Under My Skin

The Eskimos have 50 words for snow. Ancient Persian has 80 words for love. English has about 20 words for cocaine. And there's a kind of flavor in Korean that none of these languages has a word for: 고소하다 (Gosohada) - meaning the flavor that can be found in sesame oil, milk, Swiss cheese and peanuts. This was what a Korean exchange student told me last week when he was eating a club sandwich he bought from the school canteen. It is hard for me to imagine what gosohada tastes like, because I am Chinese, and there isn't a word in Chinese that describes it. But after being told that there was something called gosohada, I was starting to become aware of this flavor in the food that I ate.

Does the flavor gosohada exist before there's a word for it or does it exist just because someone created it? In English, we use the word "turquoise" to describe the bluish green color. But before it was English, we didn't have a word for that; we just described the color as bluish green with a bit of aqua mixed with gray. That's because "turquoise" was actually a word borrowed from French. Perhaps the French were more artistic than the Englishmen, so they needed more specific terms to describe colors, who knows? What I'm trying to say is, gosohada exists before there's a word for it - it's just that the flavor isn't considered in some cultures. Consequently, if something was named, we would know that its importance was considerably high in a specific culture. And I wondered how important something can be for it to be acknowledged in all languages and even named after 80 different words in ancient Persian.

All this information was taught in my Linguistics class at university. Sometimes the professor would tell us the origin of a word and try to analyze how culture makes it become what it is today. I'm not a language nerd. Comparatively speaking, I'm more keen on literary studies. But this course certainly brings me to see the world through a different scope and shows me how closely or scarcely I am related to others. Realizing how limited our range of knowledge can span amazes me and terrifies me and frustrates me, because it constantly makes me question and re-evaluate my own identity. If I spoke Korean or some other languages, how would I see the world and its people around me? How would I end up with all the different choices I make every day?

If you have studied Semantics before, you'll grasp the idea that even in the same language and culture, different people have different references of what a word means. For instance, when reading the word "cricket", the first image that flashes across some people's minds would be the little green insect while for others, it would be cricket the sport. Even for the same thing, the result would turn out differently. Take "lecture" for example. When the professor thinks of "lecture", it depicts the scenario of him standing in front of all his students. And when we, students, think of the same word, we would picture ourselves sitting in class listening to the speaker. This is where it struck me. It disturbs me to realize that one would never understand another because we exist in different realities, in our own little planets that no one could ever trespass. And the thing that agitates me the most is that I will never be understood.

As a writer, I have this constant compulsion to express. There's so much under my skin that urges to break free, but I am not gifted enough to convey what I want to convey and I wish that I knew all the right languages for the right things to say. But then it would require someone who knew all these languages to understand what I meant. Throughout the lecture I was drafting my article but I struggled with words to write, because when I intended to say one thing it might turn out to be something completely different for someone else to comprehend. While I am a person who seeks quality communication and mutual understanding, I am slowly finding it difficult to open up to people around me. And this is wearing me out because language oughts to be a tool for communication when in this case it is driving people away.

Right after finishing my milk pudding, I took out the lecture notes on which I drafted my article. Compositional Semantics was right beside my clumsy handwriting. It says that putting words together in order can alter the meaning of a word. And I thought of why I started taking up writing as a hobby when I was younger. These words are just words on their own, but a chunk of them makes them unique in their own ways. How I arrange them in my choice of sequence is greater than the words on their own. With the aftertaste of gosohada in my throat, I recalled the professor's external reference to the definition of Compositional Semantics - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

While in ancient Persian there're 80 words for love, I haven't yet found a single word for me. But under my skin, I am greater than what I cannot express. And under my skin, the whole of me can drown out a river.

The First Time I Lied

Legs dangling from the hard wooden chair, I sniffed the air that smelled like the inside of a bottle my mother took her sleeping pills from. The woman in white put her hands on my cheeks that felt like fever and I watched as she pressed a needle close to the veins on the back of my shivering hand - blue and icy. I looked away during the injection and she asked me if it hurt. I shook my head no. That was the first time I lied.

My aunt brought a summer floral dress back from her shopping spree and made me try it on in front of all the other relatives. They threw back their heads and laughed at the over-sized cloth that fell like a curtain at my feet. I said I hated dresses and I would never put them on when I got older. But when I was left alone at home, I would stand in front of the mirror and walk around the house in that dress pretending I was big enough to wear it. That was the first time I lied.

In an afternoon, I sat with my mother in front of the television and she asked me to do her a favor. She sat on the floor in front of me as I crossed my legs on the couch. She handed me a pair of tongs and signaled me to pick the strands of silver hair on her scalp. For each time I stole the aging years from her head, I would complain about how I'd never do such tedious work for her the next time. But every time she sat before the couch with the pair of tongs and a rounded mirror, I'd take them from her wrinkling hands and search for the white wires in a sparse forest of blackness. I would tell her that I hated doing this. That was the first time I lied.

The sunflowers in the balcony was a gift from my sister's boyfriend. He bought her the seeds from Amsterdam and told her to plant them. They didn't bloom until the sun had gone down for over 30 times. Every morning, my sister would check for flower buds like mail and sprinkle nutrient water to its soil. Its stem refused to stop growing and yet the bud was still too reluctant to let the sun kiss it. When it finally blossomed, its body was too tall to support the petals that it kept lying prone and weeping over the rim of the vase. No matter how my sister tried to secure it and give it a backbone, it never seemed to stand still. She expressed her frustration as the plant symbolized sentimental significance to her. The flower could almost be identified as hideous, but I told her I thought it looked lovely that way. That was the first time I lied.

The first boy that I ever loved found home in England. Maybe the city blocks in Hong Kong resembled too much of those rotten teeth in his nightmares and maybe he never really found home in me the way I lived in him. His first flight back was always the longest and I imagined myself travelling miles to a foreign place with buildings that rendered themselves indifferent to the passengers that never belonged. But I used to think that you could find home anywhere if you loved its people enough. And so that was where I came in. When he said it was over and told me to leave everything behind, I agreed meekly. But I was too young to teach myself what it really meant - Should I still call? Does it mean it's gone forever? Do I get to visit? Letting go is such a big commitment. So after that I kept showing up time after time, vowing that it would be the last one. I said I needed to learn slowly, step by step. And I said I'd eventually master the art of letting go. That was the first time I lied.

When I was younger, I used to take an erasable marker and drew on the windowpanes in my bedroom. I drafted stories on these glasses and if the sky wanted to see what I saw, it had to learn to read backwards. As I'm growing older, my writings vary. I act as if it was my first creative writing class in university that's changed the style of my articles when in fact it was what I've been through that's shaping it, molding it into lapidary forms and structures that yearn to be understood. Now the windowpanes are always empty but my heart is always full. In almost every creative writing class, there was an activity where students wrote the beginning of a poem and passed the paper around for the next student to proceed with it. The pieces of paper would be circulated until the poems were lengthy enough to be finished. Gio was sitting on my right and he handed me his first sentence, "If love was a gun," Gio was a quick thinker. He was always the first one to complete the in-class writing tasks. I struggled to carry on with the words he wrote, but I managed to scribble out a short ending to what he was seemingly trying to challenge me with: "the one in front of it lives forever." The lecturer, Chris, walked around the classroom checking on our progress and he came up to me and asked, "Do you enjoy starting the poem, continuing with it, or ending it the most?" It was apparently just a stupid question that he posed to act like he was trying to get to know his students better. I said I liked spending my time in transit. But I didn't. I either pull the trigger or I don't. So that was the first time I lied.

If the idea of love distracts us from an existential loneliness, what does love itself do to its host? I swore to myself that I'd never write about another boy I'd fallen in love with ever again but then here I am, fighting with the overpowering notions inside this suffering dome that's sticking out of my neck. Under my skin there's a panicking urge to take over and burst out the pain of that needle being stuck in my veins in my early childhood. The last night I spent with him before he left for the airport, he tapped his fingers on my kneecap and I wished I was a better conversationalist. But I was tired and I'd been tired for quite a while. There were feelings that needed too much effort and courage to verbalize and storms that weren't meant for humans to weather. I've always known how it feels to lose the one thing that hurts the most to keep around. And so when he was about to take off, he asked me, on the phone, if I'd cried. I shook my head and mumbled a small "No", my chin against the skin that's still warm and sticky from the hot tears pressed into the back of my hands. If the result of the matter wouldn't differ whether or not I told the lie, it shouldn't be considered a lie after all, should it? Love is a gun and I am not the one in front of it. If this isn't meant to be, I still need my heart to be broken more times. And when he asked me if I missed him, I said no. I still have so much to conquer. And this is the first time I lied.

Gemini

In Greek mythology, only Pollux, one of the twin brothers of Gemini, was a God. The other, Castor, was human. For some reasons, Castor was cast into Hades after a fatal fight with his cousins, and Pollux was sent to the Gods. The brothers were separated in death. But Pollux was devastated about the split. He couldn't cope with his brother having to suffer for the mistake that the both of them had made.

In one version of the myth, Zeus had mercy on the twins, so He agreed on letting them switch places every other day. In another version, Pollux gave up his status as a God and stayed with Castor in Hell.

When I made a wish tonight, I wished upon Venus. Because I am in love with a Gemini boy. One day he's in Heaven, and the next day he could be stuck in his Hades. But I am no God. I can't rearrange the constellations. I can't stay in Hell for him.

Riddles

If a tree fell in the forest and there's no one to hear it, did it make a sound?

There are three ways to solve this riddle, and apparently I was only able to figure out the first two: Yes and No. If curiosity killed the cat, then quick-wit sure fucked me up. Questions with countable and firm answers are usually the ones that are raised to ask and reassure ourselves, because we already know what the response would be. In fact it is the open-ended questions that limit us and bring us to realize how thinking outside the box is such a huge struggle to untangle.


Why did the chicken cross the road?

It's going to be August in two days and I've already got my heart broken twice within this Summer. My nails painted hot and cold, changing colors way too often, I've never been in a more rapid wave motion of feelings. Someone once said to me, expect the unexpected, just like what I quoted in one of the articles I've written, from Mary Oliver, "Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable." Taking whatever that comes your way, solving them with whatever you have now, in order to worry less and to live in the moment. Now that I've been living with this attitude for a while, the only thing I grasped is that by this you can have as much fun from it as it lasts, but when it's over, man is it over. And you can't blame anyone else for this because it was you who expected the unexpected to come and go without warning. The chicken crossed the road to get to the other side. The other side, on the literal level, as we all know, is to reach the opposite side of the road. On the symbolic level, it means to end its own life. Why did the chicken cross the road and why did I cross the line? Every story has a beginning, middle, and an end. The story and the ending are both inevitable, and the only parts we can really control are the beginning and the middle, so sometimes I tend to delay the start and sometimes I choose to sabotage the middle part in order to dash to the end. As you can see, I am in deep regret now, as I should have just delayed the start instead of crossing the line.


How many hopeless romantics does it take to change a light bulb?

There are two types of hopeless romantics - the ones that idealize someone so they can love them in their perfect form, and the ones that romanticize someone's flaws and love them in their most human state. I've never loved anything that's perfect. And he's not perfect or gorgeous in any known measurement. He looked like art. Art isn't meant to be pretty - it's supposed to make you feel something when you look at it. I've met too many people who wear a Rolex on their wrists and they're not rich, people who take buses but can throw a hundred-dollar note into the beggar's container without hesitation. Humans never look like who they are. It only takes one hopeless romantic to change a light bulb - one is enough to take it out and screw it up. There are no ultimate villains in the world, and this is how it ruined the hopeless romantic. That kid that bullied you in elementary school was beaten up by his dad every night. The man who was rude to the waiter just met his ex-wife on the street looking happier than ever holding hands with her fiancé. He who jabbed shattered pieces at your heart was holding a handful of fragments of his own. And this is why the hopeless romantic is in ruins because she saw the human side to every ruthless bastard. And because she knows the devil was once an angel too.


Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the connections between religion and patriotism and love. These three things are often glorified in movies because they are faith in its purist form - believing in something much bigger than what we can imagine, without doubts, no second-guessing, not asking for anything in return. That's the beauty of it. When he started giving me a part of himself, I knew he was going to take them right back. The half-emptied glass he drank from, mouth-to-mouth as if he imagined it was someone. I am a sinner and he looks like an angel with a puff of smoke. I am an atheist, am also not a die-hard fan of my own country. And I definitely don't know love. The bruises on my knees were not from falling. Nor praying. They say only the good die young. Thank God I'm incredibly awful (irony intended). I'm greedy and selfish. So which came first? The feeling of being loved or love itself? I believe that either one is another's reliance and eternal return - they keep giving and feeding each other endlessly. Religion and patriotism and love are difficult for me to fathom because I am an awfully greedy person that needs something in return. But don't judge me just because I sin differently from you. He's the one who kissed his knuckles before punching me.


How many licks does it take to get to the center of the lollipop? Why is six afraid of seven? What did the pig say at the beach on a hot Summer day? Did you hear the joke about the pencil? Knock knock, the punch lines are coming but the joke's on me.

So, if I fell in love and there's no one to know it, did I feel anything at all?


It doesn't really matter. Because you've already asked the question.

Synthetic Narcotics

Lightning happens when the strength of the static charges in a cloud overpowers the insulating properties of the atmosphere. Unless it's a dry lightning, rain usually comes after the thunder. But in some dry areas in China, the loud roar you hear before the rain isn't always a thunder. In fact what you hear is the resounding launch of a rocket into the sky. They shoot silver iodide onto the clouds to stimulate precipitation. It's called cloud seeding. It's not God's wrathful bawl. It's not the angels shedding a tear. It's a desperate call for moisture. And there's nothing romantic about it.

The first time my friend brought me to see this boy, I knew it was going to rain because there was a loud banging noise, though it was neither the thunder nor the silver iodide rocket that I heard. The rain was just a drizzle but everyone on the street was wet, because it was supposed to be breezy the whole week, according to the weather forecast. He adjusted his hair by the reflection of the display windows of Just Cavalli. Aesthetic patterns of a mixture of Chinese and Western art covered his entire left arm, extending from his shoulder to his wrist. Around his neck was a long chain and the charm was a Buddha. He's not well-built or tall, just a regular boy with a mischievous and yet, sweet smile, full of tattoos on his left arm and his lower leg. He was in a plain white t-shirt and the mannequin in the window was in an all-black suit, so he could clearly see me staring at him through the reflection. I looked away right after we locked eyes in the translucent glass.

It was someone's birthday and we were heading to a restaurant they owned to drink. My friend worked for him but they seemed more like good friends than in a hierarchical bond. The things they did for a living were not the things you wanted to know about. My friend was like a brother to me, so I wasn't exactly intimidated by the people there because I knew he would keep an eye on me the whole time. The boy in white was greeted by his subordinates and he brought us to the balcony where we could have a barbecue. As the night passed by, I got to know him better through the games and chit-chats and the warm laughter that suffused the place. We all drank and drank, and I drank to forget while he drank to stay sane. It's not like I'm deliberately trying to make gangsters likable, but the people there were like us. They joked, they danced and sang, cooked me pasta when I said I was hungry and baked cakes for the birthday boy.

He wasn't like your can-I-have-your-number boy. Or your daily good morning texts. Or your regular just-checking-up-on-you boy. He's not always around. You couldn’t reach him anytime you want. Sometimes he's collecting money for the protection racket from some karaoke chain-stores. Sometimes he's waiting for a client to pick-up the goodies in the back alley. Or maybe sometimes he's in detainment in the Wan Chai police station. I would call him a shipwreck, but a ship doesn't wreck on its own. In this case, I was the shipwreck and he was the storm; a force of nature; something you couldn't control. It's hard to imagine someone like me would fall for someone like him. Sometimes I think it's because he reminded me of someone I used to know. I couldn't really control either of them. The only difference was that the second boy was so much worse. He was raw and barbaric but he was also fragile and affectionate. He was daring and fearless, and because he who feared nothing was fear itself. He asked me, "You scared?" when we were waiting in line to go into the haunted house at a theme park. "A little," I said. "Nothing intimidates you more than I do," he said with a playful tone. He held my hand and together we walked through hell.

How you love says a lot about how you live. And it goes the other way, too. At times I question myself if the things I feel are real because I'm the type of person who would write herself a world and go live in it. One time my friends and I went to his friend's party and they said alcohol wasn't enough. Most of his friends were faded. He was sitting on the couch, half-sober, and he gestured me to sit beside him. He looked right into my soul, wild-eyed, kaleidoscope pupils and ecstasy void. I thought I saw the devil in him. He leaned his head on my shoulder and held my hand tightly, fingers intertwined. His hand was shaking and his palms sweating. I made him drink plenty of water so he could sit up on his own, and I asked him if he was sober now. "Nobody is," he said. Back then I thought he was talking nonsense. But when I think about it now, he's probably right. We're never completely sane. Sometimes we confuse things with reality - like the times that we thought there was an insect up our legs when it was in fact just tickling on its own or felt the ferry moving when it's floating still on the water or felt my heart wriggling while I looked at him when it's just another suffocating sense of loneliness.

Sometimes when I passed by the karaoke shop where he had to chill with his clients and boss at, I would call him and ask him to drive me home. We didn't have much to talk about, and I think he knew that too, but we both enjoyed being in each other's company, even if it was for a twenty-minute ride home. And mainly it's because I wanted to make sure he was sober and in a good state.

We hadn't seen each other for almost six months and last night I saw his car parked outside the shop. My friend, the one who brought me to meet him the first time, said he was leaving soon, and that this would probably be the last time we'd see him. So we went upstairs to meet him in one of the rooms. He was lining powder on the table when I went inside. He was going to hide in China. They were coming for him, he said. Nobody knew how long that would be, but he wouldn't be coming back for a while. He's going to stay in the place where the milk powder is fake and the handbags are fake and the rain is fake. He put the powder into the cigarette paper tube he rolled and he kept smoking and smoking, one after another that I couldn’t even count how many he had. And it smelled like something was on fire; like burnt plastic. I went into the bathroom and I saw my reflection in the mirror. I looked like the April showers and I went out and watched him heat up another one that he rolled. Thin smoke rose and covered his eyes and he looked like the pouring rain on the unpredictable days of July in Summer. He rested his head on my lap and I brushed my fingers through his hair. The Earth would be swallowed up by the Sun in 7.6 billion years and unless until then, it wouldn't stop spinning just because we weren't on it anymore. I wished it could last just a bit longer before he left for China. But the world wouldn't care, would it? It wouldn't care about something that's not meant to be in the first place. He was too spaced out to drive so he gave me some money and asked my friend to send me home. He said he didn't want me to see him like this and he told me to go home as if he never wanted to see me again. Synthetic rain, synthetic drugs, synthetic sensations, synthetic love.

There's nothing romantic about it.

Delay

A special dedication to my sister, Demi -

The air-con was right above Lola's head and it was breathing at her legs. She pulled down her sweater to cover her ankles, curling up like a kitten in the snow, too lazy to move to another spot for a nap. The flightboard flickered through different schedules regularly, displaying the estimated time of arrival of the plane to Queenstown, New Zealand - there was still plenty of time to kill. Lola rubbed the haze off her eyes and looked over at her sister who was coiled up in the seats right opposite her. She took out a booklet from her carry-on backpack which she used as a pillow and turned to the page where a small sticker bookmarked - The Nevis. It was where they're heading and she was going to jump off The Nevis. This was one of the items on Lola's bucket-list that she wrote when she was 13. She's 25 now and she could finally cross out "bungee jump" from that list, even though she was a bit doubtful about the decisions she had made twelve years ago.

We all write silly to-do lists when we were young for the things we wanted to achieve when we are older, but as we age, we'd start to convince ourselves with limitations of actually fulfilling these lists. And Lola was no different from us. Until three years ago she had a car accident and went into a coma for almost two years. Fortunately, of course, she woke up. And that's why she'd decided that life was too abrupt to not achieve the things you wished to achieve while you had the chance to. Twelve years was a long time but here she was, holding a paper of bad choices of a 13-year-old, travelling with determination. And her sister.

It was nighttime when it happened. It was dark and foggy with a light drizzle. No one knew what was on Lola's mind and where she was driving to. The head of the car looked as if it melted into the lamppost, and it was somewhat of a miracle that Lola survived, even in an unconscious state. She had a dislocation in her left arm and a crumpled-up bucket-list in her right hand. That was the paper she was holding like a map now. On it was a list of simplified goals: tattoos, sea of stars the neon jellyfish, sky-dive, Sunset Boulevard, bungee jump... and so it goes. There was a few confusing items because they weren't specific enough, like Chinese, wedding dresses, kicking belly. Lola moved out when she was 20, so her parents had to flew all the way from Oklahoma to New York when they heard the news. Her sister, Linda, booked a flight from Chicago immediately. The police department said they suspected that Lola had been speeding, because there were no skid marks on the road. They took the belongings on her car and documented of some of them and put them in a box for further investigation. Lola kept a copy of that bucket-list.

"Hey Lola," Lola felt a gentle push on her shoulder and heard a small voice next to her ear. It was her sister. Lola realized that she fell asleep again just now. "I'm going to the store over there, do you want me to grab you something to eat?" Linda asked, patting Lola's head softly. "Nah I'm fine," Lola took out her phone and plugged in her earphones. There were still three hours until their flight. Her sister came back with a burrito and started eating while she opened her laptop. The two girls had been very close since birth. Linda was only one year her senior. They were as tight as best friends, but Linda had to move to Chicago for a while due to work and so the sisters were forced to live apart. Their relationship never changed even though they'd seen and talked to each other less.

Lola had hit her head against the steering wheel and so she had a concussion and had been experiencing memory loss since the accident. She didn't lose all of her memories, though. She still remembered her family and quite a lot of things in her life before she'd graduated from university. Lola had kept a diary, and the events that she'd forgotten could be retrieved from it, mostly. When she'd woken up from the coma, her sister had tried to help her recall what had happened before the crash. Lola had read her entire diary, but no clue could be found. However, the name "Kurtis" kept coming up in it, and it occupied over two-third of her life three years ago. Lola wasn't a good writer, so her entries were very simple and short, just like her bucket-list. It could only tell her that Kurtis was someone she used to date and that he had caused her a lot of pain. Whenever Lola asked Linda about this person, all she said were just, "You wouldn't want to see him again, I swear to God." and "Jerk." and "Asshole." So Lola stopped asking about it. Sometimes we think back on our past for good and sometimes there are things that we would rather forget.

Linda closed her laptop and looked up at Lola. She wiped her mouth and threw away the burrito wrapping and sat down next to her. Upon the companionship, Lola pulled out her earphones and started chatting with her sister. "What were we like three years ago?" She asked Linda. "Well, you didn't call me as much as when you first moved to New York. And when you did, our conversations got shorter each time," Linda put up her legs and held her knees, "I guess we were both really busy." Lola zipped up her hoodie and put her hands in the pocket, shrugged, "So, were you seeing anyone before Mark?" Linda said that she was kind of dating this guy called Ian, but it didn't really work out in the end, "He got married last year and invited me to his wedding." Lola then nodded and made a remark about how guys who invite ex's to their weddings were disrespectful to their wives. "Hah! Yea, talk about jerks… not as bad as yours," Linda mocked. "What? Kurtis? What was that?" Lola asked curiously. Linda revealed that Lola walked in on him cheating. "I guess I'm glad that we broke up then!" Lola joked. Just as the sisters were talking about three years ago, there was an announcement made and they were ready to board. "FINALLY!" Linda rolled her eyes and exclaimed. Lola stood up excitedly. She loved airplanes. When she was young, she would try to take photos of every plane that passed by over her head when she heard the loud noise. And she would ask her father, "Dad, why do I always miss them?" To which her father explained, "Oh honey, because sound travels slower than images. When you hear the sound, the plane has already disappeared from your sight!" Everything reaches our sensory receptors at different times and even in the same dimension, nothing is entirely in sync. Some people call it "deviation". But that's not quite the word for it, because deviation suggests that there are no relations between the image of the plane and its sound, when in fact it's not true, because that particular sound belongs to that particular plane and that these two things should come together, even not at the same time.

Sometimes images flashed across Lola's mind and she would recall bits and pieces of information about the events happened after her graduation and before the crash. But they were only images and she was rather indifferent to them, like recalling the neighbor's cat, Luna, that she used to help look after, but she had no affection for it. It was just an image and there was no feelings attached. The girls got on the plane and settled themselves. They took off and Lola laid back her seat. All of a sudden a picture appeared in her head. She saw herself in a bed which she could control its position. A thin tube was attached to the back of her left hand. It wasn't the hospital she slept in when she was unconscious, because she wasn't wearing the same clothes. "Would you like some coffee or tea, miss?" Her thoughts were interrupted by the air-hostess. "Just water is fine," Linda answered. "You were so mesmerized in something... You're welcome, by the way." Linda said to Lola. She looked over to the window as she was sipping on her coffee, "We're on top of the world but we're still under the world," she giggled at her own nonsense. Lola felt her increasing pulse. She loved being in an airplane as much as she loved looking at it from below. She loved being in no specific places. The in-betweens. Traversing time zones. It felt like being in a room filled with different times and spaces where nobody owned them; they were just lingering in this nowhere-state. And everything was in sync and overlapped because nothing mattered in this dimension. Nothing was early and nothing could be late. It was like being in a coma.

After a few episodes of CSI, six movies and some intermittent sleep, they landed on the adventure capital of the world. The girls checked into their hotel and started walking around the gorgeous landscape and the markets there. Before dinner time, they went for a swim at the resort. "My entire body sores," Lola said while she was doing warm up exercise, "it was probably from the flight." To which Linda replied, "I told you to use that neck pillow I brought." Lola only went in the water for 45 minutes and she had to stop. Her muscles were too tired to go on. She was feeling it now, the stiffness in her neck and around her thighs. After a delightful meal, they went back to their room and laid themselves down to take a break from the severe exhaustion. They planned to stay in Queenstown for three days, so they had plenty of time before hitting the bungee jumping spot. Lola tucked herself in and switched off the lamp beside her bed while Linda was doing her bedtime reading on a separate bed. "Hey Linda," Lola hissed. "Hmm?" Linda looked up from the book in her hands, Flatland. "What are you reading?" Lola whispered. "Edwin A. Abbott," Linda replied, and went back to the page. There was a long pause, and all that could be heard was the sound of the air-con in the ceiling. "I can't believe you're doing this with me, for me," Lola spoke again. Linda slowly turned to look at her and smiled, "Goodnight, Lola." Lola smiled back, pulled up her blanket and turned to the other side. Linda fell asleep an hour later. It was like the old times, the two sisters sharing a room in different beds, whispering to each other back and forth until the both of them fell asleep.

Lola was lying on the couch flickering through the channels and Luna jumped onto the armrest and started meowing. Its forehead had a small white pattern that resembled a crescent moon, and that was how it got its name. Luna gingerly put its paw on Lola's belly and brushed its head against her skin. It swayed its tail at her arm and Lola had never felt consolation in a more delicate form.

A subdued beam fell upon Lola's eyelids and to which she reluctantly woke up. She was looking for the cat but it was only a dream. She was stifled by the strange feeling of her heart slumping down, submerging into the bottom of the bed. There are times when we wake up from certain dreams and we can still feel it when we're in a conscious state, or even the day after. Thinking back on the times when we experienced this is because something in the dream was real, and that it links up the things we see in our unconscious state with reality. Perhaps it is a temporary feeling of nostalgia that we created, because we are thinking back on a dream, which has only happened not long ago, and yet we feel a definite distance between now and then. Nostalgia is our feelings arriving late, again and again. She remembered the cat, and she remembered the feeling now. Lola thought it was pain that she felt, when in fact it was only a familiar feeling that she had when Luna was next to her. We confuse pain with a lot of things, because negative feelings are very hard to tell apart, and because there are no reasons to tell them apart. Sometimes we are just too overwhelmed with all the love we hold and we can't think of anywhere to put it. And that's why Lola found consolation from a cat. She found someone, or something in this case, to hold the love that she wanted to give.

She still felt it when they arrived at the bungee jumping center; that specific feeling of the neighbor's cat. "How was your sleep? You seem a little bit off today," Linda asked with concern. Lola just shook her head and dismissed her sister's solicitude. They were given instructions and assistance for putting on the safety equipment. Lola raised her head and gaped at the platform where they were supposed to jump from. A quiver of excitement ran through Linda's vessels and she looked at Lola with an impressed expression. While they were climbing to the top, Lola was stunned by the images that flashed before her eyes. She remembered that night she was holding that paper she wrote when she was 13, of all the things she wanted to do with her daughter in the future - learning Chinese, picking her daughter's wedding dress, feeling the kick in her daughter's belly. She drove madly at full speed to rant and rave at Kurtis who had forsaken her when he'd got her pregnant. Lola did not tell Linda and her parents about it, not even the child's father; she hadn't had the chance to. She had decided to abort the pregnancy that moment when she walked in on Kurtis and his lover. She put most of her pressure on the accelerator paddle of the car. The floor was wet because it was raining. Lola was blinded by rage and it was too late when she crashed into the post. "Oh my God," Lola said to herself when she came back to reality. "Yea it's pretty high up here, don't look down!" Linda yelled.

They were transported to the platform in the middle of the air by a container that was connected to a cable. Under them were rocks and some green plants. The view wasn't as splendid as they'd imagined, but it was horrifically high. Lola was still thinking about the images that appeared in her head, and she pitied herself for what she had been through. Even though she couldn't feel what she had felt, she understood that it must be unbearable for anyone to have experienced it. For someone who had been so traumatized, she could somewhat be called a rebirth. The supervisor saw the agitation on Lola's face and he said to her, "If a person can't jump off the platform in the first 10 seconds, he won't have the courage to dive into the air for the next 10 hours. Are you sure you want to do this?" Lola tightened her safety belt and nodded at him resolutely. She counted under her breath, "One, two, three, four, five." And she was in the air.

The fall felt longer than it actually was, and in the first few seconds Lola couldn't help but wished it was going to end soon. She tied the belt tightly around her shoulders but the pressure she felt came from her chest. The feeling came out of nowhere. It hurt. She was hurting. She remembered the unbearable pain when she should be feeling weightless now. She remembered she had her head down when she was in the hospital getting her body checked. Her chin to her neck. Her arms around her backpack. She had spent two days in the hospital with all the other girls who were waiting for the surgery, too. All the other girls who also had their heads down, their chins to their necks, holding their belongings or reading their phones quietly while the air-con breathed loudly at the back of their heads. Lola felt fearless when she leaped from that platform counting to five, but she's feeling it now. She's feeling it - the electricity of acrophobia piercing through her organs. And loving him was a lot like that. Loving him made her start wondering somewhere in between the beginning and the ending if it was worth it. Loving him made her think about all the "what if I didn't jump's" when she's already flying through the free fall. And she was thinking about what the supervisor had said just now. Jump as soon as you can. Jump before the fear or the anxiety or any other feelings catch up. Do it before the feelings hit you. Feelings don't have a specific speed; they can either come early or late. A particular feeling belongs to a particular event, but when it comes at different times, it teaches us different things. When Lola almost reached the bottom of the rope, she knew coming to New Zealand was right. She was feeling everything now. She was feeling it all. But she wouldn't crash into the post again; she wanted to live. Only in a dimension where everything is placed on a linear line can we make nostalgia possible. When we feel pain for looking back at something, we should know that it isn't real and that it doesn't exist in this space-time. And when the feelings come back and hit you in the middle of the night, tell yourself that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter now because you've already jumped.

- Love,
Diane

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.