#154: I was made to taste your kiss.

Cameron Highlands is a very beautiful place, if not kind of boring. Throughout the whole trip, all the pictures I took fell under 5 categories: Strawberries, Mushrooms, Cacti, Flowers and Scenery. So I’ll use a few pictures from each category to document my trip. Just click the title to read.

#153: Our lives are but a single breath, we flower and we fade.

My uncle sped down the main road, mostly empty. Past midnight…No one comes out now but party-goers or dead drunks…or frantic relatives. The turn into the small winding road that cuts through the villages was sharp and urgent. The fumbling of the car lights. Big to small and the big one again. Every car we met on the way had to bear with our incessant horning, and so must the villagers. I sat at the back, and wondered if it was some kind of secret signal between villagers. That someone was going. Going.

When we reached we rushed into the main room. His body was propped up with a few seats and a crude mattress, and covered with a blanket hastily folded and sewn together thicker to avoid the chill. His frame was skeletal – hollows in the face I didn’t know hollows were. At the temples, and the cheeks sunken in so deep. Spasms coursed through his body. His eyes cloudy and unaware. Two days ago we stood beside him and said that we were good kids, thought that Tina was absolutely pretty, and wanted to give out candy to everyone in the village. It’s hard to imagine him then as I saw him, his mouth opening and closing and too weak to say a thing.

And I’ve never had so many adults crying in the same room as me before. The village priest stands on the head of the bed, chanting in a dialect I wished I learnt. I never really talked to him properly before, because we never really understood each other. Now I can’t hear him and he can’t hear me.

My baby cousin cries and kicks up a fuss. It was 1am. He must be sleepy, but maybe, maybe he knows what’s going on. My uncle retreats from the bed and smokes furiously. The crying has died down by then, but the sniffling continues. In his illness he hasn’t drank anything, so we took some water, which my aunt mixed it with the holy water the priest brought, and fed it to him through a spoon. He gurgles, and it doesn’t go down. Not for a long time. He must be drowning in the phlegm in his lungs.

It was 3am. My toes were freezing in my boots. Every other part of my body was warm, but it felt so, so cold. We ate a little, toasty pieces of buns and bread, or chocolates. And the children were chased to sleep. In the huge 4-storey house, only the first floor looks fully lived in. The second had just three beds, for when we visit, the third storey was hardly renovated at all (In the summer, he would sleep there on a bamboo mat when we came to visit. He can’t walk now.), and the fourth storey was a just a giant balcony, and we used to climb up there to look at the starry nights of the unpolluted countryside.

We slept on a queen bed, the three of us. When they woke us up, it was 6.30am, 2nd January, and he was still alive. He couldn’t talk, but was conscious. We took the scheduled flight home. When I woke up today he was gone.

I don’t know how he went, but I know my other grandfather did so very quickly. He coughed twice and just…just died, as opposed to spasming through the night or something, I’m not so sure myself.

How will I die?

#152: We lose ourselves in the things we love.

I hate long hot showers when all you do is to think and think and overthink.

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Who am I? It’s such a stupid existential question, but lately I’ve really been wondering.

I cannot remember a time I haven’t thought of myself in relation with other people. I don’t exist, not by myself. I’m nothing without other people. I don’t really have an identity of my own, I think. Most of the things I do, I do because of other people. The few times I didn’t, the few times I did things for ‘myself’ or what is left of that, I…I’m not happy. Well, it doesn’t make sense to satisfy ‘myself’ when most of what I am is defined by other people.

So many things I do, I do for other people. Even if it benefits me in the first place, my overall reason always becomes someone else in a roundabout way. Sometimes I wonder if it’s what I want. But sometimes I think it is. To make people happy. Sounds like a noble enough goal.

So shall I cruise through life making people happy? Since I am, happy when they’re happy. But what if I’m not? What if I’m not happy? Who can ensure my happiness?

Or does it not matter at all, since everyone else is happy? But…but I’m not brave, or strong, or noble enough for that. I want to do somethings just for myself.  But I don’t know what I want anymore. I haven’t been wanting much lately. Nothing ever gets fulfilled anyway.

#151: (Wide Sargasso Sea Movie Review) Maybe I have slept too long in the moonlight.

Wanted to do something about my literature homework which I refused to touch through the whole holidays, so I watched this film based off one of my literature text, similarly titled Wide Sargasso Sea. (Completely contentless) Review under cut.

#150: Knee deep, knee deep in sorrow.

Happiness is fleeting. A chuckle from a funny story. Loud guffaws from an exceptionally amusing viral video. The smug accomplished feeling when you do something well. The smile that dances on the corners of your mouth when you think happy thoughts. It goes away.

But sadness grips at the heart and suffocates. It tears you apart from the very center of your being. And it rarely goes away, leaving a raw spot, a lingering ache, a bitter reminder. Anything that triggers it breaks you down completely, like it did the first time. It doesn’t ever leave.

Funny how minor things that people say or do not say, do or do not do, translate to such alarming responses from me. Is it even warranted? I’m so tired, so tired of thinking so much, of being so sad. Can’t I just be happy? For just one day? Half a day? Please? What must I do? Just tell me. At this point of time, I think I’ll do anything. Anything to be happy. To stop the thinking.

#149: The mist and cloud will turn to rain, the rain to mist and cloud again

Recently, in one of those rare occasions I got to have a good chat with Adelyn, she told me something quite…surprising. “You’ve changed! You’re different now. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something is different.” Rachel vehemently denied it, as I did when I first heard her. But now I’ve thought through it it does seem to be a pretty valid observation. I guess it’s because we didn’t get to talk much in the entire past year and any change becomes painfully obvious. She has changed too. Rachel did, as well, if I think hard enough about it. And I did, most of all, changes that are not evident to just anybody.

I’ve become a lot…weaker this year. More susceptible to depressive thoughts and  more prone to over-thinking and more vulnerable to insensitivity and I do have my many many happy moments, but my whole year appears to be a giant bout of PMS. It really is quite interesting to see because I record all my adfjskdgakshg feelings down somewhere and I’ve been updating it a lot more frequently lately.

I don’t think this was what she saw though (and I hope not). I hope she can organize her thoughts and tell me soon I’m pretty curious to know.

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Incidentally, its 11/11/2011 today and I feel like if I should update my blog on this day, I should at least mention it or something. So here is the mention. Um. Yes.

#148: But you didn’t die this year I guess that’s good enough.

Happy birthday to myself!

Had quite a good lot of things to say but I’m so shagged tonight I can’t type all. In any case, it was a good day.

Will…Should probably update this with content.

*Edit: Never wait too long to write something because some time down the road you just won’t be bothered to anymore.

#147: Do you have wings?

Note to self: Never go to the city alone on a Saturday night, unless you want to be overcome by an intense feeling of loneliness and desolation.

Hot chocolate, beef pie, Belgian waffles, my Literature texts in my hands and my Mathematics worksheets in my file. It was supposed to be a good night. But company is…important. Someone to stop me from binge eating (Clearly.) Someone to analyse with me the literary features of the texts. Someone to whine to when I can’t get my third term in the expansion of y=ln(1+tan^-1x). Someone to tell me to stop studying and discuss inane issues with them instead. Or sit with me in silence aside from the scratchy sound of pen on paper.

Goodness it seems like I can never function properly alone.

I took the MRT back, the long way, the full 22 stops, and watched as the crowd thinned. Home-bound. And I felt a great reluctance to do the same.

#146: How to be restless in a beautiful place

Sit very still.

Hear the ambient noise. The soft whirring of the laptop, of the air-conditioning. Of the hair-dryer of the person next door. Feel the heat of the table lamp on your arm. Observe the gradient in the wash of the table lamp’s glow. Marvel. Slowly, the heightened awareness of the surroundings dissipates. Now it’s just you.

Feel your heart in your chest cavity pumping blood regularly. Feel it drop, well below where hearts are supposed to be. Feel the throb in your head from every beat, the twitch in that vein in your arm or at your leg when the blood flows. You can feel the air passing through your nose and you can almost taste it, that odd, stale, cool quality. If your arm is supporting your head, you can feel the trembling of your arm. You can feel your hair sit on your head, your forehead, and you remember the position of every strand. Realize that occasionally, your nostrils will flare. You wonder if it makes you look stupid. Feel the sides of the chair digging into your thighs. Sense a backache developing from all the hunching over the computer.

Yawn, feel your eyes close, scrunch up, squeezing out the tears you didn’t manage to cry out. Call it tearing – a natural side effect of yawning. Believe it. Commit to memory the feel of skin on skin – as two fingers touch each other, as you unconsciously brush your hand across the arm, as you rest your hand on your leg or on your face – crave it. More.

And if you sit still long enough, the entire body aches, itches, screaming for activity.

Sit very still.

#145: A real abandon, if you’re capable of it.

I had hoped that post-promo activities would be more interesting than what it had been for the past two days. There were ample opportunities to have fun but more often than not they lead to troubling and unsettling issues so why bother having fun…Things can’t even go right for two days after a nerve-wrecking week of promos. It’s like the world fucked up itself and refuses to revert back to how things were.

Actually I sort of miss how it was, studying for exams, having some sort of purpose in my waking hours. I felt productive, perhaps sometimes a sense of achievement when I finish a difficult topic or if I managed to solve a tricky question. Now it’s either PW or gaming, and both are equally pointless (even if the latter can be entertaining). So this is the freedom I had anticipated.

I’m so angry at myself.

It hurts. I didn’t think it can hurt this bad but I’ll get used to it.