Masquerade Suite

Right foot stepped forward.

My mother never taught me anything else apart from living without her and my father. Or to be more specific, living without someone I needed. How to not rely on other people but myself. To carry my own weight. That's right, my mother taught me how not to be a burden of others. If living had a weight and giving birth meant to grant a child this weight, her teaching me how to live would be somewhat of an apology to counteract her guilt. If one has to depend on another to bear the weight, he or she has to live with a guarantee that the other person will always be present to carry it, otherwise one will be buried alive by the sudden burden of life once it comes crushing down without preliminary signs. Comparing life to the pull of gravity is a common metaphor in literature, because even invisible to the eye, we, humans can feel the force we are pressured against. And perhaps the intangibility of the weight of living can be proven by our responses to living itself.


Sideward rotation.

When I was sixteen, I was so depressed that I couldn't go to school for two weeks. I was throwing up blood and I lost my appetite. I spent the fortnight in bed. Curtains drawn. Only took a shower every three days. I couldn't even cry because it wasn't like sadness. I wasn't sad. I couldn't describe how it felt then, because I was looking through my diction of words for emotions. Now that I'm older, I finally have a word for it - heavy. After so many years of searching, I realized I was looking in the wrong places. It was not a feeling. It was weight. And maybe depression is just a way of handling the weight of living. It could be a vague measurement of it. It could be that the burden of life was pretty heavy back then, or that it was not, and I was too weak to bear it.


Parallel the moving foot with the other one.

Some people go for a run in response to this weight, and some people run away from it. It was like when my hand couldn't help sweating before a presentation or my heart palpitating when the plane takes off. When my closed eyes kept twitching so hard under the lids that our lashes clashed. Or that time my lips trembled when I first touched his and I went home that day and wrote something about how the stars "shake and burn". I was seventeen when I thought it would happen all over again, that I had to spend two weeks in bed with curtains drawn. But it didn't. It wasn't exactly heaviness. It was pain. It was lighter. And my response to it? I put everything inside a mason jar, sealed it up and kept it in a cool, dry place while I bit hard on my trembling lip. I wanted the memory to hurt. I wanted it to be a feeling, not a burden. Feelings fade away; burden is for life.


Left foot forward.

I was taught to live without someone I needed. But if that someone is who you need, how could you possibly live without him? Sleeping in the same bed where I skipped two weeks of school for, my ears pressed against the telephone, we talked for hours about all the little things and all the pretty things and all the simple things and fell between the pauses and giggles that filled the room, and I wasn't sure if it was lightness or joy. It was also in the same bed where I listened to his small voice on the other side of the phone telling me it was over. My hair in-between the phone and my ear, I listened to his steady, muffled breathing. Loving him felt a lot like that and not only that - it has to be it. Loving him has to feel like hearing with muffled ears. It was as if lying to myself that I wanted to hear it but I didn't, and that I didn't want to hear it but I did. After that, I hung up and never called back. That's the thing about love. People say it's a red string that binds lovers together. I say it's the red string that connects feelings with weight. Love with life.


Rotation to the other side.

If there's something like putting your own weight on someone else's back, then why on earth would there be anyone who would like to carry another person's weight in the first place? Well, there isn't. There isn't anyone who bears his or her own weight and the extra weight of another person. That wouldn't be fair, would it? In fact there would only be two people sharing the weight of the two of them. Like two monks hauling buckets of water with a bamboo stick. The lightness of sharing burdens - that's what love is really about. And yet it is also the quiet terror of being alive, because it means a promise without a guarantee. Love subjects us to the burden of life, and when the other monk leaves, you will be left with spilled water that none of you can put back into the buckets.
There are people rioting against the heavy burden of their lives in Baltimore and yet I am left here having no idea what to do with my pain. All the lovers imitating and rewriting the same love story, thinking it will turn out different from the ones they had, seeking lightness from weight, freedom from burden - and maybe this is why I don't deserve it, because I'm not chasing after it anymore.


Finish the circle with the moving foot.

I met a boy not long ago, and he said reading the things I wrote was like dancing Waltz. You had to find balance under your own weight without the partner's support. I said no. No, it wasn't what my writings were, it was me. To waltz flawlessly, you have to look at each other's right shoulder to prevent dizziness or lock your eyes at nothing in particular and let the surroundings pass by, because looking into the partner's eyes will make you shift your weight onto him unintentionally. And if you can't take your eyes off of him, waltz with a mask on. Put up a false pretense.

Pre-fixed

A heart apart
across a land
awaits asea
afraid again

Along a stream
ahead it moves
above and over
away from you

Missing You

Missing you felt different in the daytime.

At night it felt like an avalanche where no single snowflake thinks is responsible for. And when the light met the darkness, it had friends. It went train-spotting, only drawing the middle part of the vehicle. It tucked its short hair behind its ear and inhaled its first cigarette of the day. One inch from the platform, one inch from the heart. It used to feel awkward watching its parents kiss when it was little. Now its parents don't hold hands, and only call each other by their full names. Missing-you walked a straight line after drinking the entire bottle of its favorite white wine through its teeth, and couldn't speak after that. It put its hand over the brightest star that night because the sky didn't know its name. The next morning all the lost boys from the village came to see the light shining through the back of its hand. It is the Polaris, it is celestial. It ran wild. Before it left, it said, "Pick a card, any card." Before it left, it told me after three years we wouldn't look at each other when we're talking, we'd turn the lights off when we kissed. It ran wild. It was claw marks scarred across the sky. It was frozen heart with a laced rim. It was what the funeral songs were humming about. It was melting candle wax, high altitudes, the goldfish that failed to force its stomach down when it's dying. It ran wild and it was what cigarettes tasted like.

Missing you feels different in the daytime. Missing you feels different in the nighttime. Missing you feels different. It feels different now.

It comes home sometimes. It comes home sober. It doesn't yell, doesn't bruise my wrists, doesn't throw me down the stairs. It feels like the back of my mother's hand on my forehead, a new-born fawn's second stomp on the ground after falling. It speaks like a seashell to my ear, decrescendo waves, echoing back and forth. It cooks me breakfast and licks its finger to check for saltiness. It is bare-foot. It walks here and there. It caresses the cat. It ties a pencil to the plant in our balcony that is bending over and backwards. It sings and dances. It is steady and quiet. It says the moon is always the size of your thumb wherever you go. It is celestial. A heavenly body. A planet.

Missing you feels different from missing anyone else.
It lives.
It breathes.

He Brings The Rain

Are we in love are we smiling are we just friends are we something.

I was the dim light left on between late nights and early mornings.

I have everything to give and yet the very best part of me is left where he's living.

They say the person you think of when you're standing in front of the sea is who you're in love with.

Sometimes I wonder sometimes I don't. Maybe when I'm older I'll be brave enough to bear it.

Poetry can be hard for some people because it reminds us that there's no dignity in it.

If my restless ocean heart was a poem without directions, who would guide me by the noble bearings without shame?

It is always on a Sunday afternoon when I am in pain.

Are we in love are we insane are we strangers are we the rain.

Yearly Horoscope For Aquarius

Jupiter is at the top of your chart all year, which means you are firmly in control of your own world for 2015, Water Child. Have you been feeling like a wallflower since last year? The celestial bodies see a sudden uprise of prominence in your social sector for the coming annum. You will meet a lot of genuine people who will help you find your way along the road that you have been lost in. In the first few months of 2015, you may find yourself contemplate a lot about the future - Where do you want to be a year from now? How about five years from now? Where do you envision yourself in ten years from now? These may seem like important questions to you, Aquarius, as you have been anxious about your future, but there will come a time when you realize that the bigger and far more important question you have to ask yourself is where you want to be right now. Sometimes when we think we know what we want to do in the years ahead, we overlook the present. Always remind yourself to immerse in the current moment.

Saturn in fiery Sagittarius supports you, and any nervousness is very unlikely to show in your appearance or how you present yourself. In the first few months of the year, there will come a challenge running wild in your household, very likely a matter concerning the financial look. You are not the type to express distress to others, Aquarius, even when you are sitting with them by the seaside chugging down a whole bottle of cheap wine, because you would rather pull down the sleeve to cover the heart you hang there like it is a humiliating scar and beat yourself up over it. But it will soon be over and done with and it would be a waste of your life to spend it lamenting what others have that you do not. Spend more time reveling in the small blessings and enchanting moments. While others are spending a night in a hotel of five or six stars, you are surrounded by people you value a lot under the skies of five, six billion stars.

Mercury and Venus in Aquarius oppose Jupiter and anchor your chart for the year. Mercury goes retrograde in Aquarius, bringing you closer to the people you left out in the previous years. You are not typically a homebody, Water Child, you had been becoming distant from others due to the events happened in the past. The most cliché saying that everything happens for a reason is in fact the truest. For these few years you have become a more defensive being who does not accept ideas out of your comfort zone. This explains why no matter how hard you try to look for the fixed patterns of happenstance, it just does not seem reasonable. When you look for signs, you find them, just not in the places you want them to be. Sometimes these signs are the real thing. Sometimes they are contrived by your hope and imagination and even your fear. It is often hard to tell them apart. It is not possible to tell you to not go searching for it, obstinate child. But if you do, try not to read meaning into every odd circumstance you happen upon. It will come to you unexpectedly. Remain kind, considerate and gracious and you will learn what you need to know and it will all begin to make sense.

The days when Mars conjuncts Neptune, with the Moon in hard-working Capricorn, can work magic for you. What you want is out there, and it is looking for you, Aquarius. You have been keeping up with your hard work for quite a long time now, and you will be able to reap what you sown. Just because you took longer than others does not mean you failed. You are a water bearer and everything about you is fluid. Your thoughts may be flowing in scattered directions as you try to figure out what to do. But Aquarius children always allow themselves to mentally wander along the stream until obvious solutions come to them. Keep this in mind, Water child, as it will help you in the future of being able to see obstacles in a new way. What seems like a troublesome barrier to success is perceived to be more of an opportunity in your eyes. And this is a merit you should take great pride in.

The Lunar North Node has brought you blessings in a romantic encounter. Are you scared of commitment, Aquarius? A part of you is nodding to the question while another part of you wants to belong to someone. You have been thinking too much of it. You have been telling yourself that you do not deserve what you once were devastated by. Or that somehow you are guiltily convinced that you do not have much left to give to this person. This is why whenever someone crosses paths with you or try to catch up with your pace, you only find yourself running faster and faster, not willing to stop or stay put, as it has brought you pain in the past doing so. However, Water Child, you need to listen more carefully to that little voice in your head that is telling you to slow down. You are never not enough to give. If you can love the wrong person so hard, just imagine how much you can love the right one this time. Speaking the language of emotion is almost effortless for you, and your world will be flooded with it. Communicating with this special person who has walked into your life will seem easier than you think. Do not fabricate it, Aquarius, stay true to yourself and who you say you are. Follow your gut when it comes to approaching this endeavor, and if you let yourself rush through it, you may have to start from square one. We all make mistakes in our lives and meet the wrong people who make us believe the otherwise. They will not matter anymore, as you had picked up your pieces before 2015 even started. The bridges you burnt will light your way.

I'll See It When I Believe It

If these hands could talk, the right one wouldn't tell you the things it had done to the one that's left. If these hands could talk, they would talk about yesterday. Adrenaline rushed when I realized the cup of tea was a bit too hot for my throat, like the cheap words I was shot at in that same moment. I said I wouldn't think about it tomorrow yesterday. Some people are always aiming at your back waiting for you to take off that bullet-proof vest in front of the world that you're finally ready to brave. Now my burnt tongue can't stop reminding me of the pain in my chest where the bullet went through several times in my life. Is it killing me or is it making me stronger? If I were laying here with you when my heart is breaking and my whole world crumbling down, please look for the right words to say, because hating each other is the only thing we have in common now. Thousands of headlights shine through the city with their ghosts reflected on the white walls that have forgotten about the world because the real bodies who own them aren't here to love them. Next to me are piled-up blankets for warm dreams. I stare at the highways on my palms and can't stop wondering how I lose you every time in the wrinkled open cracks and why I crash and burn in the dead-ends. If this was a ghost story, it would be the only one that I could tell properly over the worst soundtrack of that horrible crack in the voice of someone who's about to cry. I acted like I didn't care when in fact I was so fucking scared because loving you made me forget about hating myself and now I don't know where hating you would lead me to. It was the same fear as when Mrs. Lee passed away holding her husband's hand and the old man living across the street always said that he was glad he wasn't in love with anybody. He said the same when the sirens rang from two blocks away and the ambulance stopped at the entrance of his building. But it wasn't for him. Nothing ever was.

Ghost stories are all lies. There isn't a ghost of us; I won't believe it when I see it, but I know I'll see it when I believe it. That bullet didn't kill me, and it never will. The city lights are trying to tell us the pain in our chests are just our hearts growing bigger, like how the lights spread themselves on the walls connecting those four corners.

If these hands could talk. No, hands can't talk. And there's only the wrong one who had stayed a little longer than it should.

Ironic Miracle

I've been receiving postcards from Chicago, postcards from Leeds, postcards from Brisbane; postcards from all the friends I'm not close with, and I have to read their regards word by word like I'm trying to figure out the secret codes behind these pictures of landmarks from places half way across the world. I've been biting my tongue in my sleep for the past few nights and I had to wake up to a mouthful of blood of my own, to yet another nightmare when I was not asleep. Intuitions like these make it hard for me to not believe in intuitions like knowing that there's really "The One" in our lives that we are telepathically connected to. Because this morning I was told that he's already found someone new now, and suddenly I have so much to say after months of not being able to put a single word on my personal journal. I've also been told that there would be a miracle today and I looked for it everywhere so hard the entire day just to discover there was nothing but a bad weather and that I didn't dare listening to music that might prove it all wrong for something I anticipated. There was a lump in my chest and I had to pretend that it was the lecture notes in my bag that weighed me down to my ankles which made me walk so slowly across the flashing green pedestrian light. I stuffed cookies into my healing mouth hoping it would grow an extra layer of fat around my heart so no one could see it wriggle like a dying caterpillar. But what's the difference when I'm writing things like these as if I'm trying to wear it on my sleeve? I flipped to the first page of my ivory journal book where I found a quote I had written, with my bold handwriting, "How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." And there's only one item I've crossed out on my bucket list - Fall in love. Postcards from all the friends I'm not close with. I definitely love an irony. And isn't this what I've been doing the whole time? Loving ironies. Walking ironies. Writing articles hoping I could be understood but also trying to hide myself away. And perhaps this is the miracle. This moment could be it. Albert Einstein once said that we could live life as if nothing is a miracle. Or as though everything is a miracle. I remember one morning I woke up next to him when the first rays filtered through the horizontal blinds and the shadows landed along the contour of his face, and I couldn't help kissing the lines like how people long to touch the paintings hanging in the museums. But I'd pretend that I didn't know him ten years from now if we crossed paths on each side of the yellow lines on the ground while green lights were flashing and my heart pumping to its beats. Because I know my heavy ankles wouldn't be able to bring me to the other side before it turned red. I wouldn't race through it. I'd just pretend that I didn't know him. All this time I've been looking for a left sneaker. He's a left sneaker. And then I look at myself and I get it now, I get it. I'm also a left sneaker. Maybe that explains why we're so similar and yet so incompatible in every way. And maybe the cliches are right. Maybe there really are some things that we have to find before we find each other.