sharp shock, soft side
no trawl or sprawl: just a tiny spiral
Hello my loves, I am tired. So here’s a scramble of halfbaked things. Sort of a break, sort of a burnout, who knows.
Destiny is calling, lunar node something something ngl, every night I chanced upon at least two to three videos announcing the arrival of the lunar North node in my sun sign from the 11th January of next year, “kicking off a 18-month journey” to some cosmic scale upgrade. ngl too that my depleted self gets thoroughly annoyed by this as I scroll up within a micro second with a mindful NOPE, not this shit again. I do not want another journey, I’ve been journeying for years. It’s time to let me know when I’ll be arriving hon. This year though was truly something else. A tidal wave of sorts. I can’t help but wonder why this tendency to bracket some beginning and end to a year, these measly twelve months but I do it anyway, every fucking year end.
This year has been a practice of intentions. I’ve been intentional with my time and attention. Quietly made big and small changes. Removed a sick organ from my body and felt the wilt of it in its absence. The pain no longer there and in its place is a body at the cusp of aging, of slowing down. This new body is demanding; it requires more rest to feel replenished (anything pass 11pm takes a lot of effort) and prefers to indulge in the pleasures of soft things, fullness and gentle manuevers. I am still getting to know it and my aging self, pushing out of my prime 30s into some strange middle ground. Not quite old but no longer youthful.
My child grows too, almost as sudden and equally as strange. Sometimes she is unrecognisable. She has outgrown all of the baby-ness, the malleability of her shapes and evanescence of her bright colours, and has become a force that’s fully formed. It’s easier to imagine an older version of her now and less of her younger self, the one I’ve lived and breathed with intimately every single day for the last eight years, the smell of her, her squeals, the squish of flesh, her milk teeth, all fleeting and almost gone. The cord loosens and I feel the slack and the tension as it pulls and tugs and loosen again.
A colleague eats a burger from McDonald’s and when I brought up the simple direct action of boycott, he says blatantly that all of it is simply about two groups being angry at each other. Normie-speech courtesy of our media coverage and state’s optics. I try with all my heart, felt my body shake, the words coming out like rocks. There’s no reason for us to get involved, it is so far away, it is not fair of course but it is not my problem. His burger disappears into his sticky wet mouth. I whispered all of what happened to my manager who in turn, played a video out loud from her laptop, something ProPalestine, and I nudged at her because I’d rather disengage. She persists. He leaves. The genocide continues.
Some things remain the same amidst all these changes. The world is kinda fucked that way. If there is a highest self waiting to unfurl inside of me, let it be burning with some kind of rage, with claws and fangs, ready to attack. But my anger is asleep, too tired to fight back.
I drew this card at the start of the year. Did I draw this card? It is somehow in my digital storage and has been popping up. I returned to it several times. A tending card. I see two other figures, one guarding the entrance and one I give my flowers to. A house stands large in the background.
Home is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place
While identification risks becoming caught up in taxonomy, writer and editor Akiko Busch advises that “identifying something correctly may be the first step in knowing its larger place in life.”4 The state of "attentiveness" is an etymological offshoot of "attend," both from the Latin attendere (ad ‘to, toward’ + tendere ‘stretch’). To identify is to pay attention, to stretch one’s bodily boundaries, previously assumed to be discrete, only to find them porous in the process of finding relations.1
A makes me the most delicious sandwiches and they keep them cool in small cardboard boxes wrapped in kitchen towels and some ice thing. They put them in a bag and cycle out to me. Cycling with A feels like we’re falling out of the edges of the world and portaling into some safe place where no one is able to find us.
For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.2
When it rains heavy, I eat a plate of nasi padang. Something swarms inside me. Let’s take our joy wherever and whenever we can.
Last night, while making milk at a bridge that cuts the river, the bottle dropped over the barricade. A woman appeared out of nowhere, went on all fours and retrieved the bottle for us. She smiled the warmest smile and then was gone. I went into the small minimart pushing the door open to let the pram in. Inaya makes her sounds and said her non-worded hellos enthusiastically. A migrant worker was waiting to make payment, completed his purchase of a bottled of ice lemon tea and handed Inaya a chocolate bar, non-worded reciprocal gesture into her open hands.
“There’s so many tiny moments of disabled intimacy and knowing that the abled world doesn’t have the words for. So we, the disabled don’t always have words for them either. But they still exist. We’re still making them happen, all the time.”3 Sometimes the knowing seeps out and back in and the demarcations of the abled world and the disabled bodies disappears and it’s not just sorry eyes, or pity parties but happenings of shared joys like a chocolate bar and the warmest smile.
I spend the year grieving trees. Olive trees, banyan trees, the three sister trees opposite my house, the sight of them, their absences. I grieve trees more than Z’s obtuse silence and I wonder why that is the case.
An old song from my twenties came on in my Spotify daylist blasting loudly in my ears as I commute to work.
What's the time?
What's the day?
Go and leave me?
What's the time?
What's the place?
Go and leave me
What's the time?
What's the day?
Go and leave me?
What's the time?
What's the place?
Go and leave me out
Leave me out
Leave me out
Leave me out
Still a sharp shock to my soft side I guess. I refrained from writing about the things I did (or achieved, pfft) and have come to love and all the things I had to leave behind or something about the better or worse of it. Sometimes it’s alright to not know the meaning of something just yet, especially when you are still in the thick of it. To whoever that may be going through the same dispersal and accumulation of fragmented selves and feel hella exhausted by it all, I’m there with you hun. We got this. Fuck that cosmic upgrade, all we need is tenderness.
Till next time my loves, hydrate, ressociate and stay in love. <3
https://www.nationalgallery.sg/sg/en/learn-about-art/magazine/out-of-isolation-covid-19-marcus-yee.html
https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2014/04/02/invitation-to-miss-marianne-moore/
The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha