eerie hati*
a closure of a place I hold so dear always got me up in my feelies </3
(i) prologue: this dark feeling
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I came across a video last April whilst scrolling through TikTok of a user describing how the house used to go dark when his mom took a nap. I remember this vividly. As a child in a two-income household, always left on my own with the television as my informal sitter, Mak would put some Disney princess thing on VHS (usually Little Mermaid) readied food on the stove and the kitchen full of snacks, closed the curtains in her room, the ones that are of collaged brown leaves that left a sepia tone leaking out of the doorsill just slightly and shut the door to her room. The house would suddenly quieten down into a soft hush with a strange kind of tension pulling at the pit of my stomach towards the empty hallway and emanating around the closed door which appeared much larger than before. It was not terrifying at all but there is a thick air of unease that would usually leave me frozen in front of the television until my sister came home or when Mak finally woke up. It felt as though some energetic flow had abruptly been cut off rendering everything that remains, unchanged in their positions, bathed in a strange dark feeling.
This feeling held on as a strange memory from childhood that never found its place. I thought it was a unique experience, this piercing feeling that darkened a place, slowed down time and muted all the sounds and colours of its interiority to a menacing sense of nothing that felt somewhat eerie1. A failure of absence AND a failure of presence — Mak’s absence and this other unnamable thing in her place. Yet, many others have experienced it too though I’m unsure whether its uniquely generational to the Gen Xs and early millennials who grew up with lesser supervision (with forced parentification for some of us) and of course pre-web 2.0 where the virtual world was not as expansive and accessible. We leaned\ into the rotation of neighbors and informal caregiving when domestic helpers and 12 hour childcare centers were not yet the norm. This is symptomatic to forces governing capitalist society2 — tired overworked mothers who had no choice but to shut the door and rest it out for a couple of hours as their children are left to their own devices.
On overwhelming parts of the day, I put on Elmo’s world and retreat to the toilet in my room and closed both doors behind me. Before I do that, I watched my child’s eyes widening slightly before her attention shift her gaze back to the screen. I wonder if she feels it too, the darkening of the living room even as the sunlight pours in, the hush of the hallway and the distance seemingly growing much larger than it normally is. I keep my escape short, just enough to sustain me for the rest of the day and feel the eerie slightly, clenching in my grasp as I open the door, feeling as though there is nothing on the other side of the room, as though everything has momentarily disappeared and maybe had disappeared for good. I avoid sitting in it for too long, this dark feeling, and brush it away as I hold my child, cupped her small face in my hands, smothering her with kisses as gratitude for giving me a little pocket of rest.
Somehow, this feeling stuck with me since I discovered that it was a shared phenomenon. The mystery of its sly showing beguiles me and I’ve been considering other times in which the same eerie feeling surfaces and how most times I’ve taken an extra effort to avoid feeling it altogether.
(ii) “I still daydream of beary days”
My left eye had been twitching non-stop. Like some unexplained inheritance from a witchy ancestor, my eye twitching signals two impending possibilities; on the right meant that I might be bawling my eyes out over something huge and on the left, which is the less ominous one, meant that I will bump into someone I haven’t met in a long time. The longer the twitch the bigger the impact as though the twitching is trying to dislodge things I’ve repressed in the recesses of my mind. By the third day, I was on high alert, bracing myself that this encounter might be massive, like a friend I had a falling out with, or a one-time fling or the worst of it all, an ex.
So I forgot to mention that the eye-twitching is similar to hiccups. The moment they are out of your mind, they disappear or in this case, they would appear. And so there I was, with my partner and child, and the mind goes blank because it is nice to just be with my gang at some mall spending time, and I caught sight of Irwan and his wife. And like an open valve, the warmth of some other lifetime started pouring in. My face wore the biggest grin and I almost hugged this man, who was just a boy the last time I saw him. I almost hugged his wife too, someone I’ve never met before this and had only glimpsed on his Instagram ages ago. I wanted to say hey I’ve missed you and I’ve missed us but all I managed was a short it’s been a while and where you going and hope you’ve been well and we headed our separate ways. My heart winced as I felt the valve closing and the warmth leaving my body.
I used to work with Irwan in a rundown chain of hostels in Chinatown filled with teddy bears of all sizes. There was a bunch of us, all in our 20s. I was the oldest and also one of the two managers running the place. The bosses were barely around. We rotated hostels on a 12-hour shift and got into all sorts of cute adventures, hung out a lot and when things got hard at home, some of us lived there, finding refuge and protection. When I texted Ilyas, who continued on to be a dear friend to me despite not being able to keep up with regular contact, he told me that he’d still daydream of beary days. I, on the other hand, had blocked it out completely, avoided thinking about it and would cycle really fast to go pass the last one standing along Upper Cross Street.
But the memories remain vivid if I choose to dwell, which I did for a bit after reading Ilyas’s reply. Mornings started before the sun came up when Chinatown is half asleep. I’d smoke a cigarette before a slow climb up the staircase. We’d do a handover from night host to day host and the guests would slowly wander in, sleepy-eyed and mumbling good mornings. The smell of toast and cheap 3-in-1 coffee filled the air. We do our checks and clear out the bookings. I remember the low counter space and the way the guests would tower over as they walk past that crammed space or always map in hand asking for directions. Sometimes the night host would stay behind and we’d get Mcdonald’s breakfast sets and hang out until noon. Didn't matter who, it was always felt like I had shared my morning with a sibling as we goss over the latest guest.
Every chance we get, we’d throw a party; Christmas or Halloween or someone’s birthday. Nat would do these amazing decorations and we’d all dress up for Halloween or do gift exchanges. But every night is a kind of small party too; we’d congregate at Beary Best, which is the largest one and at that time the newest, order supper and watch something or cook in the kitchen or indulge in some random side quests. At every chance we get, we would hang out. I remember the daily bustle of it, the way we tease each other like siblings would, the way we all got excited when we found out that there was an extra space just for host in the new hostel and that night we all had a sleepover.
I made friends too with guests, so many of them. Lazlo Kiss and his weird food list, Little Laura and our plans of meeting in Paris and then in Switzerland and how she was part of the Faraway Club with 12 other solo travelers who then became fast friends, and Lea who we met when we travelled to Paris and of course Dhruv who stayed for several months and I lovingly called my son. It was the hostel that I learnt about how intimate connections do not have to last in the hetero-normative happily ever after. I called the experience traveling without moving as I was too broke to travel but was doing so through the guests, these strangers who became temporary friends who shared maybe a day or two or a few hours but it was more than enough to last my entire lifetime.
And then when Beary grew in outlet, so did the hosts. At one time, it had the most perfect bunch of folks. I can still hear how our laughter fill the space, the way we looked out for each other, going through big and small transitions in our lives together, like crushes and breakups and bad guests experiences. I called this the beary golden era. I love every single one of them with all my heart despite the long hours and low pay.
I was ironically trying to complete my degree so that I can get a better paying job. I was working 10 hours on a six days shift, almost around the clock and replacing hosts who had fallen sick. I paper-chased the hours I wasn’t working and I was spread so thin that I could barely function. Somehow in all that mess and joy, I caught a sneaky link at an apartment nearby and started using meth again. I’d smoked all night as I rush to finish my assignments, headed to the hostel in the wee hours to freshen up, work through the shift thinking I might die and finally crash out for a few hours. I’d repeat this over and over.
I struggled in the last year of Beary trying to keep up. I had stopped coming home and my substance use had increased so it was impending both work and school. I told some of the hosts about it because I was tweaking hard at work and some caught on from my search engine history with things like “Can you overdose from meth?” or “How you know your heart is stopping from meth”? No one intervened hard enough and maybe they didn’t know how and I don’t fault them for that. At the tail-end of it all, I could not stand to stay on and was making mistakes with detrimental results. Being there meant using and I had to get myself out and this broke my heart. I could not remember if I quit or was fired but by then it did not matter anymore.
The place that had offered me refuge and protection became poisoned by attempts at surviving the labour required in keeping it all from falling apart. In the following years, I did returned as a part-timer, but the place did not feel the same. The other two hostels had changed hands and the third one was on its last legs. I found out I was pregnant in the toilet of that hostel and sat on the same steps I did many years before that but all I can feel is an emptiness of what used to be, the brightness of it long gone bit by bit with the folks that had left to pursue bigger things.
Sometimes, on quiet days when the hostel is empty, I would hear a door creak open and popped my head out slightly expecting to see Nadd’s sheepish face, or Mas coming in through the main door with our lunches, or Ilyas coming from upstairs even though he was not on shift and was just doing some fixing of something or the other or Haykel waiting for me outside to bring us all out on some random ride. The phone would ring and it would be Joe doing some funny prank, or we’d all gather to smoke a garden at the back.
Last few days, I had watched the building from far. It still stands although online reviews are poor and ratings are really low. There is no longer a host apparently and guests have to take their own sheets and make their own beds and figure out their own ways around the city. There are no longer gatherings over food, sharing about our home countries, playing drinking games until wee hours and breakfast at the market in the mornings. There are no more strangers becoming short-term lovers or besties for the day. There are no longer found family that brings warmth to my body as I indulge in the daydreams of beary. It is just a holding liminal space for travelers and any potentials of something more has been stolen by the times and the convenience of devices.
Watching it from a distance, I could not bear to peer through the glass walls, the same eerie feeling overcoming me. What remains is a physical shell already long past its prime waiting for its demise. I realised then that the eerie collapses time unevenly. The body does not understand chronology — it feels the failure of presence, in a hostel with no hosts and the failure of absence makes it yearn for a disruption, yearn for it to fucking remain in the eerie. Yet, the eerie manifest into something else, a quiet pain of wanting to open that door and find everyone in their places but this time with the knowledge that the last day is going to be the last of it for good.
I would hug everyone tighter and stayed on a little longer and stretched it all as far as I could beyond the space-time corporeal staircase, or kitchen, or bunk bed, or that ugly orange couch, enlivened by our chiding and laughter and tears and the ways we loved each other, the refuge and protection into some forever space in my mind. But I knew I did all that and it was still not enough to keep it for longer.
(iii) this must be the place
“I see music as a tool, a real powerful tool…Not just to connect with people but I see it as a tool for social change. Just because, like I said, it brings people together, it’s the need for congregation. It’s a need to get together right but what do you do when you get together? The environment that you create for people will inform their choices. It’s about and I guess for the parties that I do in my own clubs or outside of my clubs, it’s about making the dance floor an equal space, regardless of who you are, regardless of your gender or what you believe, nothing matters. What matters is that everybody is on the dance floor as one” —Eileen Chan
I was a latecomer to techno nights having grown cynical by the club culture of mid 2000s to 2010s where people cared more about how they look and who they pulled up with rather than the dancing and music. Before I entered HQ, I was on that very panel listening to Eileen shared about making the dance floor an equal space. This was not the club culture I had known so well where we exists in our own clusters most of the time and was far from what felt like a safe enough space to be truly yourself. Izyanti invited me the first time in 2019 (bless you always for this my friend) located in the heart of CBD on Phillip Street at a place called Somewhere. HQ was under renovations I think and I still remember the darkness of the space, the parapet at the sides where we can sit for a minute and the open dance floor. That feeling of being constantly watched (and judged) disappeared the moment I stepped inside. It felt like a house party but instead of a house it’s a club.
That one night led to many nights at TUFF, and HQ when it reopened. I was there two times a week and sometimes three, pre-gaming first and staying always until the lights come on, trudging back home with sore feet and a cleansed body. Each night I visit, I climbed up the steep staircase heading first upstairs before back down on the second floor for something a little heavier. I fell in love upstairs just for its goofy atmosphere, the music always a little leftfield (shoutout always to my favorite duo iykyk) was always so good. No matter how packed it became everyone always made space, looked out for each other even though it was a roomful of regular strangers.always moving shoulder to shoulder, the energy exchanged so pure and charged.
Here I felt rapture, a sense of ease, I felt untethered to the heaviness of caregiving and the mourning of a life I thought I would be living. There were no words, only dancing and music, my heart synchronous to the bpm, to the bodies, to the sound. Here I feel the time-snake slithering and in a split I was twenty-five again, splitting half a mollie with my best girl for the last time and the first time in a long time but I was also thirty-five nursing a wound that I kept a secret in my tongue as the chemical dissolves. And here too were the long lovely nights with Jo who sometimes would bail me midway to fuck her girlfriend and it did not matter because we’re in safe hands here and no harm will come our way.
In hindsight, the vibe is kinda eerie in itself because none of us could have sustained it outside those walls. It only existed there, temporarily conjured through the sound and our collective desires. I will catch Eileen burning up the palo santo into the smoke machine midway through the wee hours. Cleansing energies she’d say with a smile. On Valentines she bought me a drink for no reason other than we all deserve good things. I remember seeing the same smiling faces when a beat drops, the way our energies climb and then burst into the air like a spell.
I left with the beat still thrumming in my body, so alive and so emptied out all at once.
The period of 2019-2020 was a short but bright one and then Covid hit and everything changed. Clubs were closed and everyone took to the virtual space. DJ sets from home sorta thing. I longed for that feeling and waited patiently for it to return and then regulations eased up and independent rave outfits such as ER and Bussy Temple were born. I’ve always wondered whether HQ, and all what Eileen and her gang stood for was the genesis of it all. In the middle of all that, I dabbled and released naik angin which was truly an ode to this time in my life. I bookmarked HQ and the techno nights until I was able to come back.
In May 2022, Eileen passed away suddenly. It shocked the whole scene and I think we still feel her absence in big and small ways. I returned for a night but it did not hit me in the bones like it used to. The space felt different, further away even though I was at the heart of it upstairs in the crowd; eyes half closed, limbs flailing but there was a failure to sync. My heart would not open, no longer broken and hungry to heal. I left before the lights came on. I truly believed that I’d be back but I never returned.
At the start of May, HQ announced that it’s closing down for good. I felt the same wince in my heart. I knew nothing here last forever anyways but there is still a frustration of not being able to return. I cannot take my daughter, years from now, and say: this was the room that held me when I was becoming someone else. Because nothing here survives more than two decades and that’s if we’re lucky enough. Here the eerie stays, always a shadow shrouding a good place, like the HQ we all know as that will always be the place, that can never be replaced and yet can never be that place forever.
Will I return for the last soiree or Irish goodbye it out? I’m not sure really but I know for a fact that I will hang on tenderly to what stubbornly remains, that same thrumming in my body, the closeness of strangers, that safe feeling, all the potency untouched because here the lights are never turning on; I’ll hang on to it with all my heart.
Mark Fisher defined eerie as something that is constituted by “a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something.” https://magazine.tank.tv/issue-71/features/the-weird-and-the-eerie
“As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register — if we are not who we think we are, what are we? — but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” — Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie,
dance like you got ants in your pants