2004-10-17T20:36:00.000+08:00

* _______ the mad molecule.

Meet my Maker, in straightforward CAPS too. Don’t expect too much because the great dream is long dead, and the final word was that being plastic was better off than being real & no longer breathing.

____ just like building sandcastles at the beach. If I was the size of Thumbelina and stranded on a beach, I will engage in arm wrestling bouts with all the fiddler crabs that is there. They lose, they will forfeit their big claws for my dinner. I lose, I will scratch their crustacean-backs for them.

The only thing he left for me was three strands of guitar strings from his battered guitar. He burnt the rest of it after removing the strings, and then went on to obsessively gather the coal-like dead embers & ashes, shaping it into a pile with his hands. Satisfied with how the pile looked, he knelt down and prayed towards the ashes, with his somewhat burnt palms clasped like a motherly Virgin Mary statue. I wasn’t sure what to think of this. The strangeness of his ritual or should I be concerned with his hands that were beginning to blister already.

In my work planner, one date demands attention. 17 October 2003, a year exactly after his girlfriend’s departure, Kid took his own life too. Maybe that explains why he wanted to give me those guitar strings. He didn’t say anything when we met up for lunch, surprisingly initiated by him. He called me on a Thursday morning. My mobile registered twenty-four missed calls before I relented & gave up sleeping amidst that familiar ringing sound. The night before Weiss made me drank a bottle of Hoégarden beer because she was happy. But I can’t drink to save my bloody hide. My body turns itself inside out if I take more than two mouthful of beer or whatever that is alcoholic. In simpler terms, I got a splitting headache from a slice of last year’s Christmas rum pudding which dad went on to douse with brandy before lighting it up & serving it. It was such a carnival without the giant Ferris wheel. God must not like me very much or I’m destined to be a nun.

So I met him for a late lunch at our shared favourite food court in Novena. Not many words were exchanged. I ate my lunch dutifully while he sipped uninterestedly on his ice lemon tea through the straw. I told him he needs a proper decent haircut, and not the ones that he cuts himself. He pushed those guitar strings into my hands before we parted. I didn’t think otherwise. I could feel that my head was swollen to twice it usual size already. The next day his sister called. He had jumped from his bedroom window, seventeen floors up. His sister thought of calling me because I was the only good friend he had left. I didn’t know what to say. He had never played his guitar for me. I was immediately reminded of the bookmark that he had made for me in our last year at secondary school. On it he wrote, “The act of dying is like hitch-hiking into a strange town late at night where it is cold and raining, and you are alone again.” – Richard Brautigan. Telephones are such terrorists.

_______He used to say, “Take a risk, take a chance.” I hated it whenever he said that to explain for his actions.

____The wound doesn’t heal. It’s just covered up with a perma-fix scab, and the wound will bleed again when someone or yourself scratches it hard enough. It doesn’t take any vigorous scratching to hurt them again. I bit my lower lip. I wanted to taste blood again. I want to see how the blood dries, cakes on my lips, and how the clot cracks when I smile for the world. That is the only fucking reason why I want to taste blood. I got two valid scars on either side of my arms, and I can still remember the nauseating smell of it, and I never liked it. But I don’t mind tasting it.

I shouldn’t think of it this way but I still believe that it was premeditated by him. All of it was planned. Burning his guitar, calling me out for lunch, giving me the strings, and didn’t said we will meet up again soon like he would usually do when we parted. None of our mutual friends took up the theory of mine but then they didn’t talk to him much often anyway. They didn’t even know that he chose his girlfriend’s first death anniversary to do it. No one cares.

There must have been a lot of blood splattered everywhichaway from the point where his body landed, and when his life ended. I never attended his funeral held at the void deck of his apartment block because I can’t stand going near where he chose to end it. The sister called me on the second night of the funeral asking whether I’d be making my way down, and I just replied that I really can’t. Maybe she understood what I meant or maybe she didn’t because the lines were left hanging, our words caught frozen midway, I hung up the phone. I did make my way to the cemetery, talking to his picture sculptured into the headstone, into the empty air. His family knew he liked things simple so they had a specially made-to-order square granite block in smooth finishing to serve as his headstone. I can imagine him nodding his head silently.

________Shit, I miss him.

Being his childhood friend & growing up with him was like spending a Wong Kar Wai movie moment. He was always that little bit different, showing off that rebellious streak that you can’t really put a hand on but neither can you say that he wasn’t rebellious. It was that ridiculously mixed up. I remember once while taking our usual bus ride home from our tuition class, he suddenly removed my earphones, and said, “You know, Claire, today, I met a mountain that is deeper than the deepest sea that anyone will ever know. I hoped we would get the chance to see it together one day.” As coolly as he had removed my earphones, he just refitted them back into my ears. And the next best thing he could do was to borrow my liquid paper, and began drawing funny faces on the back of the seat facing us.

Period. I think when he died, the world temporarily celebrated its decadence in honour of him. No more bras & flags burning. If we are all reasonable enough, we will sit down with our guns on our laps, and do a sincere group reading of Fynn’s ‘Mister God, This is Anna’.

The short sickening one week break is finally over. School life back at the Uni will be much more familiar for me, a skin that I can carry off even when Kid is no longer in my world anymore. At least, he got his wish of flying from seventeen floors up. I have lagged too far behind in my share of the final year projects. I still haven’t got my readings done. I have already skipped too many lectures for this semester, enough for my course manager to call up my mother, and ask what’s wrong when obviously something was wrong. And I haven’t been attending the last three sessions of band practice. But I shall keep chanting to myself that I can play catch-up, play catch-up, play catch-up, and play some more catch-up.

The Cheng family daughter dedicated educational pathway: Primary school, Secondary school, Junior College, and hopefully University, the ace in the hole that Mom prays I will be resilient enough to complete it. Kid went all the way with me to junior college but then he stopped short for his Army conscription.

‘Play catch-up. ‘Play Ketchup. I quite clearly remember that I used to detest school so much that I’d resort to incredible acts just so that I could skip it, and be allowed to slack away at home. Feigning sickness was the surefire method to get me laid off from school, especially since Mom had this hypochondria syndrome transference thing on me. If I said the pain in my stomach was killing me, she’d immediately make me lay still in bed, coaxing me back to sleep, and later in the afternoon, we will be on our way to the neighbourhood doctor to get the medical certificate to excuse me from school. And I didn’t know whether it was my acting feigning sick brilliant or was it my Mom’s acting that was radically fantastic but the doctor always believes us. It got so serious to a point that he was concerned enough to write up a referral letter for me to get a Barium Meal scan done on my digestive tract. For the amount of feigning sickness to skip school, I also got in return a fair amount of visits to the hospital, pored over by a panel of really serious specialists – no slight to them – , had a barrage of tests performed on me, and still I left them perplexed. Gradually, I became the star of the Children’s Ward, the Medical Oddity, and because I was a little girl, every pain that I professed to be experiencing seems so much more believable. For the record, I was only sent once to the Psychiatric department to check whether I was either lying or was a hypochondriac after one of the doctors put across the suggestion that I might fit one or the other description above. Maybe due to the vehement defense of my Mom or again due to my acting, I got off clean with that pretty psychiatrist lady. She was so full of warmth & disarming, unlike most of the rigid doctors that I was facing. But maybe all psychiatrists looked that way so that they can make you feel comfortable enough for you to surrender all your demons.

‘________________ But I didn’t surrender mine.

The hospital visits continued throughout my six years of primary school. Graduating to secondary school, it kind of stopped, partly because I outgrew the novelty of hospital stays, and partly because Mom was resigned to the fact that she had a sickly daughter. It actually reached to the conscience-pricking point where she blamed herself & Dad of passing on the bad genes to me, and it was my conscience not theirs that I’m referring to here. I still skipped school regularly but this time round, I evolved the stomach pains to headaches. I knew that that one of my older cousins from my Mom’s side has diagnosed migraine, and it was serious enough to disrupt her daily life to quite a large extent. So I decided that headaches it shall be. I did some reading up of the symptoms of what one should display when one has a migraine attack at the school library. I regurgitated the information and it wasn’t before long when Mom decided I might have migraine too, albeit caused by her bad genes. So the sickness charade to escape school continued other than the part when I had this huge crush on one of the upper sec boys, who was in the soccer team, and the Science club of whom I was in. I attended school religiously for close to three months before the infatuation pewter off which also coincided with the fact that I saw him out on a date with another girl from school. I had tailed them one day, and at a safe but audible distance I shouted his name as loud as I possibly could coupled with the words, “You fucking bastard”. Okay, so it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t date me since he wasn’t enlightened by the fact that another girl was holding a torch for him but I needed to blow off steam. And the best thing was that the pair of young doves didn’t know who had shouted because I was hiding behind a parked van while doing the deed. Kid half jokingly said that I was scarily malicious and he worries much for the person who dares to date me but has even more bravado to dump me. I remember saying, “That is just going to take a lot of balls.”

So this is what retribution is like, ____________ in either funky pain or groovy sadness.

God’s irony is served in permanence because officially in my last year at the secondary school, I was diagnosed with migraine. Mine wasn’t as glorifying great as my cousin, I didn’t blacked out like she did on her really bad days but as a usual routine, I’ll always spend a couple of days withering in a disheveled state in my bed. This was definitely retribution. First of all, if menstruation wasn’t irritating enough, now, I have to have a three/four day fling with migraine. God also made sure I had a new best friend to help me cope with His irony, Mr. Painkillers.

You know, Kid laughed out heartily when Dr. Samy said that I have migraine. He had accompanied us there. My mom didn’t give any thought to his humour since she was already so impervious to everything that is about him. But Dr. Samy didn’t come away looking too humoured having must have assumed that Kid was doubting his professional assessment. Mom was at the brink of tears, speeding to the conclusion that her precious daughter will later develop a malignant brain tumor because of all those headaches. She readily lambasted Dr. Samy with her 10,001 questions, providing the lapse for the doctor to shift his focus away from the funny Laughing Machine. Kid even had the balls to silently mouth the word ‘Retribution’ while we were walking out of the room. See, Kid wasn’t laughing that it could be the wrong diagnosis or that I was faking it again, rather he was picking at the threads of my physical misery. ‘____ Kid laughs like that Desi Arnaz guy from “I Love Lucy”, with a Singaporean flavour not Cuban. But then my Kid can’t sing to save his own life. Why can’t he not laugh during those un-laughable moments?

HY3241 lecture was mundane. Fourteen minutes into the so many theories I almost became Citizen Mundane until I sneaked out my really trashed up Nylon magazine, and one can’t even begin to describe its condition as dog-eared, it is worst than that. It has been read to death and i shared it with Gerry. In five, four, three, two, one, we drew black marker mustaches on Avril Lavinge’s face. That fucking bitch sitting two rows in front of mine was still sobbing & occasionally darting evil eyes back at me. Her eyes looked as though it had just been through the aftermath of a terribly botch-up Botox injection.

Today, while waiting for the lecture to begin, this girl from another tutorial group announced in an insinuating tone that at long last the rich girl decided to come back & attend lessons. And if she can’t finish in time to get her degree, it’s alright because her daddy is rich enough to let her stay back as many years as she want. Obviously, the mock was directed at me. Gerry, sitting beside me turned kind of sick, holding on to my wrist, now afraid that I will become a fighting she-cock hungry for first blood. Back in junior college she had witnessed a couple of times provoking both girls & boys, inciting them to slap me or else I will do likewise. I fight good. Like Edward Norton in Fight Club except that I am the female version. And school uniforms can’t stand up to the rigors of clothes grabbing, breasts punching, fingernails clawing, and hair pulling; literally the basics of girl fighting 101. I didn’t fight this time round. Before heading back for our lecture, Gerry & I had drove into town for lunch and a quick jaunt to the supermarket to get the groceries we needed for the dinner that I was cooking tonight. The day before Mom said she wanted me to cook tonight and so I said if she wanted me to, I will obliged but I shall do it my way, nothing of her picky choice. Gerry had bought a pack of preserved plums earlier, needing it to keep her awake in the lecture, I reached into the pack with my right hand, and rummaged through it. Gerry thought I wasn’t getting up to fight but instead venting my anger at her preserved plums. I walked up to that mocking bitch and smeared my preserved plum coated hand into her eyes. Her boyfriend just stood there, looking at me. I think Gerry will never place preserved plums or anything closely remote to preserved food near me again. The rest of my lecture mates shuffled uneasily back into their seats while that bitch’s boyfriend rushed her to the toilet. Gerry kept on clicking her tongue throughout the lecture, signaling her disapproval of what I had just done. I returned, at a level audible enough for everyone present, “Well, who asked her to mock me?”

‘_______ “Mock me lah, Nah Bei, I’m going to eat raw onions now,” that was what Kid mumbled to his auntie while reaching for one on the kitchen counter, and started taking quick bites of his yellow onion, skin & all. I was wondering what the hell was he doing eating an onion and seemingly threatening his aunty that he was actually eating one. The auntie let herself out of the house hastily, behaving as though she had just lost both the battle & the war. Kid finished his onion and then told me to hold on because he needs to brush his teeth now. Regardless of whether I was immune to his weird behaviour or not, I still asked his mother what was that all about. She explained that Kid had years back once ate an onion, spat out the chewed up bits, working it well all over his hands, and then without warning smeared it all over that Auntie’s eyes. And it was all in return for her injurious comments on his father whom had passed away when he was close to eleven. She had insinuated that Kid’s father was a cheating bastard, and so deserved to die in the car crash with that slut whore. I learnt my lesson, right or wrong, Kid had already forgiven the dead. The dead dears are always the heroes. I think I should carry an emergency onion for those unexpected situations. If he could chew up an onion so could I.

‘________cut me thin wheels of lemon. This night is going to end with me being lulled into a one-sided conversation with the rumbling of thunder, its starting to drizzle and I’m just to lazy to get up to shut the windows. It is now actually the 19th of October, and the digital alarm blinks 02:37am. I remember catching bit parts of the TV serial 24 Hours and in it whenever the scene cuts to the time ticking down to Kiefer Sutherland’s doomsday, there will be an accompanying computerized beeping sound. Maybe I can imagine that my time owned by me is ticking away with that same beeping sound in the background while I wait for sleep to visit. Mom was pleased with the dinner I prepared, or partly by me since Gerry had helped. She would make a good kitchen mom & wife, wearing a Mary Poppins apron in a sexual kind of manner, and pleasing her husband to no end. Gerry squirmed at my imagined scenario. I would squirmed too but somehow watching Jaime Oliver or Nigella Lawson cooking up feasts after feasts, and rightly fit for kings & queens in their studio kitchens, I can’t help thinking that the kitchen is a shrine where food & sex collude in harmony. It is like how you eat piping hot pancakes with maple syrup. One cannot do without the other. I don’t think pancakes will taste that right if you ate it with only butter or cheese spread. So in conclusion only pancakes & maple syrup can create that orgasmic harmony. Little wonder sleep wouldn’t come because I’m thinking of kitchens, feasts, and how it can be transformed into a shrine for a kitchen sex goddess. A figment of my imagination it shall stay like that. And if I do dream tonight, I want to dream myself licking vanilla crème brulee off Nigella Lawson’s fingers and feeding me thin wheels of lemon in between licks. The rain was staining the parquet floor already.

The morning after. I have got to make good on my promise to help out Gerry with her research assignment on ballroom dancing, and specifically waltz, the dance movement that she is supposed to write up on. She chose it because it looked humanely possible for her to pick it up as part of the assignment requirements, while I thought it was painfully a sleep-come-on. Drove to her place but Mom didn’t trust my driving. She wanted to call & pay for a cab so I deliberately overturned my bowl of cornflakes & milk. Mom chased me out of the kitchen, absent-mindedly gibbering about my clumsiness; I slipped out of the house with the car keys. When I was learning how to drive, I got allocated this Hell-Rider inspired instructor which made the lessons mostly nervy and barely instructional. He is like the King of filter lanes, meaning he doesn’t give way to you, you on the main fairway, shall honour him with the right of the way. I’m obedient. I drive obeying the filter lane traffic rule. But I did absorb one nugget of driving advice from him. He said, “The car is a thing, not something that lives & breathes. So never ever let the car drive you. You, you are & will be the one that drives the car, wielding your ultimate will over a thing. Always remember, you are the one driving the car, and not the car that is driving you.” So other than obeying the compulsory traffic rules, I more or less drive in a manner when I used to crash & burn in Daytona at the gaming arcade center. Dad thinks I drive like Vinnie Jones with lots of mean meatballs, and openly he disapproves of my technique but deep down I believe he is brimming with endless pride as a father would have for a daughter that drives properly. It’s a show for the paranoid mother. I’m in love with the smell of the car’s dashboard. Somehow, the luxurious scent mix of a leather & oak paneling dashboard always manages to get me on. I should be keeping my concentration on the road and yet, I’m imagining myself having a full-blown make-out session with that hottie, Jude Law, in the backseat. Car rocking, windows fogging lightly, the world outside is raining till death, I moan, he groan, the catching of breaths exuding muskiness, the smell of leather & oak paneling, and that’s only my penultimate sexual fantasy. The next to the last is even more sinful than Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden”. I looked up at the rearview mirror, the driver behind me was flickering his high beam lights at me. I pray his dick will just shrivel up & drop off for interrupting my turn-on session. Slowing down, I cut back to his left. It was my church pastor. He must have thought it was my Dad on the wheel, recognizing the vehicle plate. I waved, flashed a choir girl smile, and picked up speed again. The rest of the journey to Gerry’s place was a distinct aftertaste of getting caught in a sinful act.

Having reached Gerry’s place safely, I made a call to Mom to apologize for the bowl of spilt milk & cornflakes, and also for sneaking off with the car. She spent the next five minutes nagging about me driving, and forced me to pass the phone to Gerry. The next five minutes I can only hear Gerry answering, “Yes auntie, I will do just that, no worries.” Mom instructed her to drive me back later when we are done with what we will be doing, and she will call & pay for a cab to drive her back home. Gerry stared really hard at me whilst putting back the cordless phone. I sank further into the couch. She stuck out her hands, demanding for the car keys. And I was hoping that I would be the one driving us to the dance studio.

The dance instructor was still halfway through their lesson when we arrived. I’m sure Kid would love to pick up a dance step or two if only we had reached this far. I wouldn’t mind being his dance partner. Kid & Claire floating across the ballroom floor in perfect synchronized fashion, with him pulling me up close while I draw in nearer still, and we exchange breaths, eyes to eyes, he will be the perfect dance partner. Gerry had already been here the week before, requesting permission from the dance instructor that she needed to work on her project assignment on ballroom dancing. The answer I got from her was that he was very obliging as long as she signed up for a class. “Claire do you want to sign up for a class too, we can choose similar classes since our lesson schedule matches? Claire, can you hear me? Claire?” Exasperation welling up, I can see Gerry mouthing those words. “Yes, Geraldine, sign me up too with whatever you are signing up.” I think I was caught daydreaming again that’s why I blurted out her full name. The dance instructor was this middle-age guy, and he looked presentable for someone his age; clean, neat, shaven, shirt pressed, slick pants, impeccable mannerisms and stable. He could even be my father if he had gotten married & have a kid really early but then, that would have ruined the entire setup. A wife & kid will change him, he wouldn’t look presentable anymore. Gerry filled me in with the detail that the dance instructor is still single while on our drive here. She speculated that the dance instructor might be gay. I said “Good, maybe he could introduce us to more of his gay friends, and we could widen our gay social circle.” Taking one hand off the wheel, she quick-swiped my forehead. “I was joking. And I’m certain my Mom wouldn’t let you drive if she knew you were going to take one hand off the wheel to swipe her daughter’s forehead.”

“Hello girls. So Geraldine, you are here to sign up for the slow Waltz class right? And I see that you have brought a friend here with you too.”

“Yes Eric, and her name is Claire. We will be signing up for similar classes, at similar timings.” I didn’t know that they were already on a first name basis. Maybe it isn’t such a brilliant idea for me to join the party but Gerry stared at me again & then at my fingers, as though using her mind power to coerce me to put my signature to the application form. A standard package of 24 lessons, twice every week will set us back by $480.00. Gerry gladly paid hers, I paid mine, and this smooth operator dance instructor has just made a small pile of $960.00 from two young girls in less than a time it takes to do the tango. We left as the next class began to mill in. Wonder what they were going to do today? The rumba or the tango? Our first lesson begins at 3pm sharp, Thursday, the day after. Suddenly, I don’t feel that keen at all. Gerry dragged me away from the dance studio, shoving me into the car, effectively preventing me from withdrawing my application & tearing up the form. I informed her that she has stared at me twice, the third time, I’m going to stab it, best friend or not. And she just gave me a wicked smile. I fell asleep in the car listening to the fading strains ofA Letter to Elise, while Gerry carefully drove us to our next destination.

‘__________ if this was in Hong Kong then this would have been next station, Tin Hau. Breathe. Yes, Next Station, Tin Hau. That is how the specialness of one place can define a human being, and not the usual way around.

We ended up back at her place instead. Gerry had driven around us around for nearly four hours, without a destination, making only a stop at the petrol station for a refill, toilet break, and her own microwave-oven lunch, while all the time, I was sleeping like a dead beaver in the back seat. In order I could catch up on sleep, she had actually driven around aimlessly, discarding the original plans of heading to the bookstore to pick up a book that she had ordered and has arrived. I woke up in the midst of her driving, and murmured where we were? “Pan-Island Expressway,” Gerry replied in a sing-song manner. “Why?” “Because you have been sleeping for like nearly four hours and I didn’t want to wake you up so I just kept on driving & driving.” She made a stop at the next petrol station. I needed the toilet. I bought Lay’s potato chips for my late lunch. Gerry insisted on either I wait till we drove back to her place & she will fix something up or I choose the tuna sandwiches available. I opted for the potato chips to stave off the stomach rumbling, and will also go for the late lunch at her place. The cold tuna sandwiches made me wanted to throw up. On the drive back, I strapped myself into the front seat, totally refreshed from the unexpected gratuitous sleep, and Gerry sang along to A Letter to Elise. I can’t believe that we are still playing the same song over & over again.

Late lunch was Cheese-Baked Fusilli, generously mixed with bacon bits & chopped mushrooms. It took Gerry roughly an hour & forty-five minutes from preparation, to it baking in the over, to it sitting in a bowl in front of me, and eating it up as fast as I could endure the hot melted cheese burning my tongue off. She corrected me, saying that this meal should rightly be my dinner. I suggested a DVD marathon at her place tonight so that we could finish up the last three pieces that we had rented, and avoid paying the overdue fines. We were supposed to get started on another project deadline but I argued that it will be a terribly wasteful of us to pay the fine when that same amount of money could be dropped into the charity donation box at the supermarket. I called Mom that we had decided to have an all-nighter on our project, which means I will be staying over. And she can rest assure that Gerry will still be the one driving me home tomorrow. Mom asked for Gerry to come to the phone again before I could cut her off. She rolled her eyes at me while I went to hunt for a clean towel so that I could take a shower, having not taken one when I left the house this morning. I borrowed her top, shorts & panties, skipping the bra because I’ll just end up having to stuff thick wads of paper towels so that it could somehow fit. She must have done something right during puberty or else God wouldn’t have bestowed such great endowments together with a willowy figure & pear-shaped bottom to match. Or maybe her Mom fed her some ancient secret recipe passed down from generations to generations, and speaking of that I realise that Auntie Sally is actually pretty well-endowed too.

The leftover DVDs were two Hong Kong & one Korean flicks. We decided to start with Shiri, the Korean one which is action-packed as suggested by the synopsis printed on the back of the casing. Gerry wanted something more upbeat to begin the marathon.

“You are not wearing a bra. You borrowed everything except the bra, and now you will be walking be around the house braless. Where are you going with this, my dear Miss Claire Cheng?”

”Mine is already like two-day old, I don’t want to risk developing some nasty itch, and yours are like only fit for rock melons. And furthermore, I’m like extra small. Have you ever seen me in a state anything other than small?”

“True, true, very true.” She responded, and trying her whole best to contain laughter as I re-enlightened her on the size of my breasts.

Before she could even properly laugh I threw a cushion on the couch at her, smack right at her chest. End of discussion.

We started on Fleeing by Night, the second DVD, at nearly a quarter past eleven, and Gerry & I were still trying to clear our choked noses after crying our eyes out at the terrible sad ending of Shiri. It got me thinking whether I had subconsciously deliberately chosen shows that had sad endings in them so that I could use it as a substitute to mask myself crying. I had already watched both Fleeing by Night and Funeral March, the third DVD, back when it was released at the theaters. I only suggested to Gerry that she rented them because they are very good shows. I already knew that Fleeing by Night & Funeral March have terrible sad endings too. Both of us struggled to keep awake but at the last burst of Funeral March, I swear we were crying our eyes out as we watched the main character slipped away from life on his hospital bed. Gerry said she would kill herself if I she had to watch the sad ending again. The plot was a little bit stretched with all the emotional twists & turns of how & what a terminal illness can do your loved ones but somehow, I just can’t erase the final last scenes from my mind. The guy, the main character, lies on his hospital bed, on his side, looking at the girl he loves who is resting on the couch beside him, and she is looking at him too. As the night wears on, we already get the feeling that the guy wouldn’t be able to make it through the night, and the girl desperately wants to stay awake for him, and to be the one to see him go. Since it is a sad love movie, it should be cliché. The girl falls asleep, unable to contain her tiredness anymore but the guy stays awake. And even though he was dying, he is happy, happy like a kid ripping though their Christmas presents, happy like the parents of a new-born child. He was happy because his last breathe will be taken with the image of the girl sweetly sleeping near him. And then, he slips away. If I didn’t remember wrongly, Funeral March was one of Kid’s favourite movie.

‘____ i know, I know, I know, I need to play catch-up on my study deadlines but when boredom seizes one like a Kansas tornado, flaying you into strips of monotony, I told Mom I was heading down to the central library in school. She drove me down before heading to her appointment at the hair salon. My intention was in fact to drop by the central library, not to beef up on my sparse takings on the Millenarianism lecture but actually do something else that can save me from my afternoon boredom of being cooped in the room. The lecture notes staring at me, I, staring at the lecture notes, we stare at each other again, not making a single sense of what is being preached, I was about to break out singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars’. I’m not absorbing the knowledge but further fuelling boredom instead. I must have some fun even if it is at the cruel expense of others. I brought along black markers and all the tiny wads of Post-It notes that I could find at home, tossed everything into the tote bag, hurried to the car, and changed to the radio station that Mom prefers to tune in when she’s driving. No point annoying her even when boredom is bleeding from my skull. John Lennon’s Jealous Guy was playing, and when the part where John whistles comes on, Mom whistled along too. It was kind of discomforting to hear my own mother doing that. Didn’t she teach me that a girl whistling is a graceless act by itself? Whistling is strictly for boys only. When girls do it, they either imply that they have poor family upbringing, parents not instilling the proper personal manners, or the girl is a tomboy. My skin cringed even more when she continued whistling to the next song, without missing a beat as she negotiated with the late afternoon traffic on the roads. I kept my silence. Not sure whether I should utter anything since speaking could break her whistling momentum, and subsequently, trigger her off to something bigger. Or maybe she was deliberately whistling to make me feel discomforting, strain me enough so that I would confess to all the bad things I have done recently or will be doing later. Damn it, she is mind-fucking me. She whistled the third song. She whistled to the fourth song too. She wouldn’t stop at the fifth one. A quarter through number six, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides, we turned into the sheltered foyer, I mouthed a quick “Thank you, Mom,” and bolted out from the vehicle. As she turned to drive away, I could still clearly see her lips holding that whistling shape, she was still whistling. If Kid was here, he’d have knew how to handle the situation, and slip-slide me out of this uncomfortable skin. If the drive was any more protracted, I can’t tell who will explode first. And if I asked the wrong question, she’d have let free of the wheel and wrap her hands around my neck. I can’t help it but I sat in the toilet cubicle crying for a good twenty minutes. Not being able to systematically hate your own mother is like an un-asked God-given blessing. A pity, I do not have siblings or else I could make myself unavailable to attend Mom’s funeral when she passes on, and let my siblings arrange everything. The flower wreath can be my substitute. It will be my way of getting back, and make it worth the twenty minutes of crying in this cubicle, ranking of urine.

Washed my face, refilled my tumbler, and headed to the central library, searching for an isolated corner to work on my stuff.

Eclectic

__________________ any newly updated writes will be either in PINK, GREEN, RED, or BLUE. To Be Continued when i can find my fingers to type again

______________13th November '04

writing Notes to self

I still have not opened the box of possessions that Kid had marked out for me.

“I don’t know, lightning could strike.”

“Claire & Gerry goes shoplifting.”

“do we have faith in what we believe?”

Have you ever hard of the ‘ting’ sound when the light of a fluorescent tube catches on?

My eyelashes are so long that it keeps on brushing against the lenses of my glasses, and I have to frequently wipe off the smudges.

If it was snowing in Iceland now, where would we be then? No. The ‘We’, as in you & me. Will we be standing together, holding hands, hoping to watch our succeeding breaths condense into vapors, and instead what we find ourselves drenched through in the pouring rain. We didn’t need umbrellas. Because we are happy together. And who will say otherwise,

Oh, I didn’t know that the Tokyo Tower was taller by a little bit more than the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The bowl of spilt milk was actually my overturned bowl of cornflakes & milk.

So I said, “What about breakfast at Tiffanys?”

Staring at the stereo, liking the music that is coming out from it. On Gerry’s bedside table lie two compact discs, Rostropovich Mastercellist, Legendary Recordings 1956 – 1978 & Natalie Merchant, Live in New York, New York City, June 13, 1999. The music flooding through her room and permeating every brick of her apartment was the latter.

I began to lose control. I really like the way John Lennon whistled on Jealous Guy, and I will believe everything that he says

Claire, narrating the story - Main Character
Kid - Main Character
Claire’s Mother - Supporting Character
Gerry - Supporting Character
Dance Teacher - Supporting Character

• “that’s too much machine for you”
• “oh, in what manner of trickery do I deserve this? Your chicanery is consuming.”
• Disappearance at Ayer’s Rock
• Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’
• Stunned the computer lab’s keyboard keys
• She checks her reflection on the stainless steel knife.
• Kid borrows my stereo to listen to his cds
• The question that saves the day: “Will you be my doll? As in the rag dolly of that rag dolly song?
• __________ : From Dr. Iannis to his daughter, Pelagia: When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!
• there is always someone to save isn’t it?
• everyone that dreams of writing will want to write their own Catcher in the Rye, don’t you agree?
• Build a pyramid out of a pack of poker cards
• When will we open our eyes like the first time when we open it as a baby?
• I had read from a friend’s weblog that during the Columbine High School shooting, one of the shooters had asked one the victims, a girl, Valeen Schnurr, whether she believed in God. Already injured & bleeding from shotgun pellets, in hands down & kneeled position, she said yes, and he promptly walked away.
• Kid is a small-time shoplifter.
• Kid is a smoker, smokes so that he would look older.
•

_______'morning becomes eclectic