I started 2016 in a slouch on the sofa. I had been there for a couple of hours already; UnREAL, a modern soap opera about the cynicism and calculated ruthlessness behind the scenes of a "The Bachelorette"-esque reality television show. How meta: a show about the show behind a show. It wasn't particularly sublime, nor was it particularly bad. The ( Read more... )

The slowly-dawning realization that you will never amount to somebody as great as you had hoped, and that paths only narrow henceforth. Full glasses be damned; time is seeping as life ebbs away.

I need new words to live by.

Click to view

I want to find and burrow in a Faraway Tree.

It is already more than halfway through the year. I have barely written anything; the days have only been filled with doing. Of late, it has been training five times a week, feet coated with calluses and an unshakeable smell of sweat and gritted effort, floorball too, wild and carefree and hearty laughs, and work. Always work for the most part of ( Read more... )

Every day, I skip off into the dawdling sunshine, waning but holding its shimmer as the hour stretches till the very last moment. It comes easily when dusk leaves a tenuous grasp: the desire to make magick, be magic, to will oneself to be transported to when one knows to be a happier, freer time. And then, it dissipates into the swell of midnight ( Read more... )

It is the littlest things that come together to make a brilliant visual reel of the day. Window panes thick with rain, buildings shrouded from view, and curiously removed from the hullabaloo on carpet. Trudging through the slick streets, peeping up from below the umbrella to see grey skies washed clear. Swashing hair with a colleague who came to ( Read more... )

It seems as if I had been slumbering for a long time and have recently awoken to discover that sunshine feels like this, and fingers, when stretched, feels like that, and the world, much smaller, blearier. It is not a bad thing though. The ceaseless stream of saffron from street lamps whipping past on a cool, crisp night. Things are manageable. ( Read more... )

There is an elderly man at my block who has been wearing a white shirt and a pair of black slacks every time I see him. I don't run into him much nowadays: maybe once or twice a month. When I was still schooling, I would go down every morning at five forty-five with my mother, and he would be sitting behind the staircase, stretching his thin back ( Read more... )

Too soon, it is midnight. Too quickly, it is time to sink down into the sweet molasses of slumber. Yield to an enclosure, hide beneath comfort, and haul yourself out after an internal promise for five more minutes. Give in, give up, it is too easy to lose track of an Ultimate Purpose. When days are to-do lists and deadlines and putting out fires in ( Read more... )

The days draw open and close like curtains, hastily and quickly, with eyes registering the outside as a rough brush of colours. My favourite times of the day are those spent on the train. I have come up with many favourite times over the past month, occupying my hours with the creation of new routines and new traditions. It has been a month, or ( Read more... )

During dinner, my father spoke about a hypothetical future that indicated a picture-perfect life in his mind. "In ten years time, there will be a little Yoshiko"; my brother would be married and have a toddler named Robert; my sister would be married and traipsing around a film shoot; I would have found Mr Right by then; and he would be seventy- ( Read more... )