291: hello again.
no one i know reads/ blogs on LJ any more. so it is safe, yet open.
sometimes, my heart feels physically heavy. i have forgotten so much that every little thing stirs a new memory, every look into the past uncovers some hazy, treasured secret.
we used to go home together everyday. we went roaming around orchard, eating cupcakes and buying the same clothes, playing pool at paradiz and laughing at the boys, watching movies and gushing about cute actors; we frequented wild wild wet in our holidays (what, quit judging); we spent ages reading in TP library (me and my obsession with tracking down all the X-Wing books/ comics, her and her proper literature), wandering around TP finding cheap nail polishes, stuffing ourselves silly with mos, talking about parental woes and heartbreak and past loves and present crushes. it was carefree and unguarded, and in our teenage way we loved each other and spoke fearlessly of that love.
years later, even as we went to different schools and different faculties, i met her new friends and made friends with them, just as i had befriended her friends in the past. she educated me on the newest and best bags and jewellery (a nightingale is a BAG, not just a nurse or a bird), just as she had introduced me to the wonders of orchard, and to my first (and current) brow threading place in dodgy orchard towers. we had formed new and perhaps deeper friendships in the interim, but ours was a bond made strong through shared experiences during our most turbulent, unstable years. i knew that whenever we met, i could tell her everything, and face no judgment. and i could always prod her into updating me on her life, on the important things.
we met less and less over the years. life took us away from each other, with our diverging interests and industries. i still remember the exact point where i thought to myself, "wow, we are really different now."
but this year, i heard a piece of gossip that i thought she would be interested in. (she was.) we met; it was also her birthday dinner. once again the download of information started, as if no time had passed at all. i got her up to speed on how i had been wasting my life (lol), and she told me of many things, including a new, budding, tentative love, if one could call it that then. i was excited for her. i realised that somehow, despite all my philosophical ramblings about principles and worldviews, it was great just knowing that she would be on my side.
the next night we were to meet again. she couldn't come, but it was okay. "love you", we said.
too soon after, it was "happy bday:):) meet soon!" we postponed it because i was overseas. in my OCD over inbox zero, i archived the chat. the meet-up never happened. then in a mess of hysteria and incoherence and tears, reminiscence and laughter and more tears - it was over.
this is a terribly prosaic tribute to a girl/ woman who was a poet at heart. but in this clashing and intertwining of two lives, somehow the unromantic lawyer is the one who remains. i am unable to express my grief in more beautiful language, for I never had her way with words; all i have is honesty.
who is going to introduce unpretentious poetry to me now? goodbye, love.
Away and see an ocean suck at a boiled sun
and say to someone things I’d blush even to dream.
Slip off your dress in a high room over the harbour.
Write to me soon.
New fruits sing on the flipside of night in a market
of language, light, a tune from the chapel nearby
stopping you dead, the peach in your palm respiring.
Taste it for me.
Away and see the things that words give a name to, the flight
of syllables, wingspan stretching a noun. Test words
wherever they live; listen and touch, smell, believe.
Spell them with love.
Skedaddle. Somebody chaps at the door at a year’s end, hopeful.
Away and see who it is. Let in the new, the vivid,
horror and pity, passion, the stranger holding the future.
Ask him his name.
Nothing’s the same as anything else. Away and see
for yourself. Walk. Fly. Take a boat till land reappears,
altered forever, ringing its bells, alive. Go on. G’on. G’on.
Away and see.