this love radiates and overflows, (even) in the fading penumbra sunlight.
this month requires a state of undress, an eclosion birthed from what Ocean Vuong describes as a deep purple feeling marking the completion of my 39th solar return.
(i) a day is not 24 hours (an anachronous list of things that happen)
10022021 — 1102202
I watch you squeeze yourself in through a makeshift hole of a chain link fence and squatting on all fours you pull the kayak towards you. I push with all my might at the other end.
You send me a text at 5:42pm: Hey babe I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ve been told to pass this message to you. I just want to make it clear I’m not involved and got a text to do so.
I arrive too early and sat at the staircase, and conducted a morning interview via zoom. Pre-instructions was to have fun and keep it light and casual.
You offer me peaches still wet from being washed. I took a bite. Acid slips down my throat.
The DJI-2 pocket camera keeps shutting down. I try five more times before giving up.
Your stuff are all packed into bags the moment I walk in. I want to hug you and cry like you did when you rushed over to mine many months ago. But there is some sharp thing between us.
I put my hand into the water. Watch it break the surface. I close my eyes. We do not have to talk.
Laughter fill the empty staircase as the day got brighter. I switch off my laptop camera and ask the next question on the list. I laugh along. I go along.
You open the door and pull me in for a hug. Thanks for coming all this way you say. I hesitated. My pleasure. I am so excited. My voice breaks a little.
You hand me two joss stick already gently burning, the little glowing orbs almost imperceptible in this morning light. We ask for her blessings before we set off to sea you said. I clasp my hand together and asks for mercy to get through the day intact.
High tide. You paddle slowly into an opening. I stretch myself out and listen to the conference of the birds. I listen and in my heart these lines read itself, a prayer:
Heart’s blood and bitter pain belong to love,
And tales of problems no one can remove;
Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine -
And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.
Love thrives on inextinguishable pain,
Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.
I recount the details of the situation in-depth through text. At the end I write Also this incident has deeply saddened me and made me feel like I shouldn’t even bother pushing anymore. You reply almost immediately. Can we speak at 830?
I look through the email for the details of my meeting. When I look up, I see you leave, closing the door behind you. The light outside disappears with you.
We enter into a mangrove maze. The reflection of the water a doubling, mirror surface as the roots extend from its ending into a beginning and back again. Endlessly. We remain silent. Your smile seem to endlessly stretch itself towards me. I flinch but you did not notice.
I prop my body against the wall and take the call. There was funeral in the multi-purpose hall. At the same time, I wait for my grab ride. You assure me that I am in no legal trouble at the moment. Someone is crying over the dead.
You left some of your stuff behind. You left me behind.
We come upon a bird at a far distance. Majestic silver of feathers catching the morning sun. As though knowing it is being watched, it puts on a show, spread its wings wide and held them open for a while. A half embrace. It hesitates and fly off.
I squeeze myself into the hole and scrap my knee a little. It does not hurt as much.
I read the message that came with the text, white words against a black background. The last two lines a creaking, a crack, kayak breaking the mirror surface, my knee scrapping on wire, the sound of the door closing shut, different time,s same impact: Please take this as the last warning to stop all conversations on public and private platforms, in which detailing the situation puts them at risk for harassment. You private actions and subsequent public Instagram stories constitutes as harassment and will be liable to legal action if continued.
The birds grow quiet when they detect our presence. Their secret keeps me safe, their secret terrifies me. It is time we head back.
We have lunch at a hawker centre nearby. Holding the magic of the morning precariously between our stories, in our words, in my mouth and I swallow. I grow wings and fly off with no hesitation.
My last meeting runs long. An acquisition is in the process. The institution feels it is crucial for this work to continue in other permutations. The same work that brings all the trouble and the pain. My mouth is metal. Shut tight. I am screaming.
You did not have to send me the text. You could have waited for a while. You did not have to know. You protect me with your words. You break me with your silence.
I run up to the back before the light goes out. Between the trees, there is a deep purple feeling. Black shiny scales rustling the leaves. I cannot tell if it’s the head or the tail I see. The start or the end. Can an omen be both good and bad, and if so does that steal away its powers or make it more potent?
I learn later that the tangle of roots in a mangrove system is called a mangal. Mangal in a tangle of my mangled heart, tears the soul and knit the threads again. I laugh and cry. I go along.
===============================
(POSTSCRIPT): If our definition of a day was truly based on one complete rotation of the Earth on its axis — a 360 degree spin — then a day would be 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. This is nearly 4 minutes shorter than our 24-hour standard day….The mismatch of nearly 4 minutes is because the Earth must rotate more than 360 degrees between one dawn and the next. As you know, the Earth experiences two simultaneous motions — it not only spins on its axis, but it also travels in orbit around the sun. In a period of one day, the Earth travels about 1/365 of the way around the sun (because it takes about 365 days to go all the way around, which is how we define a year)….Therefore the Earth has to spin an extra degree in order to line up with the sun again each day. The result is that one complete cycle of sunlight and darkness — one day — represents a rotation of about 361 degrees, not 360 degrees. Although a year consists of 365 and a quarter days, the Earth actually spins 366 and a quarter times during a year. From the standpoint of sunrises and sunsets, one complete spin is negated each year by the journey around the sun.1
(Page 98) Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?
(Page 100) We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day—neither good nor bad, but something we passed through. I pedaled faster, I moved, briefly unmoored.2
(ii) It’s my party and I cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to…You would cry to if it happened to you.
For as long as I can remember, I take pleasure in the ubiquitous birthday things holding the flimsy flame of candles perched clumsily on kitschy cakes, balloons and streamers; cheap purchases from party shops, the gaiety of it all, the singing, bad chorus peaking at “to (insert name)” each time, and my most favourite of all the birthday surprise.
This child wound have refused to heal; the one I constantly nurse through the years of my life. But tbf, the pleasure was always there. Birthdays were a big thing for my family. Always a simple celebration at home, always with cake and our favourite dishes. An unwrapping of gifts once everyone comes home, on weekend or school nights. Never missed. One year, Mak bought me a birthday cake organ that played happy birthday on loop all year round until it broke. I love that organ so much, a pink plastic cake with a pink plastic candle that lights up each time I press on the keys. I brought it everywhere with me believing that birthdays are everyday. I celebrate you and you and you everyday is your birthday and my birthday. I also remember a musical greeting card that plays a polyphonic version of happy birthday if I left it open and how it played on and on until the tune slowed down and turn ghastly from the batteries running out. When Mak threw it away, I cried myself to sleep.
There were other rituals too that I have held dearly and remember fondly. Nenek preparing bubur putih merah for all of us, with the one on birthday duty tasked to scoop the red porridge out to fill the bowl and a dollop of white porridge at its centre. How we were made to wash ourselves with a bucket of water in which a buang balak bowl was left submerged overnight. For good luck, for good fortune, for good tidings.
When my parents marriage ended, so did these celebrations. My first birthday after the divorce, was just a month after they split officially. Ayah, to win me over, had gifted me the trendy MTV Motorola MTV pager. It was blue and oh so new. A guilt present. I sat at the back while Ayah and my stepmom sat at the front of the car. Their love gestures were over the top knowing that Mak will demand a detailed report. The sight of the necklace of love bites on Ayah’s neck made me nauseated and thoroughly confused. When I came home, Mak went on and on expressing my betrayal without using the actual word. You should have rejected this gift, she said as threw the pager, still in the box, across the floor. As I turned 14, I was reborn, no longer my parents’ shared child but some other thing to contain their toxic hatred for each other.
When I turned 15, Kakak and Mak brought me out for a birthday dinner. It had been a rough year. I was acting out and had spent an entire night with a nineteen year old boy I had met through IRC just a few weeks back and as some kind of strange sex education, Mak told me that I was conceived because condoms are not 100% safe. She revealed I was an accident and she would have terminated the pregnancy if Kakak had not begged her for a sibling. You should be thankful that you exist. I wasn’t.
It was not all that horrible but each time after that, I get severely depressed as the date approaches. At 16, I was staying with Ayah and his new family. Their helper bibik, bless her dear soul, made me my favourite; tofu stuffed with instant noodles and deep fried in egg. A mountain of that with a candle at the top. We did all of it in secret; before Ayah and my stepmom return home from work. Nanti kena marah, bibik said.
I anticipated something bad so I skipped turning 17 altogether. On my 18th birthday however, M who was housing me at that time brought me to Disney on Ice. Her parents paid for our tickets and momentarily I felt like a child again, soaked in pure joy without feeling that something will blow up in my face. When the show ended, I hid myself in the toilet stall and cried for a while, homesick for my own family to show up. It was a deep purple day, both one of my happiest and saddest.
In my 20s, I indulged in birthday surprises for my chosen kin. A cab full of balloons, a house filled with empty wine bottles, birthday kidnappings. My sister had two daughters of her own by then, both 13 months apart, and we celebrated every single year. One year in particular, I struggled lighting up all the candles on A’s cake, my sister’s youngest daughter, at a windy staircase landing of their new place. How they walked in on me before I could finish, surprising me with gleeful laughter. Or how I burned the floor with the tea lights scattered around the living room as F, her oldest walked in. Exuberant smiles and excitement captured in their faces, contagious and everlasting, the same expressions I recognise in our old family photos and even that could not heal the wound.
Each time, there was immense joy, it came tangled in incessant pain, an ache, a sadness river that flow, hulu-hilir, upstream, downstream all at once. On my 21st birthday, a boy I had been talking for hours on the phone with, asked me out and we stumbled upon Rivermaya performing a set at the Esplanade. To move me away from the crowd, he gently guided me by the elbow and I realised in that moment that I really like this person, much, much more than a friend. Nine years later we returned to the same spot, some super moon in the sky to the set the scene and he proposed. In between and the following years after, since turning 21 this boy who became my life partner and corroborator, who knew of this ache, sweetened each year and yet the ache refuses to leave me. No longer open wound but scar tissue that seem to undo each year as the date approaches.
In its undoing, is my own undoing. One year whilst I was working at the hostel, I spend the whole night doing meth to take the edge off. As I was coming down from the high, the folks from the hostel, my colleagues and my bosses surprised me with a cake. My partner had organised this surprise for me and I almost died. Instead I sobered up and stayed clean for a really long time after. And then many years later, after my child was born, I was deep in postpartum depression. Mak came to make the birthday special, old mother to new mother, a mother to her child but instead that night ended in tears, screaming and a massive breakdown.
And then the years that followed, I busied myself with work to skip my birthday altogether. At least I am doing what I love. Instead that too blew up in my face. A collaboration went sour, hurtful words, no one remembers, and then burned bridges. The year that followed was even worse, painting walls this emerald green, a colour I’ve grown to despise due to what had transpired, an exhibition organised by someone I cared for deeply who had suddenly become cold, punishingly cold in fact. I organised a small get together in that same horrible week, to get me out of my own little fuck up feelings where dear friends came to celebrate me, a yummy strawberry cake, illuminated faces, and a trip to the park by the water, I was already a shell of myself. Far away in my hurt.
***
Safe to say, I am still figuring this out. Mak told me that my birth was rather traumatic for her. She said this casually during a birthday date we had ,where she wanted to cook my favourite ikan kurau goreng and sayur bayam and picked up on my mood dipping. She checked the time and noted that it’s noon and in three hours, 34 years ago I was born and now I am making my descend into the world and its making me all up in my feelings. Maybe she knew even back then, experience my mood shifts each time my birthday draws near. Maybe the ache has always been there, some kind of mark from multiple past lives. Maybe it is her pain that I am carrying, some cursed inheritance that have entangled itself around my core being, mutating, manifesting in some coalescence of deep sadness and pure joy. I truly don’t know but not knowing won’t stop me from tending to it and holding it with even more tenderness as the date approaches.
(iii) Eclosion//occlusion in the fading penumbra sunlight
In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, purple appears nineteen times. Twoents in particular intersect across the book, both with Lan, the grandmother of the Little Dog (the protagonist) at its centre. As a Little Dog plucked the stray white hairs on Lan’s head in exchange for stories, she recounted meeting her lover Paul for the first time at a bar. She was wearing a purple áo dài, the split sides billowing behind her under the bar lights as she walked, the same dress which she wore as a sex worker servicing American G.Is to survive th war… it was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive.
At the end of the book, purple appears again, this time as Lan lays dying.
‘“The feet, they go first—and they’re purple. Only a half hour now, at most.” I watch Lan’s life begin to recede from itself. Purple, Mai had said, but Lan’s feet don’t look purple to me. They’re black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an opaque yellowish tint—like bone itself. But it’s the word purple, and with it that lush deep hue, that floods me. That’s what I see as I watch the blood pull out of Lan’s black feet, the green surrounded by clusters of violet in my mind, and realize the word is dragging me into a memory.’
Little Dog shared a memory; as a six year old he had climbed over a chain link fence at Lan’s insistence to unroot a bunch of wildflowers that grew along a busy highway. Hesitating when he reached the top Lan had assured him and said “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you,”. Having filled a 7-11 plastic bag with a bunch of these wildflowers, Little Dog felt Lan shuddering only to realise she was giggling with joy at their spoils.
‘I would never know those flowers by name. Because Lan never had one for them. To this day, every time I see small, purple flowers, I swear they’re the flowers I had picked that day. But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear. Clear and purple, the color that climbs now to Lan’s shins as we sit, waiting for it to run through her.’
A purple day across time, Lan’s purple áo dài, the wildflowers, her dying feet. There is so much life in death in these three different encounters yet they all seem to mean the same. When I finally finished the book last February, I learn about a sudden passing of a friend. As social media posts appeared about their life and light, things they will never get to know themself, it made me realised that when someone dies, they are the most alive. Coloured brightly by those around them, in vivid bold strokes by others who are dragged into these shared memories.
On 29th June 2021 I wrote this instagram post when I found out that dragonflies, a symbol of change and transformation, live for only six months:
But six months in their cycle may feel like sixty years for us. I thought about dying every six months and what kind of life that may be. I’d be reckless and hungry in the first month wanting to do everything I wanted to do in this short lifespan but by the third, midway before my death, I may have grown bored or exhausted from trying too hard realising nothing matters long enough to make a difference. By then I would gather all loose ends, think about the moments that I am thankful for and map the route out of this labyrinth I have created from my mere existence. Make little changes, the ones that I can, like an apology to someone I have hurt, or spending a little more time with myself. Let the big ones go, the ones that are beyond and behind me and be ok with it. The sixth month would be my favourite. I spend the weeks mourning all that I have lost and naming all that I have missed. I’d throw a three day long funeral where I’d celebrate with my closest and take time to say goodbye, telling every single being how important they have been.
And after I die, I come alive again, like an energetic egg ready to thrive. Everything repeats in the same ways but completely different.
I think too about this quote all the time: Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
As I grow older, my mortality have become more pronounced as I find myself caught in linear time, my aging mother who falls sick easily and talks about dying more and more on one end and my seven year old child who bends time, seven years on earth but not quite seven years in age on the other, and by all the deaths I’ve experienced in between. But yet death is still not talked about enough, not in the manner that brings comfort, that open doors to let the light in.
It’s easy too, to forget as we crawl out of each eclosion into some new version (and I believe it peaks, at least for me in the weeks leading to every solar return) there is a kind death, there is decay and ruin, and it hurts like hell. But the promise of life, at least for another year, purposefully occludes grief, keeps it hidden in the dark, as I blow out the flimsy flame of some metaphorical candle before it extinguishes and quickly make a wish. Never the other way around.
There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras.
Maybe I yearn to catch these colours, these shades before I die, a penumbra of time extending and fading, of shadows lit by the brightness of myself, and I want to catch it with all of you, our faces illuminated radiating and overflowing with love, eternally fleeting.
I end this post with a screenshot of my favourite Tiktok video that captures the messy cosmos that is Pisces szn.
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Thank you my loves for staying on till the end as I meander in the muck of my birthday blues. Go tell someone how their existence in the world matters to you. Until next time. <3
https://medium.com/the-philipendium/a-day-is-not-24-hours-c36ee96078c6
From Ocean Vuong’s On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous