you said you loved the weather
and the food
and the london markets
and london
and your course
and the christmas musical your church had put on in the Dominion theatre
and the dancers on Oxford street

i said i loved it all too

travelgolf is a really ugly website
you said it was geeky
and i think so too
but i still want to make a website for you

(and to have you cook for me
and to cook for you)

i just wanted to write this all down
because i don’t want to forget

one day i’ll write something i mean

xxxx
11/12/11

On that particularly frigid August morning, Alyssa had woken up and performed her bathroom ritual with her usual precision and efficiency, brushing her teeth with the detached frustration of someone enduring a ringing phone during a movie, and driving her brush through her frazzled black hair with more careless ruthlessness than was strictly necessary. Rather than co-ordinate an outfit, she had slipped on an ice-blue chiffon sundress- elasticised at the waist and slightly frayed at the hem- that she’d had since sixteen, before she’d met him. She had paired it with her most comfortable pair of flip-flops and a fake Hello Kitty wristwatch that her best friend, Eileen, had set to New York time and gifted to her just the day before.

They had spent the day together in a daze, her mood throughout the proceedings an embarrassment to her now, having swung violently between accidie sullenness and hysterical happiness. Her laughter- when it came- had arrived in angry spurts loud and harsh and pleading. She vaguely recalled punching him on the shoulder. As for him, he could not laugh, he could not cry; he only knew how to smile. All day, he had untangled the furious knots in her hair, cupped her dew-dipped face and whispered wordless secrets into her soft, pliable ears, but his eyes had been hollow as an empty lake and for the first time in her twenty-one years of age she had found herself flinching, mechanically, from his touch. In defiance, she’d brought them to Little India, where she’d purchased a bottle of henna and, in a deserted park, had painstakingly traced on his back: I will remember Alyssa.

What did you draw on my back?

A swan, she’d said.

Now she found herself seated, alone, on a row of flimsy plastic chairs at Changi Airport Terminal Three. The ceiling lights were bright and blinding as a surgeon’s, and she could not help but feel the pressure of the people around push and press against her, like waves against an ice floe out at sea. She raised her handkerchief to her face, partly out of an impulse to hide it, and was surprised to find that the tears had dried.

Hello jie jie, the little boy said.

Alyssa looked up. The boy was short, stout and appeared no older than nine, and if the softness in his eyes was anything to go by, was younger than that still. With his fat flushed cheeks that constantly huffed and puffed and his red pasar malam t-shirt that had been valiantly tugged over his tummy, he reminded her of a balloon Winnie the Pooh poised to pop. She smiled at the thought.

Hello, she said.

He was very tall, he said.

She put her handkerchief to her face again, knocking her spectacles askew. Her nose felt hot and uncomfortable on her face.

Do you want a sweet?

Slowly, she uncurled her right hand, which- she had not realised until now- had been desperately clutching the edge of the seat. The release, so unexpected, triggered a warm internal flush, like a shot of alcohol, that ran down her arm and lingered in her fingertips. Smiling shyly, a front tooth missing and just the faintest hint of triumph in his eyes, the boy gingerly placed in her proffered palm a yellow tear drop- the candy- which she immediately popped into her mouth as if it were a pill.

It’s sour, she said.

Later then sweeter, he said.

The boy edged a little closer and she lunged forward to hug him. He wrapped his tiny arms around her, and the warmth and contact of his small, plump body was so welcome and familiar that it terrified her slightly, and she began to tremble.

Will you see him again?

I don’t know, she said, her pretences thawing with every word.

I’ll be your boyfriend, he said.

She laughed, warmly.

VERSION 1

On that particularly frigid August morning, Alyssa had woken up and performed her bathroom ritual with her usual precision and efficiency, brushing her teeth with the detached vengeance of someone enduring a ringing phone during a movie, and driving her brush through her frazzled black hair with more careless ruthlessness than was strictly necessary. Rather than co-ordinate an outfit, she had slipped on an ice-blue chiffon sundress- elasticised at the waist and slightly frayed at the hem- that she’d had since sixteen, before she’d met him. She had paired it with her most comfortable pair of flip-flops and a fake Hello Kitty wristwatch that her best friend, Eileen, had set to New York time and gifted to her just the day before.

They had spent the day together in a daze, her mood throughout the proceedings an embarrassment to her now, having swung violently between accidie sullenness and hysterical happiness. Her laughter- when it came- had arrived in angry spurts loud and harsh and pleading. She vaguely recalled punching him on the shoulder. As for him, he could not laugh, he could not cry; he only knew how to smile. All day, he had untangled the furious knots in her hair, cupped her dew-dipped face and whispered wordless secrets into her soft, pliable ears, but his eyes had been hollow as an empty lake and for the first time in twenty-one years she had found herself flinching, mechanically, from his touch. She’d brought them to Little India, where she’d purchased a bottle of henna and, in a deserted park, had painstakingly written on his back: I will remember Alyssa.

What did you draw on my back?

A swan, she’d said.

Now she found herself seated, alone, on a row of flimsy plastic chairs at Changi Airport Terminal Three. The ceiling lights were bright and blinding as a surgeon’s, and she could not help but feel the pressure of the people around push and press against her, like the tide against a boat moored out at sea. She raised her handkerchief to her face, partly out of an impulse to hide it, and was surprised to find fresh tears there.

Hello jie jie, the little boy said.

Alyssa looked up. The boy was short, stout and appeared no older than nine, and if the softness in his eyes was anything to go by, was younger than that still. His fat flushed cheeks made him look as though he was constantly huffing and puffing, and coupled with his shy demeanour- hunched shoulders, inward pointing soles- he reminded her of a balloon poised to pop. She smiled at the thought.

Hello, she said.

He was very tall, he said.

She put her handkerchief to her face again, roughly pushing her spectacles askew. Her nose felt hot and uncomfortable on her face.

Do you want a sweet, he asked.

Slowly, she uncurled her right hand, which- she had not realised until now- had been desperately clutching the edge of the seat, leaving her knuckles lit for one brief moment in a halo of incandescent white, before fading to a ring of sore-red, an ombre tone much like the fringe of her dress. The boy gingerly placed in her proffered palm the candy, shaped like a yellow tear drop, which she immediately popped into her mouth like a pill. He grinned a toothy smile at her, a beaming ray of innocence and sunshine with one missing front tooth.

It’s sour, she said.

Later then sweeter, he said.

The boy edged a little closer and she lunged forward to hug him. He wrapped his tiny arms around her, and the warmth and contact was so welcome and familiar that it terrified her slightly, and she began to tremble.

Will you see him again, he asked.

I don’t know, she said, her eyes frozen with longing.

I’ll be your boyfriend, he said.

She laughed, warmly.

I dug my fingers into her jet-black hair, petrified and tangled like the matted fur of some Wild Thing. Below the weight of my body I could feel her quiver with fevered rage, her wrists straining against the vice grip of my right hand, her back arching and aching off my coagulated mattress bed. It was her gaze that broke me in the end.

Hot as chilli, bores through your irises and burns like whiskey down your throat where it stays in your belly, smouldering for days. Something like longing. Something like desire.

I just want to break you, I tell her, into a million little pieces that can never be put back together again

(Her EV shields go down. The Ministry has fallen. They are coming!)

So break me, she says

So I do.

*

Sam never considered himself particularly exceptional. He did ok at school, he did ok at home. It was hard to pinpoint exactly when he had started to go wrong, but gone wrong he clearly had. The trouble, naturally, was what to do about it now.

*

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell us, Mr. Yung?”

With one arthritic hand she trembled her way to her spectacles, where she removed them swiftly with a certain vindictiveness. The lady in the power-suit lifted her stony gaze from the paper to stare straight at him, eyeglasses wobbling in her hand, the light refracting off the harsh fluorescent tubes into the lens into his eyes.

“Not that I can think of,” Sam replied, cool as a Kat. The world ends with you, after all. “I’d just like to say how much I look forward to serving your organisation as best as I can.”

Plus ten points! The iron lady smiles, as do the rest of her panel of twelve, seated around beside and above him like a Jedi Council.

“Thank you, we’ll be contacting you shortly.”

A week later the pretty girl sitting on lady ironchef’s right personally calls him up. He recognises her even before she introduces herself because of the distinctive way she sucks in her breath before speaking like someone preparing to blow a balloon:

*wooooooooo* hello is this- Is that Ms (oh yes, he can remove the “is” out of “Miss” over the phone too, that’s how slick he is) Patricia from MOE- oh yes hi is that Samson Yung- why yes it is- hello Mr Yung (he’s dancing on the spot where he is, shaking like Presley already) we’re pleased to inform you that you’ve been awarded the MOE Scholarship.

We look forward to having you with us. Do you have any questions?

(yes when do I get to fuck you)

(ans: page 58)

*

Sam maintains that it began at conception. The fault, dear readers, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are composed of genes and matter and Dust.

Sam doesn’t know if that makes things better for him, or
worse, far
worse.

Go on. Fight for my computer desk. Send me passive aggressive emails. CC me in all your emails conversations so its my fault when something goes wrong. Assign me work you wouldn’t do yourself. Spout the typical top-down nonsense about discipline and work and responsibility. Forget life and destiny and passion. Ignore freedom and privacy and happiness. Maybe you’ve been in the Singapore system for so long that you’ve internalised the belief that you’re only as valued as your usefulness. That work is worth. That’s fine. I respect your right to be wrong.

Now you need to respect my right. My right to reject your masochistic despair. You know you’re unhappy, but you keep telling yourself it’s alright. You’re lost and that makes you scared. It makes you angry and frustrated and you just wish we would go along with you so maybe things would be a little better for you. What you don’t realise is that we are not the problem. Don’t let them convince you of that lie. The problem is the organisation. The problem is the work. The problem is the system. The mismatch of talents and inclinations with prescribed duties. The endless drudgery and pomp and procedure. The vast vat of incompetence and despicable dishonesty.

Sometimes I think people get so caught up living their lives that they never once stop and think about what they’re doing. Or if they do, they fail to see the bigger picture. The bigger picture that we’re all just human beings trying to do what many other human beings did before us. That we’re all stories. That we’re more than the punctuality of our Excel sheets, or the shine of our boots. Or at least, some of us are.

See, that’s how you do passive aggressive.

2009′s tender months were spent in turmoil. Having returned from my holiday to San Francisco and Los Angeles mentally rejuvenated, philosophically disheartened, and physically bruised, I was forced to postpone my enlistment into National Service into the murky fogs of the “near-future”, and for that endured three months of arduous emptiness.

Upon enlistment in April I suffered the anonymity of Basic Military Training, the pointlessness of CQMS training, and the drudgery of 2SIR logistics work. Somewhere in between I squeezed in time to meet with friends for meals and movies and LAN. That is the sum of my year.

What have I learnt? How have I grown? In the past few months I have truly let myself go, binge eating and burrowing into the depravity of my computer chair. Can I blame it on something dark and nebulous beyond myself? Army, it’s all their fault. First, it was the uncertainty of my enlistment date that made any time spent as a free civilian short-lived and pointless, like having an ominous year-end examination looming ahead that you cannot prepare for. Meaningful employment was out of the question; I was too pampered and too high-minded for a proletarian existence. Greatness, or nothing. Nothing.

Then Army struck like a bullet to my hourglass. Time and identity became as fleeting as wind.

My storeman wrote a song about our situation, and I think it’s angsty and melodramatic, but it’s so fitting it’s the most evocative song I’ve heard all year. Pending his permission, the lyrics:

[...] We sit in the store all day
Watch a perfect day, just slip away

Because I’m just a storeman
I can’t save your life, can’t make things right
Because I’m just an ordinary storeman
Oh why am I just a storeman?

Recently my storeman have told me I’ve grown fatter (true). If you must know, my company stores are in a mess too (true). People tell me I’m ok (not true). They think my store is in good shape (delusional). I’m thinking: Titanic is holding out for an Iceberg, Iceberg where are you, Iceberg please?

I have not learnt anything of use. In fact, I have forgotten my math, forgotten my history, forgotten my economics. I am no more intelligent than I was two, three years ago. If anything, I feel more intellectually bulimic than ever before. Well, army does that to you. He without apathy quickly acquires some. Attempts to relearn French have repeatedly stalled. Attempts to make new friends have simply faded away. Attempts to apply for scholarships and universities, abandoned. Without school, without a reason to know me, my social circle has whittled down to a precious few. True, this Circle of Trust sustains and nourishes me, but like any teenager in mock-crisis the deeper the introspection and self-justification, the greater the corresponding need for external attention and implied validation. Oh wait, the teenager years are over. I’m supposed to have outgrown the angst by now.

Ok, done.

2009 was a great year for me. I made friends with two of my storeman, who turned out to be hardcore ex-gang members. They blew enough second-hand smoke in my vicinity to turn my babies into retards, while teaching me invaluable lessons in management, leadership, and how to drink. I drained my first beer can (Amsterdam), downed my first chaser (Red Bull), and puked like an animal (Merlion). I went clubbing for the first time, to celebrate the new year, and it was the closest I’ve ever been to such attractive people. The whole time I was wondering what I was doing there, and just happy to be accepted into their mass delusion that everyone is having a good time, that everyone is attractive and desirable and can/should dance. Came into contact with more denim-decked and cotton-clothed ass-breasts-dicks than I’m comfortable with. Read so many books. Watched so many movies. Heard so many songs.

Where has 2009 gone? Into Everywhere and Everything, like Dust from the freshly dead, into Life and Knowledge and Awareness. Who is there to miss? What is there to regret? Only the Quest for Love (cure this bleeding heart, purge all apathetic strife, escape my lonesome past and leave this tedious boyish life). The questions of How is She, Who is She and What did you feel with her head on your shoulder remain. With these, 2010 begins.

Part Four

Since her mother had brought John home, Natalie had been touching herself on a regular basis, and her sexual frenzy’s source consisted exclusively of that pair of eyes, which had seen her naked while fully-clothed. There was no doubt in her mind that they belonged to a boy, and that they had been watching her (for who knew how long!). She liked to think she made that decision based on intuition, and not wishful thinking. No, maybe a flair for the dramatic, a fatal weakness for a prince charming enforced in her by a parochial society, but most certainly not a decision born of latent desires. She thought of the boy and his eyes and masturbated with a fury, and once it was over she said to herself over and over again: all pretty flowers need the sun.

For someone who had always prided herself on her intellectual prowess it seemed almost ironic that what her mind craved most of all was its suspension, to relinquish control to a carnal master that saw the mind only as a hindrance, an obstacle, indeed, the main opposition to its own self-fulfillment.

She understood why he would watch. She understood, she empathized, she secretly encouraged. Far more worrying were her thoughts or, if she was being entirely honest with herself, she reflected, the thoughts that her emotions chose to justify. All pretty flowers need the sun, but she realized with a shock of self-awareness that she cared neither way, that she would embrace the sun whether it nourished or scorched her. Above all all she wanted him to watch. And that was the most worrying, her sudden dependence on a one-time audience for this most intimate and one-person of acts. If she could not have him physically there, she would create him in her mind, force him into her mind’s eye, his big blue brown basil eyes, big as orbs, watching her resolutely, boring into her being, whether he wanted to or not.

So when Natalie caught the eyes at her window again, this time for real, she was neither surprised nor excited. It had been inevitable. For him, she took off all her clothes and masturbated, but not once did she show any sign that she knew of his perverse vigil; she refused to acknowledge his presence. He could never know that this was all for his benefit alone. The shame might crush her. As soon as she was done, the eyes disappeared. She stared longingly after them.

The next day the eyes were there again, waiting for her this time. There was no ignoring them now. After furtively checking around the house for her mother or her boyfriend she ran to her room and shut the door behind her with a lock, staring straight into the eyes, speaking to them with the pure intensity of feeling.

I dare you to do it, they said.

I dare you to watch me, she replied.

Slowly, she slipped her blouse off to reveal her smooth, hairless shoulders, flat chest, stomach. The eyes were unflinching. One hand brushed over her rib cage, poking out of her skin like a dirty secret. The other hooked into her full skirt and pulled it all the way down. She had not been wearing any underwear.

Are you waiting for me? Or have I been waiting for you?

The eyes were silent, fierce, unblinking, and when she finished they were gone.

For a week she kept this up. A mother who had found love, a spacious house, a private room: these unconnected circumstantial facts all conspired to instigate her downfall.

One day she took a black felt-tip marker and scrawled on her stomach: I love you.

The eyes vanished, and she was terrified, heartbroken. Then they came back, and her stomach could finally unclench. They came back with two hands, and a sign: I love you too.

What begins as a coming-of-age becomes a romance.

She began to write to the eyes, her body was the performance, the canvas, the parchment. Some days she didn’t even need to masturbate at all to keep the eyes glued to her. The eyes wrote back to her too.

I love you.

One day after rushing home from school the eyes were not there. A great melancholy settled on the girl, and for some reason she felt like crying. She crawled into bed, took off her clothes, and simply lay there naked waiting for him to come back. What had she done wrong? What had she done to deserve his disinterest? Then she saw him. A desperate joy flung itself against her breast, and she sprang from the bed, but this time he did not disappear.

Another pair of eyes emerged, two lugubrious moons slipping out from the gloomy tresses of the dark.

Had she not craved attention? Had she not desired love? Now she had twice its dosage but she found herself numb. No, worse. She felt terrible, betrayed.

I loved you, she cried with her eyes.

I love you, they whispered back, those four eyes, unblinking, unflinching.

She stared into the obsidian vortex of the four eyes and struggled with herself: how much further must she fall to land. Her eyes were frozen lakes. She walked over to the windows, and drew the blinds, and the movement seemed to slice the four eyes into nothingness, which was all they had ever been anyway.

That was her first love. What begins as romance ends as tragedy.

end of part four

Part Three

The twilight sky was a vile mix of murky maroon and gravel gray when Natalie returned home. The first thing she noticed was that the lights at home were all off, so her mother was either out or asleep. Best to keep it that way. On timorous toes she crept down the hallway, when she was startled by a loud, pained groan. A man’s, so perhaps Jon had not left after all. It sounded pleased with itself, victorious.

The groan had come from her mother’s bedroom. The door was ajar. Quiet as a mouse she nudged it further, and what she saw shocked her, who she considered rather worldly and jaded, beyond being caught unawares by the world.

Natalie was surprised at how disgusted she was at the sight of their naked bodies, middle-aged and dying, wrinkled and etiolate, and as they moved back and forth the folds of fat that collected around their waist like hula-hoops rippled and shook and bounced around and she had to suppress the wild urge to laugh, then gag, then laugh again. A black fuzz of pubic hair crept over Jon’s bulging beer belly like dirty mould. Natalie marvelled at the sheer amount of hair curling out of every dip and crevice on their pale bodies; she had never thought of the human body as furry- the media’s penchant for airbrushing had robbed her vision and smothered her imagination- but seeing these two hairy, writhing bodies before her were a revelation. A terrible fear of sprouting hair possessed her; she dared not check her armpits. Only now could she see how beautiful and transient the flesh of her body was, and how every second not spent appreciating that truth was careless and foolish and wasteful.

She stood there for a while, mind racing with forbidden feelings and obscene thoughts. She stood on the brink, at the cusp, and before her sprawled a white mansion of many rooms and many doors. It was if she had been walking down a path all her life, but the trees, the flowers, the winding cobblestones, had all been so familiar, so common- the frequency of her perambulations had dulled her observations rather than liberate them- and it had taken a guest, a tourist, to point out that the iridescent mansion had been at the end of the road all along, that the flowers were in bloom and spectacular, that she was foreign to herself; finally she grasped the key to the mansion’s magnificent front doors, and instinctively she understood that if she entered the house the rest of the keys would present themselves to her and if she tried to run away she could avoid entering its premises but it would always loom behind her, the wax-white house that burned in the sun. She was terrified, she was thrilled, and she could no longer tell one from the other because they came down to the same thing: anything could happen now.

***

In the comforting warmth of her room Natalie felt the stress release from her shoulders, leaving behind a dull ache that accompanied relief. She scrutinised the fingernail marks she had carved into her palm, and on her face was etched a look of detached wonderment. Lovingly she caressed the raw red crescents; the anticipation of pain sent a pleasurable shudder down her spine and Natalie inhaled sharply.

Her body was hot, her clothes were too tight. Her throat was constricted and her hands felt swollen and clumsy as they scrambled to close the window blinds. With frustration she cast the pulley aside and threw herself into her comforter, which promptly wrapped around her familiar shape like a mother’s embrace. Her skin smouldered, sticky with salty sweat, and her hands were now snakes barely grazing her sides, wild snakes sliding against skin, her pristine skin flushed pink with youth, and then they were hungry, ravenous snakes that had coiled around her chest and were crushing her with their cruel lust, half-crazed with an unholy, insatiable craving that could not be exorcised but by yielding to its temptation. There was no doubt of her delirium now, for how else could she explain the serpentine whirlpool spinning towards her? In her mind she spread her arms and welcomed it, yearning for its asphyxiating constriction, and then it was over her, all over her, in unreachable places inside her (snakes, noodles, hands) and then for several endless seconds the world ended. All her fifteen years had been building to this moment of self-discovery when she learned to distil beauty from life.

As the real world came back into focus, the hair on the nape of her neck bristled, and she had the distinct sensation of being watched.

Her first suspicion was that there was someone at the door. But it was closed shut, and she was sure that her mother would have noticed if Jon had left the room. No, not at the door, then-? She leapt to her feet in time to see a pair of eyes disappear from the windows.

end of part three

Part Two

She strained to hear, and could make out the clattering of keys and the clinking of heels taken off, but there had been no need, for her mother soon called out:

“Natalie! This is er, Jon.”

Natalie looked him over. “Jon” was a pleasant man in his forties, a little plumb but agreeably so, such that his presence was instantly familiar and reassuring, like the presence of a favourite uncle or family friend. His face was young, boyish, and when he smiled his eyes glinted with the suggestion of mischief. He did not deserve her animosity, but Natalie opposed men on principle. As boys they were nonchalant and rowdy, as men they only got louder and more intractable. Boys wished themselves undefeatable, men thought themselves so. Men were only interested in impressing upon her their size, strength, and stupidity, strutting their money and women in a garish display of stunted mental evolution, and since the woman they were most proud of was generally her mother she saw little reason to have faith in the masculine. She despised their peacock plumes, their underlying neediness. She was self-satisfied, and she could not respect anyone who was not complete themselves.

“Jon, why don’t you take a seat? I’ll prepare us some drinks.”

Natalie found herself sitting opposite Jon. Here came the inevitable. “So Natalie,” he said warmly, leaning forward as he did, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

When she did not reply, her mother called out from the kitchen: “Try to be nice, Natalie.”

Her mother had probably prepared Jon for her coldness. She had probably told him to persevere, but not to be too disappointed if Natalie gave him the dumb look and the cold shoulder. What maturity, she reflected, to gain insights on myself by thinking about others. In all likelihood she had briefed him on 21st century teenage lingo as they took the elevator up, establishing at the same time her rules on their relationship around her daughter: no discussion about their love, no talk of their plans, no hints of their lovemaking. But Natalie knew what went on in her mother’s bedroom. She knew it was sex, even if she didn’t know what it entailed exactly. That’s how she had me, Natalie thought, determinedly emotionless.

“Natalie! Come here please.” With defiant steps she went to her mother.

“Sweetheart, I need you out of the house this afternoon.” Natalie marvelled how her mother sounded pleading and accusatory at the same time. I could say the same for you, she thought.

“I could just stay in my room,” she grumbled.

“Not today,” her mother said, before giggling sharply, as if she had just said something unexpectedly hilarious. Her daughter did not share her mirth at all.

“Fine, I’ll just walk around downstairs till dinner time.”

“Oh, you know that’s not what I meant. Go out with your friends or something. Have some fun!” Her mother rested her hands on Natalie’s sinuous walnut hair, smoothing it out absent-mindedly. Gently, she kissed Natalie on the forehead. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” she said, “You’re ten times prettier than I ever was.”

Natalie leapt out of her mother’s embrace. “I’m not like you,” she snarled, “I don’t need boys.”

Her mother sighed, “But you’d certainly be happier.”

“Are you happy?” Natalie cried, “Who made you happy? I know it definitely wasn’t Dave, Sam, Roger, George, Harry, or Ethan! Is this the guy who’s finally going to make you happy?”

“I know I’m not the best role model,” her mother said, and she sounded as if she had tears in her eyes that Natalie could not bring herself to see, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t be different for you! You can be happy. You don’t have to be lonely. And Jon’s different, Jon really cares for me. I’m really happy right now, Natalie. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but people can make people happy, even if it’s only sometimes, because sometimes is more than we’d have otherwise.”

Natalie felt ‘whatever’ rise to her lips, and killed the childish, meaningless retort before it came out. In recriminatory silence (or was it really non-silence) she stumbled forwards, the corridor endlessly tessellated through her prismatic tears, desperate to get as far away from her mother as possible.

end of part two

Part One

The girl stared at her plate of spaghetti. With the end of her fork she carefully raised one strand of noodle, ogling the steam rising from the yellow loop, drifting into the room, carrying on its neither-air-nor-water what she knew was the greasy smell of microwave pasta.

With a loud sigh, she looked up from her plate to gaze distractedly into the wall. What the girl was looking/not looking at was a watercolour her mother had completed a year ago of a Pekinese Water Dog. (It was a fine, convincing work, but the girl knew for a fact that her mother had simply painted over a photograph she’d found over the internet.) In her best wits and worst moods the girl liked to think of it as her mother’s self portrait. It hung in a cheap plastic frame on a wall of off-white over a floor of aging white oak. The whole effort struck the girl as the work of an amateur slavishly devoted to an overwrought style of “modern minimalism”, whose concept of “designing” consisted entirely of hanging certain things in certain places, and whose attempt to reduce the house to basics had inadvertently created an asylum cell, stripped of any padding, comfort, security.

The room in which the girl now sat was barely a room at all; it was simply a basin and the other rooms, the real rooms, were the tributaries. From the girl’s right flowed the musty smell of absent light and heavy furniture, her mother’s bedroom, modelled after old English libraries with its floor to ceiling bookshelves, all dark woods, mouldy pages and dank smells. Books make me sleepy, her mother said. A flight of steps behind the dining table led to the girl’s room, the only thing she could love about the house. In the privacy of her own room she could bask in the shimmering sunlight, twirl beneath the waxing moon, and sleep enveloped in deathly darkness all at her own discretion and for her own satisfaction, though what she prized above all, and her pride burned fiercely at the thought, was the knowledge that she alone knew of what she did in her room. Insignificant in and of itself, it amplified the ignorance of and hence her superiority to the people she had to deal with daily, and that was reason enough to live, to be better than the fools.

Fifteen years of reluctant existence had been sufficient to imbue in the girl a scathing distaste for people; people are like celery, she declared, anyone with taste thinks they’re absolutely horrible. (She frequently substituted celery for her Hate of the Week. Past entries: French cheese, Nickelback, Crocs.) She was of a vague intelligence and general prettiness that neither attracted friends nor scared them off. Friends came of course, but they changed, they left, or she left, or something happened to intervene, it always did, and before long the maple trees had changed their shade of colour, and the cobbled paths filled with leaves of orange, falling gently, helplessly, floating off one by one or en masse it was all the same. Why grow them to shed them, she wondered. Even though they varied in shape and inclinations she discovered that the friends she made were one and the same to her, for without fail all of them eventually betrayed the implicit rule of love, which is to last forever. In this way she found that her heart grew no warmer at the sight of her friends than the goldfish she kept in the toilet.

Lost in her thoughts, the girl found her vision blurring. It was hard to keep her head up. She couldn’t be sure, but her goldfish seemed to be cavorting in a parade before her in mid air, bobbing their mouths stupidly and soundlessly as they drifted around aimlessly in the room- hardly different from their glass bowl- all noise and fury, signifying nothing. She could not say why, but she felt her heart clench and with a strangled cry she strained to touch one of them, she longed for them to recognise her and with a rush of joy she realised one was swimming towards her, but as it brushed her fingertips it exploded and for a second she thought it was blood but no it was tomato sauce and meatballs flying everywhere, and from somewhere within the pageantry of goldfish corpses her spaghetti rose, a malevolent, slithering whirlpool of bloodied yellow watching her, yelling for her, and with a scream she realised- too late- that it was all around her, smothering her soul.

At this moment the front door burst open, and the distinct rumble of a man’s laugh could be heard. Breathing heavily, unbelievably exhausted, she realised her mother had brought another boyfriend home.

end of part one

Thankfully, I have some of the best storemen, or rather, Supply Assistants, I could hope for. They are hardworking, knowledgeable, friendly, and one in particular is a real cool dude. He used to bartend at Harry’s and such… and other than Metal he has great taste in music, i.e. we have similar taste. So being without any mp3 player isn’t so bad. It’s mitigated by the fact that if he puts his Nano on shuffle I occasionally get to hear Iron & Wine, Flight of the Concords, Dashboard Confessional, and other great tracks even though I don’t recognise their provenance.

(FUCK)

And this other guy brought in an Xbox, so I get to leech and play Need for Speed.

But the whole affair strikes me as a celebration of mediocrity. I don’t feel as if going back to the bunk is a reward for hard work. No, the idea is that I’ve been imprisoned and forced into slave labor and the only form of retaliation I can muster is my mediocrity. Especially in the light of my superiors’ general ineptness. So every moment I can, every trip to the bunk, I dawdle and laze and waste away. Every moment has been about lying about how much work I have, how much work I’ve done. Sneaking around. Going behind backs. Cheating. Cutting corners. Stealing. Being mean, being rude, being obnoxious.

It comes down to three things: the lack of enthusiasm in NSFs (who can blame them), the lack of ambition in the regulars (who the NSFs are forced to work with), and the lack of women.

I just want to get out of here. So pardon these rambling posts… they are the whines of a lonely, idle mind… all the books in the world won’t help me if I’m stuck in here… and it’s made me afraid that that’s what will happen to me when I enter the cubicle world… especially in legal services…… I really wish I could make money off writing but I’m not good enough yet and I don’t know if I’ll ever be and I don’t have the strength either, I know if I saw the money I would sell out and write any crap just to get your money so it’s best if I stay away and no one should let me near a pen or keyboard so I could never sully the art of writing, the glory that is literature…

(FUCK)