum, the arms that reach out to weary tourists.

I like to think that the uniform collects all the beautiful tongues that I hear as well. Tourists talk to me in their native tongues of Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Khmer, Burmese, and others I can’t pin down. Even though I don’t understand most of it, I like to believe that in this uniform, I am a speaker of all languages because I am a host of a museum that houses different cultures, that attracts people from all over the world. I pick up small phrases in different tongues, and they are souvenirs of distant lands I haven’t seen, but tones and syntax that have floated to my doorstep with each eager traveller.

Sometimes I am posted downstairs, where there are less people. I enjoy these shifts as well because I am less of a host rather than an observer. I shrink into the walls, I become a wallflower. I notice different types of visitors — the one that is looking for art to take a photo with, the one that wishes for their heart to be shattered at the entrance of the exhibition and put back together completely differently at the exit, the one that simply needs aircon to hide from the heat or a shelter to run from the rain.

I notice school groups who come in, bored students who are forced to make something of art in their assignments. I see little children try to grapple with meaning that slips through their fingers, and when encountered with a real military tank from the 1950s, they ask only if they can ride it later. I watch nervous couples stride through these marbled pillars and nervously make commentary to substitute words they don’t know how to say. I smile when elderly couples can walk through the history gallery and supplement it with stories of their own past.

Sometimes my stomach drops when I see apathetic visitors that look unimpressed. In my head, I pray often that these exhibits will not disappoint them. I hope that a fragment of a marvellous curation would cut or heal or invoke something. I want to scream that there is beauty here, if only they look hard enough, if only they wait patiently for it to sink in.

Other times, when there are less people to observe, it’s just me. I am lost in thought, I drown in myself. I think about why I love museums, I think about how I love watching people, I think about all the decisions that have allowed me to walk these cold marble floors.

But before my wondering kidnaps me, someone comes up to me and asks a new question. And again, I drown in uniform.

There is, for instance, the time I stole a gold tooth at the back of a hawker’s mouth. I could see how he kept his mouth shut and nodded to customers, perhaps embarrassed at the shiny ingot buried between molar teeth. I thieved, I stole the dignity upheld through closed lips. When the hawker yawned, my camera, quick and clever, captured its shine. I grabbed dignity by the throat and suffocated its pride.

Or the time I stole the honest purity of a statement. Under a towering tree in Kyoto when a young man, nervous, leaned over to kiss his girlfriend on the cheek. When I walked past, I could hear their giggles, I could foresee their murmured dialogue, of “remember the first time, under the tree, when it was just us?” I stole the sanctity of these virgin first moments when I took an unknowing shot of a young couple, when the shutter closed the moment lips touched, and I had ruined the beauty of their remembrance with my camera as a witness.

Even the numerous times I have stolen the beauty of transience from nature’s clutches. When I take a photo a falling leaf, a swaying branch, a running river, and I freeze it in my frame, I have solidified that beautiful, unique permutation into permanence. If transience is nature’s greatest gift, with every living thing eventually decomposing into nothing, with every nothing eventually blooming into a living thing, then I have stolen this transience by enshrining it in my photos. If nature knew, it might cry, no, no, how dare you imprison me in the unnatural.

Or, perhaps worst of all, when this thievery becomes second nature. When I take my camera out when I travel, before I eat, during dinners with friends, intimate moments with family — every moment is splattered red by my crimes. My camera steals the first visual feast of the opulence of a good meal. My camera robs me of the beauty of a mountain I should have remembered when I close my eyes but instead reminisce of through the frame of a viewfinder. My camera, the thief, the treacherous monster who keeps taking, who I keep committing crimes against myself with.

The fleeting moment after is the what I’m trying to catch. When my friend laughs at my furrowed eyebrows and throws out “sinister? nightmarish? menacing?” and my eyes open wide and I nod vigorously. When the goodreads review explains the semantics in the syntax that has slipped through my fingers, and that yes, the ending was meant to fly past your head as a clever subversion of the reader’s expectations. When he prompts me to be brave by pouring words into empty silence first.

This is the feeling I’m trying to grasp. Where a sentence I cannot finish is completed by another, where I am the first weaver of the tapestry but someone else takes the needles and becomes the last weaver, continues the stitches because my hands cannot.

Somewhere, hidden deep in you, are the words that I try to draw forth. Somewhere, in your clutches and not mine, are endings of sentences I cannot finish, or conclusions to thoughts I cannot form fully in the womb of my mind. My dictionary is incomplete but made whole through yours, half-finished chapters that make a full book when merged.

Worded exchanges are the core of our endeavours. To read is to consume a world that supplements our own because another author, out there in the world, has the unique permutation of words that we cannot string together ourselves. To converse is to pull forth answers, backlash, opinion, in this stichomythic exchange that is either passionate or restrained or comfortable, because tension is created only with two hands pulling on both sides of the string. To ask a question is to acknowledge that yes, I am starved of the words you have, and yes, I need yours to make mine whole, to make me whole.

If I have thoughts of closing myself off from the world, running into the void of solitude, this is the realisation that stops me. That we are whole only through others because they withhold words we ourselves do not have.

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I will start to comb my hair. Really comb it through, the tooth of the comb running through each knot and frizzled strand of hair, while I look myself in the mirror instead of rushing out the door. I will go to the library to stare at the books that I’ve been wanting to read, but could not because I was there to absorb books that I had to read and didn’t want to. I will run into the arms of characters that don’t exist, of authors I used to love, and I will tell them I’m sorry for not showing up for a year. I will close my eyes properly. I will brush the dust off my camera and I will press the buttons and caress the screeches and groans away lovingly. I will shower for a long time. I will look at my stuffed toys like I’ve never met them before, and I will give them a hug and tell them thank you. I will call my grandmother. I will go to the gym and not feel guilty about it. I will move my limbs and muscles and tissue and my organs will feel alive. I will run again. I will sit with my sister and let her tell me funny stories. I will hug my parents. I will text the friends I haven’t seen in months, and ask them, hey, what are you doing when this is all over and can I be a part of it? I will have breakfast at 12pm. I will lie down. I will go outside and meet the sun and ask it how it has been recently. I will sit and try to remember all the promises of “yes, of course, after IB”s that I made, and I will try to follow through. I will space out. I will clean. I will re-memorise all the country flags and play Sporcle and try to beat myself in useless things that don’t matter. I will not count the time. I will go a full day without checking the calendar for what’s happening tomorrow. I will stare at a tree, any tree. I will water the plants. I will live in yesterday. I will run outside when it rains and I will slurp the raindrops. I will give my friends a hug and I will sit with them in disbelief as we ask ourselves how we did it, how we got here. I will dream again. I will drink more water. I will throw out the pens with empty cartridges. I will download social media. I will write and I will write again until I drown in a pile of words and I smile as I suffocate. I will shut down my computer. I will laugh. I will look at the pile of work I’ve done for these few weeks, these few months, these 6 years, and a part of me will feel sad that they won’t be accompanying me anymore, but I will say goodbye and I will thank them as I chuck them into the recycling bin. I will feel the weight of freedom. I will miss the burdens of my exam bubble.

But when this is all over, what really happens is this: I sit down on my bed. I lie down and feel the wind against my face. I breathe.