Our Hiding Place

I could listen to this all day
The ship horn howling with its pack
If I laid very still on the asphalt
I could feel the whole world tremble
The water looked like porcelain
when I tilted my head sideways,
undisturbed and slightly below eye-level
I pressed my knuckles on the rough bed
like how sculptors dug their thumbs
to make space for their creations’ eye sockets
And felt the coarse remains of the cements
like blind people felt their beloved’s faces with their fingertips
Every part of it has been touched by me
Every part has my imprints on it

This is an abandoned town
only the stray dogs remember
and only the ramshackle furniture knows
how anything could be orphaned overnight
Perhaps everything has a story that could break our heart
and perhaps a place could have more feelings than me
But the person who used to own it
isn’t here to love it
and must have plenty of places to go
but no places to be

I wondered, if one would want to wander here,
if one would want to get lost here with me,
one would be another extinguished soul,
a soul that was always burning
I thought maybe if I stayed put in one place long enough,
he would find me,
just like what I was taught to do
when I lost my mother in a crowded place
But I never really thought about what to do
when the both of us were lost
and standing in the same place,

waiting

                                  separately.

I’ve made this place for you to love
and for us to feel connected even by distance
I've grown to believe that
we shall not seek
and we shall not wait –
Soulmates will eventually meet
because they have the same hiding place.

2013

仙蹤 (上)

我們膝對膝說著喃喃細語

兩人思想用的辭彙是顛倒的南北極

你以為自己還擁有的甚麼

都只是似曾相識

你可曾試過用靈魂解讀

我掏心挖肺寫的情詩

那些綿延不斷的台詞

演繹了我最勇敢的時刻

我們的強迫症

是留戀早已痊癒的灼傷

希望疼痛不會離去

因為這是我們僅有的甜蜜

你說你曾經很愛我

我回答我也很愛你

我的語言沒有過去式

這個文明的缺陷也是一種浪漫

儘管在我身邊很安全

你總會跑到雙人床的沿崖

我呼喚著親愛的

因為我們的愛還沒有名字

那天水晶燈在下雨

站在正下方

頭髮是乾的

卻沾濕了雙眼

一杯馬丁尼的開場白

在把它乾了前

已決定了我們的結局

所以也不必再追問

或許命運是一個害羞的小女孩

只懂得暗示

又或許這只是鐵樵夫

找回自己心臟那短短的一幕

我們猜不透卻又很快樂

原來有一種有緣無份

是兩個已斷絕來往的人

面對面說再見

 

Alice In Wonderland

It must've been the roses.
A splash of scarlet
The color of my insides –
the parts you said you would love, too
even though you couldn't see them
But it was only a façade
The gardeners' remission
for the monochrome yard

It must've been the tears.
The saline driblets
that turned into a pool
and before I could
regret crying too much
I was already drowning
in my own blue –
transparent when I opened
my eyes underneath it
Bright but lonely
when nothingness engulfed me

It must've been the drinks.
The bottled-up potions
that bottled up our spilling emotions
A single sip and I was a diminution
of everything I have become,
in a world of vast illusion –
this world I couldn't seem to contain
while leaving a room for you
I remembered drawing a new Atlas
for this Wonderland of ours
Only to see it disappear with the Rabbit
among the evergreen grass

It must've been the games.
The sickening contests
that we bullied each other with
in the names of love and loss
There was no right or wrong
No winners or losers
Only the Knave a poet
And the Queen and King of no hearts
A croquet match without rules
A cat floating in mid-air without a body
The uncanniness that tickled my fantasy
The false hope that lured me
down the rabbit hole

It must've been you.
The White Hare with a pocket watch
Running here and there
Chasing an invisible thing
as if no one else could be as mad
Until I fell into dark hollowness
and forgot the touch of everything real
And by the time I wake up from this dream
I will have become a different person
I will have learnt to love everything
that reality thinks is wrong with me

The funeral of emotions

Goldfish

They say that the memory span of a goldfish only lasts about three seconds. Of course, this is just an ancient myth with an untraceable origin. In fact, the goldfish can remember things up to 5 months. But a goldfish's lifespan is around 30 years. If the meaning of life could be found only in the captivity of memory, that is to say, the goldfish has lived life about 72 times: (30*12)/5 = 72. I think about this a lot. Unlike in the movie Groundhog Day, the goldfish isn't Phil who remembers everything from living the same day over and over and over again for an estimated ten thousand years; it is Rita, the unaware girl who begins to live, every day, from a certain point in her life. The only difference is that the goldfish keeps aging.

I had a goldfish when I was little. Well, to be exact, it wasn't my goldfish. I wasn't in charge of taking care of it. My mother cleaned its tank once in a while, fed it, tapped on the glass and gave it attention. It had a name. Translated to English, it roughly meant Golden Bowl. I wasn't raised in a very superstitious family, we don't believe in Feng Shui or anything, but when it comes to naming pets, Chinese people like to relate them to wealth – it's more of a habit. I wasn't fond of any domestic animals apart from cats and dogs. You can't touch a goldfish. You don't know what it's feeling. Besides, we weren't professional fish breeders or aquatic experts, any fish that had been kept in our house wouldn't live up to even half of their expected lifespan. Golden Bowl wasn't exactly a pet to me.

We never forget anything really, unless there's a memory loss. Learning is the process of creating memory, and as we are learning, our behaviors are changing simultaneously. To me, forgetting and being unable to retrieve a memory are different things. The former means that it ceases existing, while the other implies that the memory is still there, but it's too far back in your head that you can't immediately recall the experience. The memory span of humans lasts about a lifetime; even so, most of us try to make it last more than a lifetime, because we'd like to believe that life is purely made of memories, and that memory, is life. We build monuments and museums, we write books, biographies, diaries, blogs just to prove to ourselves that we are not as pathetic as the other things that have history, too.

Golden Bowl was brought home along with a few other goldfish. One died the day after, because it couldn't adapt to the new environment. The others died one by one in the following three or four years. They all turned upside down and died. Some people say that this is because there isn't sufficient oxygen in the water. So basically, they drowned to death. Yes, goldfish can drown too. So every time a fish started tilting to its side like it couldn't balance its own body, we knew that it was on the verge of dying. Golden Bowl did that a few times. We thought it couldn't make it. But it did. It kept surviving day after day. It tried very hard to force its stomach under without turning upside down. My mom helped, too. She put some seaweed into the tank and gave it more oxygen. That was when I started to take care of the fish like a pet. I didn't want it to die. I knew this one was a fighter.

Memories make us who we are. They are the basis of our identity. But if a piece of memory was never spoken of, did it really happen? If someone did not know of that small moment I’d experienced, who was I to him? There are thousands of conversations I’ve let slip – the moments that I’ll never speak of. Sometimes there is no point in telling anyone. There is no point in verbalizing a moment that is so vivid, that contains all the other senses that words can never replace. Our experiences are too profound, too multiplex in forms to be expressed with sounds aspirated through the gaps between our teeth. Meanings are lost when a moment is being spoken; it ceases to be what it was in my head. Communication distorts our meanings, our personal experiences. And I think that the best parts of us should be well-hidden. I keep a collection of these moments in my heart. I preserve it because it is unique, because it is so much greater than what I can encode. I keep it untouched and I keep it from the world simply because it is nothing but mine to own. I dig holes in the back of my mind and bury its ghost – the ghost that humans call “memories”, and I shall be the only one who knows where to find it. When it acts up inside my head attempting to haunt my thoughts, I’ll even try to hunt it down and kill it; that’s how much it matters to me. But like I said, we never forget anything. We can't just erase it. The best we can do is to shove it aside and hope it doesn't sneak around when we least expect it to.

Can you imagine if humans were like goldfish? Every time when we reach the last day of the 5th month, we instantly forget what happened 5 months before. And everything will just start building up again from the beginning - the awareness of the existence of our own and of others gone forever and reappear. What can I learn from in five months’ time? What's it like if I only had five months to acknowledge the world around me? What would I do if I knew that five months later we would be someone completely different? My “6 months” come and go irregularly, mostly by choice. Of course, I still remember what happened before my 6^th month came; I’m not a goldfish. It only means that I leave behind all the things that I’ve learnt every now and then and try to see the world with new eyes.

One day I came home from school in the afternoon, the tank was empty. Up until today I'd still like to think that it struggled and fought with all it had. It just died like how the others did. It turned upside down with its stomach facing the ceiling. And my mother flushed it down the toilet. I'd existed in its life for roughly 12 times and yet it had only been in mine once. But this memory is still lingering in my head and I'd like to ponder over it once in a while when my heart gets broken over and over again, as a reminder that I am constantly creating myself, if not erasing.

Mind Tricks

That night was so cold that if you could feel your face, it would've stung. The car was parked right behind you but you had no intention of getting back inside. Your ears were probably the only heaters of your body that were switched on. They matched your bloodshot eyes like a perfect outfit, and they were the kind of red that made roses look lifeless. You turned to look at her but you could only see half of her face. The wind struck again and her hair veiled even more of it. The sea looked like diesel and the reflection of it in her eyes made her pupils seem even darker. But she wasn't looking at the sea. She was zoning out, as if whatever that's in her mind was projected onto the scenery in front of her. She was not troubled. She was thinking. And the thought does not include you. But you weren't too troubled either. It felt good looking at her looking at something else, taking in the scent and color of her hair that you could not name. She passed you the crooked joint, from which you took a few puffs. And you were vacuumed into the story of the boy whom you once heard from your mother –

It was a warm afternoon in Summer and he was standing in the damp sand, water washing off the back of his feet. And next minute he was sucked into a whirlpool. When he was pulled out from the ocean, he was already filled with the gold that took him in.

You thought she called your name in a low whisper but it was just the splashing waves hitting against the rocks underneath your dangling feet. The picture in your mind of the story that your mother told you was gone in an instant – all the whirling sunlight, the shining dust that lost hold of the boy's feet, the glitter on the surface of the sea. Everything became pitch-black. The ocean looked like diesel again; its edges a jagged blunt blade, persistent and cold like memories. The story was brief, but you imagined the boy float to the surface and you imagined hearing his muffled scream under the shimmering water.

Sometimes we could use up all our luck to meet someone, so that we wouldn't have much of it left to make them stay. It was her turn to smoke. You passed her the joint but she was too wallowed in her own world to take hold of it. But you just kept your posture of holding it next to her. You didn't feel the need to call her. You didn't want to touch her either because she felt a lot like heartache. There were 2 billion songs written about it, and you thought they sounded very much like the muffled screaming of the boy. There's a voice in your head and that was what it was telling you. We call our impulses "our first voice" and our hesitations "our second voice". Our impulses are irrational thoughts, and so we often confuse our hesitations with rationality. Sometimes our second voice pretends to be logical when it can just be cynicism in disguise.

Another gust of wind hit the shore, and her eyes came back into focus. She took hold of the joint and smiled politely, dismissing the short period of distraction. She was lost in contemplation and it was a thought that was not of you, and would not let you in unless you learnt to love enough.