Feathers and Flints

Flaring out prayers from his lips
hotbox our love in the backseat
his grin holding a thin paper strip
with Greek Gods on his sleeve
another future passing by
he only smokes so much to die

I ask him what he believes in
to sin against all odds
he says someone who can save him
and like me, he never believes in God
but I believe in angels – Arch, fallen, guardian
all with halos bright like neon

The sun seems 6 billion miles closer
when it blows lukewarm kisses at my skin
he would leave a third-degree burn on these feathers
if humans' bones were made of flint
our false heaven has burnt to cinder
who's the Saint and who's the sinner

Every boy that I tried to save from a storm
says I'm the one who needs salvation instead
he didn't set himself on fire to keep me warm
I'm just a paper body dancing around my death
homes are never meant to stand beside volcanoes
and this is not a poem about angels

Lioness

The first time I saw a lioness cry,
it was weeping over a fawn that wandered away
from its mother among the pine trees.
Amber spots that looked like an extension of the stars,
damp-eyed and bewildered,
shuddering at the hunters' snares.
But the beast was afraid of losing its momentum
and she leapt at her prey like a switchblade.

The first time I saw my sister cry,
she was in fear of the bear trap between her thighs
that was buried to hunt forsaken children.
A belly full of poetry and a heartbeat full of songs,
a nameless face with rhythms that mocked her –
it could taste the soil that stained her hands.
But she hummed apologies over and over again
until it came out like survival.

Not About Love

Every wonder what happened to the boy I told you about in Synthetic Narcotics?

We'd kissed in the car the night before we promised to never see each other again.

What I'm about to tell you is not a love story.
It's not a story about love, either.
I won't write about how often I think of his voice;
or the way his dimples made him look like a little boy;
or how tenderly his fingers intertwined with mine;
or the loud pumping sound my heart makes whenever he's on my mind;
or the times when he made me laugh about the silliest stuff;
or how we pretended all of that was enough.

This is not a love story.
This is not poetry, either.
I won't write about how he said he wouldn't do cocaine ever again;
or how I found out he powdered his nose the next day right after that;
or how he said he didn't want to drag me down;
or the time he said whenever I needed him, he'd be around;
or the drugs he took that broke my heart;
or the synthetic love that had torn us apart.

This is not a love story.
This is not an apology, either.
I won't write about hearing his name on the news;
or the time he went to court for an appeal;
or how devastated I was that I couldn’t be there;
or the way he tip-toed and looked for me everywhere;
or how I didn't even visit him for once;
or how I'm just scared that seeing him will leave me undone.

This is not a love story.
I won't write about how I tasted stars that night.
I won't write about how he asked me to run away with him.
I won't write about how I almost said yes.
I won't write about how I lied to everyone
and myself.
We were not in love.
This is not about him.
This is not about us.
I won't write about how I could've saved him.
I couldn't even save myself.

This is not a love story.
This is not poetry.
This is not an apology.
This is a lie.
This is everything we denied.
This is goodbye.

U n I verse

How does a writer know when his story has ended? He knows when it can only remain in the same place; when nothing more can be created and nothing more can be destroyed. How does a lover know when the passion is no more? When she forgets how it felt before it began and when she fails to imagine a future for it. How do we know when a fire dies without being put out? When there is nothing left for it to burn. We think things end because they suddenly stop, but really, everything ends because it wears itself out.

The first funeral I'd ever been to was my grandmother's. She laid still and calm in the casket, the spot where she used to wear her smile had sunk into hollowness. They made us circulate around what was left of her before she was put into the giant flame that swallowed her whole. I cried the hardest when she was slowly glided into the roaring fire. I just couldn't imagine how her tiny body would handle the heat. I cried the hardest because I thought that would be it. It would be the last moment of her existing in this world. Her body would then turn into ashes, and there would be nothing left of her here. The second one was when my other grandmother passed away. They dressed her in funeral clothes. It was her uniform. She was a well-respected officer of the governmental revenue department in China. They placed her cap on her chest full of badges honored by other retired officials that used to work with her. My grandmother always taught us to live with integrity. They saluted her when her coffin was lowered into the soil bed. It was held in the middle of a quiet graveyard without any shelters. That day the sun was ferocious and we sweated our tears away. It was the last time I'd ever seen her, flesh and bones, right in front of me. Her husband, my grandfather, died in a car crash when my mom was still 17. I've never seen him in my life, but I grew up with stories of him. He went out to work one day and never came back. I guess that was my mother's childhood trauma that she never really seemed to be able to get over. There were no signs. No symptoms. No nothing. Another car just ran into his. BANG. That was it.

There's no such thing as a peaceful death. When you make that jump on Golden Gate Bridge thinking you would just sink into the water and dissolve into foam and never to be seen again, you're wrong. That's not how it's going to happen. You know what's it going to be like? You will travel through your mind looking for reasons that made you take that jump, and those that made you wish you hadn't. You will hit the water hard, and it may break your bones. You will immerge into another type of free-falling. It will be slower but you still can't control how fast it will go. In the deep blue you will exhale the last breath you held on that bridge. You will hold your breath thinking you could die just by suffocating yourself. You will twitch and a part of you will struggle to swim up to gasp for air again. Your mind will fight with your body. If your mind wins, you'll still hold your breath and try not to let water go into your system, because there's a part of you wanting to live. But somehow after a long struggle, your lungs will be filled with liquid. Your head and eyes will intensively be congested with blood and it may ooze out from your nostrils or your mouth. Your tongue will stick out and will be bitten. You'll keep twitching until you die. That's when you think you've dissolved into foam and stopped existing. It's not peaceful. Death is violent. All kinds of death are.

We were never gentle, to begin with. After the Big Bang, flints and bits and pieces of stones collided into one another and accreted the Earth. Some continents were made because they crashed into each other. The impact was violent. We were born after, not destructive, but vigorous circumstances. So basically, something was destroyed so that we could be created.

I took a long drag from the cigarette before I pressed it against the parking-lot-asphalt. A chunk of black ashes was stuck to the scorch mark of where I forcefully thrust the serial killer. Sometimes I would just put it on the floor next to where I sat and observe closely as it consumed itself. I used to think death was terrifying. I used to think that's how we lose people. Some say that death is not a real fear, because we're all going to go through it once, and if you're lucky enough, twice. But does it even matter if the things you're scared of are real or not? You're scared. And that should be the end of the discussion. Anyhow, I shouldn't be smoking so much. I could feel my lungs rotting away as I'd started to take shorter and smaller breaths for almost two years now. They twitched like the man launching off of Golden Gate Bridge. If I were to wistfully swim towards my death, they would be the only parts of me longing to stay.

"Ping."
"Pong," I said as if it was almost a reflex action.
"Pong," my friend said, only a nanosecond after me.
"Hah, was waiting for it," I smirked, "thank you." I said as one of them passed me the joint.
"You should be smoking less of those and more of these," they remarked.

I chuckled while I took a puff and watched as the substances dissipate from one end to the other. I held my breath and imagined how the smoke I just took in soothed out the vileness I contained, then I exhaled slowly like the way people breathed while trying to retain their composure during yoga. Tiny bits of burnt weed dropped to the floor next to where my cigarette was killed. From ashes to humans and from humans to ashes. In the world of mine, everything comes full circle. It will. It has to. And that's what most people would want to believe too, I think.

They say that good things take time, but great things happen in a blink of an eye.

Before all those plate tectonics and all those flints crashing into each other, there was the Big Bang. Scholars still argue over the name, as some of them think it sounds misleading – The Big Bang wasn't very much of a BANG. It just meant the beginning of everything. Our universe started as nothing and it quickly grew bigger and bigger, until it could contain all these galaxies and planets and us. I wouldn't say the Bang wasn't exactly a BANG, because nobody really knew how it started and what sound it made, and how it could begin from zero. The furthest realm that humans' knowledge can reach is the part where we are convinced that everything must start from something. Some people think that there could be a celestial being, a higher power that oversaw all this, while some try to convince us the otherwise by proving the evolution theories. Sometimes I think that, well, maybe God is just a mad scientist, and the only angels I believe in are astronauts.

The outer space isn't the only thing I think about when my head's in the clouds. I immerge myself in another type of free-falling. It's dangerous in a way that it feels safe. I sink into the thoughts of repressed memories, of him, of us. It's the only time that's safe to think about him because there's a time limit. I know sobriety would drag me out of the suffocation when the time is up. And when I'm out of the water, I wouldn't remember what it felt like underneath. I'd be safe from it. I only allow myself to think about that when I'm stoned. There's a fine line between sanity and insanity, and I try my best to follow the rules of what I should and should not do while I'm in these states.

Scientists believe that there was another universe before ours. They predict it in retrospect that it'd ended exactly how this one started. In the previous universe, the vastness just shrunk into nothing in an instant; it went on until there was nothing more to consume. Then suddenly it ended. Humans predict things because we always try to find a pattern in everything. And we hope that by knowing the pattern, we would be a step ahead of what we're going through. We would then know how this universe is going to end, or not end. Humans tend to take control. We call ourselves "intelligent beings" because we fulfill all the criteria, designed by humans, of "intelligent beings", just as how Milan Kundera said in his book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

"The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse."

The universe is a strange place of which humans do not have the power to take control. By having this thought we would question the status of our existence. What if the universe doesn't have a pattern like how Pi never repeats itself? What if the universe has a mind of its own? It never makes us feel better to know that the universe doesn't follow a pattern. Humans are comfortable with repetitions. And that's why we always wonder if there would be a universe after this one where we could exist again after we die.

I have this theory that in order to fully know a person, you must visit where they have been and who they've met throughout their whole life. Not so much of being them, but just knowing them. Because being that person means visiting where they've been and meeting the people they've met at the exact same time. I believe that in every place and person we meet or just pass by, we take a little piece of them with us. The part where you take others' pieces with you is the process of becoming. The part where you give away little bits of yourself to places and people – it's existing. If humans were ceramics, the marks that the craftsmen leave on them would be what the pottery is going to look like. The clay that spun in the craftsmen's hands would be how they know that we were real. And that's why existing is not a place for dreamers. Speak of it, yes, but we need to BE of it more. Face life; question it; challenge it back; feel the universe's pulse. We shouldn't be a silent witness but we should participate in living, and that is how we connect to the universe and with others, I think.

Sometimes I think people come into our lives either as blessings or lessons. Then I thought about it the other way round. I wonder whose life I've gone into as a blessing and whose as a lesson. We exist in others just as much as others exist in us. We don't just stop existing even after we die. We still have some pieces in others. Existence does not stand on its own; it comes with consciousness and acknowledgement. My grandmother did not cease existing when she was cremated. She's still in the words that my family speaks of. But then she will really die, or stop existing, when we slowly stop talking or thinking about her generation after generation. So you see what I meant when I said, "you die twice if you're lucky enough".

I find myself writing about him and us sometimes, because I wanted to keep it alive for a bit longer. Existentialism proves that humans have to connect with one another. And it should be uplifting because we don't just live for ourselves; we're alive so that others can be. I used to think death is how we lose people. But really, we lose them when the memories of them slowly wear themselves out - it is as if death is calling your name using someone else's microphone. The reason I write is to explain my life to myself. I've also discovered that when I do, I'm explaining other people's lives to them.

Giving birth to a piece of writing is violent – you need to remind yourself of the open wounds or bruises that haven't healed. It's an intimate process to connect with the world and make sense of your existence in it. Scientists' proof of the universe starting from nothing and suddenly was born, came from the research that the universe itself is expanding now. We don't know when it will start shrinking and disappear into nothing, but we do know that the end is nowhere near us. In this immense space-time, it is possible that we exist as long as the day the universe dies. Before it happens, I'd like to meet as many people as possible and think about them as often as I already do. I want to write them down and keep them in the little eternity that we all believe in, even if some of them might hurt. I want to write them down in the sense that they will keep existing and I will keep becoming. And when people read what I write, I will exist in their existence too. When the universe really ends, it will not be us forgetting the existence of others; it will be violent – it will consume what's left in itself until it wears everything out. The universe will shrink but the planets and stars in it won't. It will become smaller and smaller until we're squeezed into each other and melted into the Sun or other burning planets in some galaxies far, far away. The flames will swallow us whole and we will become ashes. From ashes to humans and from humans to ashes.

I took another puff and passed it on to another friend. Time's up, I should get out of the water soon. My mind was fighting with my body; struggling. But that's not what I was afraid of. Because even when I died, this would be one of the proofs that I existed. You would be one of the proofs that I existed.

Seeking Love in Memories

Growing older makes you look back, doesn't it? Though I reminisce a lot, I find it funny that I still think about the old days on birthdays. We act like we're going to be a completely different person, and do things differently when one year is added to our age. Being 21 feels exactly the same as the night before I blew out the candles. Waking up on a new day is more or less the same as waking up yesterday, isn't it? But when you really look back, everything has changed. I like harking back. If memory isn't the only thing I hold dear then I honestly don't know what is. I love how each time I recall a piece of memory, it communicates a different message to me. It's like re-reading a book – you interpret the context in a new way every time you read it. Perhaps that's where my obsession with reminiscing comes from.

Changes on a linear scale make people measure and compare. Recalling the trip with my closest friends to Taiwan three years ago, I can't help but evaluate how much I've moved and grown. Do we still laugh at the things we laughed at? Do we still hurt like how we had hurt? Are we becoming the people we said we wanted to become or are we at least on the road of becoming them? There's a lot of smudged details in the ways I recalled these memories and they are getting blurrier each time I stir around looking for them in misplaced cabinets. But were we happy? We must've been.

There are memories that are fading away now. I am slowly forgetting how to write poems. Living a "normal" life distracts me from poetry just as much as how poetry distracts me from a normal life. It's like soldiers going back and forth between war-zones and homes. I find the transition hard to adapt to, and switching between these two worlds requires great effort. Poetry liberates me and yet I endeavor to contain myself and rationalize my thoughts in my conscious state on a daily basis. Looking back on memories and talking about them are very different experiences. Visualizing or thinking about them is like indulging yourself in the world of poetry. Verbalizing memories, on the other hand, is very much like writing poems in the midst of my normal day.

Before kindergarten, my sister and I had lived with our grandmother and our uncle's family back in Hainan because our parents didn't have time to look after us in Hong Kong. My mother came back once in a while to visit us in the old house in Baipoli. There was a balcony in each room of the house and the one in the laundry room overlooked the main entrance. It was on the third floor and every time our mother called home telling us she landed safely, we, my sister, cousin and I, would sit on the balcony holding the railings and anticipated her arrival as if she was coming home from war. "Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" We yelled at the woman coming through the tall gate who had luggage and was wearing a pair of stylish shades until she looked up and waved back. While my cousin was expecting the gifts my mother bought her, I was looking forward to going to bed at night and fall asleep with my mother and my sister on the big bed side by side. It was Summer and even if the thunder woke us up, we would drift back into sleep again forgetting what our helpers had told us of how the monsters and ghosts would appear in our nightmares if we didn't go to bed before 10.

When we came back to Hong Kong for school, we still visited my uncle's family every Summer. Each time we went back, we would stay there for a month or two until the break ended. The two families would travel together for two or three weeks, and on the other days where my father had to go back to Hong Kong for work, the grown-ups would hire private tutors to teach us English and Math on weekdays from 8 to 12. I forgot how many years ago it was from now, but one time our family went to Sanya together for two weeks. It was a distant past but it also felt like it's within the reach of the stretch of my arm. The place was like a paradise with beaches and resorts. Before the ocean was as polluted as it is now, we could see small fish swimming in the clear water here and there. My dad and my uncle challenged each other to catch them and they bought a big net and headed towards the deep end of the sea. A giant wave crashed over the shore and a while later, the two challengers came back panting. "The fishes are too fast! And the wave washed away my goggles, the net, and Poon's swim cap. Thank God we still have our underwear on!"

After the beach bound, we had dinner in one of the restaurants in the hotel. As we were walking to the table we reserved, we observed the decorations of the place. There were small fish tanks or bowls, as how I prefer to call them, on each of the dining tables. The fish inside were small and colorful, exactly like the ones we tried to catch in the sea, though we would set them free right after. "They swim so fast, we couldn't even touch them!" My uncle exclaimed to the waitress. "Do you feed them?" My mother asked. "Oh no, there's plenty of them in the sea; we don't have to," the waitress replied as she was handing us the menu, "and besides, we don't know what food to feed them."

Another Summer in Hainan, which I forgot how old we were, my sister and I had gotten much closer with our cousin. We didn't live in Baipoli anymore; the place was rented out. My uncle's family moved into a new house near where he worked. The three of us were much older back then, and we would hang out in the playground at night after the streetlights were out. We borrowed a basketball from a family friend whom my cousin always hated. We flung the ball at the basket despite the many times we had failed. It was fun because nobody was watching and no one was there to laugh at us. Some days before dawn, we would stroll along the court observing how the players dunked. We had to pretend to be doing something else because we didn't want the guys to think that we were watching them or sending them the wrong signals, so we stood on the benches and pretended that we were trying to catch cicadas in the trees and bushes. We had no empty bottles or any containers to hold the cicadas so we cupped our hands and trapped it carefully as we walked 7 floors back home. I lost mine in the bedroom the same day I brought it home. For the following two weeks, it kept squeaking and singing of lost places at night. We had been looking for it in the room but we couldn't locate it by its sounds. Some days when it didn't make a sound, I thought I heard it squeak. It only turned out to be my own imagination to fill its absence. I couldn't remember what happened after that but I think about this piece of incomplete memory a lot. I am addicted to the vagueness of some distant memories because it adds so much more possibilities to my narratives.

Before we make sense of it, memories are just a personal collective of how we think we experienced certain events. Like I said, looking back on a certain memory is just like indulging in the world of poetry. These fragments have an elusive and episodic nature, and to assign meanings to memories and to create values of them, we need to, first, acknowledge the consciousness of our being. To verbalize or to write about a memory is to construct a framework in which these fragments can fit. And it's exactly like writing a poem. Memory serves as the basis of human existence, and therefore it is also inevitable. To make meanings of my present self, I need to be immersed in my own past, then select, prioritize, or even neglect each part to compose a narrative. These memories are coming back piece by piece now in retrospect as I am asking myself the questions I asked myself three years ago in the Taiwan trip.

We were sitting in a circle inside the hotel room after a long day of adventure in Taipei and we started to talk about the little things as well as some bigger things, and eventually we were at the topic of love and life and values and beliefs. We saw one another's past scars and even some wounds that were still open; we saw how they had made us the people we were and the people we wished to be. I remember when we were discussing what love meant, one friend, a Christian, said the Church told them that being in love was like losing half of your heart. And each time you fell in love, half of your heart would be given away; so it would become smaller and smaller as time went by. The fear of getting hurt wasn't what the Church was teaching them. It was warning them about what came after that – losing yourself along the way. When we think of love, we don't just think of the feeling. When we think of love, we think of the entire picture we perceive of it. We think of the future, the setting, the people, the type of lifestyle we imagine to fall in love in. What is love, really? Five confused girls sitting in a circle, miles away from their hometown, couldn't figure it out back then and had kept asking themselves the same question year after year. I don't know if they still wonder about it now, but one of the girls still contemplates it sometimes. And she is pondering over it more often than ever now.

What is love? Is it the lovely words we say to each other at the pier where we both spent our teenage years? Is it songs being sung over and over again in the shower? Was it love when we talked about our dreams in that messy bedroom of his when the both of us were piss drunk? Is it forehead kisses and holding hands? In which moments did it exist when we spent the whole day together? Does it occupy any space in our body? How do we keep it and how can we lose it when we don't want it anymore? How much void is there in love and how much substance does it accommodate? Does it have a future? Is it a living thing then? Does it matter how I pictured my kind of love and how you described yours? It's funny how much more we question love when we are in it than when we are out of it. People pursue love. We want to catch fishes when they are swimming all over the place in the sea. But when we've captured it, we don't know what to do with it. How do we keep it alive? What do we feed it? Or do we even need to feed it at all? Can we live with what we've done to it or are we proud of our displays and proofs of victory? Are we the fishes or are we the ones catching them? Does love really eat half of our hearts away? Who is exploiting who? And who is it to decide what the repercussion is? Was I just being delusional or did the cicada really squeak for the entire Summer I spent in Hainan? Sometimes our mind makes up things to fill up the void of something we've just lost; it's a kind of defense mechanism. Sometimes humans need a significant period of time to get used to a new situation. And it can be terrifying because we could confuse that with the real thing. Poetry and reality. War and home. Memory and narrative. Love and solitude. An echo's echo will just keep coming – and that's why we need to seek the answer of love from the initial state; the real form.

We haven't been to Hainan for almost four years now. But I still remember the time when we screamed at the top of our lungs through the balcony railings. I still remember how my mother would cool us down on a hot Summer night with a paper fan and tried to stay awake until we had fallen soundly asleep. I still remember the angel in my nightmares and the thunder that didn't scare us a single bit. They say that love is a battlefield. They say love is a battlefield because it is cruel and gruesome. I say love is a battlefield, not because of how brutal it is, but because it teaches us to jump on grenades like a soldier would do to protect his comrades. Love may be a peaceful and cozy picture in your head. But to me, it is a battlefield, a war-zone. And for those I love, I will sacrifice.

Blindness

Kaleidoscopic contour plots
wielding to the directions of muscle contractions
Afterimages overlapping and parting
along incalculable orbits
Euphonies visualized under certain spots
where the sun doesn't hit
Imagine, they sing
There are truths to be sought
from the back of the mind
to the back of the mind
Imagine, they worship
until they open their eyes
and catch a glimpse
of its consequences

The creative adult is the child who survived.

A Christmas Carol

"Only believe half of the things," my mother warned me, "that men say when they're saying it in the bed."

Looking back to the arduous and reckless, yet vibrant and fabulous, two decades I have lived (miraculously), I cannot imagine how right my mother was about all the little bits of advice she has told me and forced me to live by growing up. The clichés are always true, no matter how old they get or how badly you hope that they weren't. And I wish I had listened to them when I was younger because all these notes of caution have come to pass one by one now. I've never sent any "to my younger self" or "dear 10-year-old me" letters to, you know, myself, as if writing articles like this one doesn't make me sound old already. These letters always end in "just be yourself" or "your future will be awesome" or "what you're going through now will be good for you in the long run", but let's be honest, you're just saying that because the one who's reading this letter is your present self. I am by no means cynical; call me realistic – it's the better facet of the word. The only thing that was bothering your younger self was the lack of notion of moving backwards, staying put, or going through. But having lived life long enough to give advice to your younger version, you can tell them that they're going through. We are always going through; never backwards – only ahead.

In my family, my sister and I were raised in a certain way that was meant to train us to become very polite and well-mannered children. There were strict rules for us to follow growing up, even way before we'd had a slight sense of the purpose they served. It was said that we should keep our mouth shut whenever someone next to us was talking on the phone. And when we picked up the telephone, we must answer it like this, "Hello, who would you like to speak to?" Another one was that there was a format for an apology: I am very sorry; I won't ever do it again, I beg your forgiveness. Or when someone apologized and asked for forgiveness, we must assure them that they were forgiven: It's okay/I accept your apology; and I forgive you. I recited these words like a poem even when I didn't mean what I said. Before we went to bed, we must say, "Goodnight." And whenever a family member says, "I love you," we had to reply with an "I love you too" or sometimes when I was too lazy for the whole phrase, I would just say, "Me too."

There's also a rule that told us to stop making noises when my father was listening to classical music in the living room. He was a big fan; the cupboard above our television set was filled with Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Paganini, Haydn, his favorite Chopin and more, stacked up and across in alphabetical order. He also took good care of his hi-fi set just so he could enjoy Sophie Mutter tell a story of the Four Seasons by Vivaldi on the strings, and pick out the flaws of the cellist in the second row; but he sure loved a right amount of authenticity in a concerto. My father loved classical so much that he hired a professional pianist to teach us when we were four. He said it was for our leisure time activity but deep down he hoped someday my sister and I could play him something like Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu Op. 66. He said we would like it after learning about it. I'm not sure if I was too used to classical music that I started to enjoy it or if I actually liked it. Either way, I listen to it whenever I write or try to overcome my anxiety. Last night as I ran my finger along the spines of the CDs above the television set, I recalled the times when I was still learning piano and lost my temper over the little notes that I mistakenly played. I would hit the careless hand with another one or just smash it on the piano keys as hard as I could until I got the few bars right. At the beginning I would cry while doing that and say mean things to myself so loudly that my mother would come out of her room and told me to take a break and be more patient, but years later I would just hit my own hand without hesitation or saying a word; it was almost like a reflex – wrong key? Take that pain. There was also a time when I threw a temper at my dad saying how I didn't want to go to piano lessons and he was so furious that he picked up my hair-straightener and pounded it on my left hip bone. I stopped complaining and practiced quietly with a big bruise on my hip for the following week. With Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 playing in the background, what my dad had said to me realized itself, and I wish I could play the song so flawlessly when in fact I can only do the composer's Spring Waltz without getting mad at my clumsy fingers.

Four days ago I picked up a call from one of my best friends, Julia, "Hello, who would you like to speak to?" I said habitually, even when I was answering from my own cell phone. I had to make her repeat herself several times because I couldn't hear her low murmur. She said she was drunk. I got a cab and rushed to Central to get her home. When I arrived, I looked around the area for fifteen minutes and still couldn't see her. Then after a while, I found her. She wasn't just drunk; she was proper wasted, sitting on the stairs outside a building next to HardRock. I was told that she broke up with her boyfriend. She insisted on calling him and asking him to send her back or else she wouldn't go home. It was very cold and she was in her Summer attire, freezing and crying, make-up smeared all over her eyes and cheeks. I couldn't convince her to go home because she was very resistant, and the best I could do with my physical effort was to drag her to a less crowded place where I could see more appearances of cabs, regardless of her refusal to get into one. We found shelter in a concave entrance of a Victorian building that resembled the tall and arched wooden doors of a church. Her ex-boyfriend was coming to pick her up after about twenty calls and numerous negotiations. Julia squatted down holding her own knees as a means to keep warm, and I stood in front of her to block the cold breeze that was blowing at us. She was slurring her words hatefully, blaming everything and having pity on herself, so I just responded with the regular and customary break-up consolations to dismiss her drunkenness. As she was getting more sober, she started telling me about her friend that passed away recently. She was sobbing as she told me that she didn't forgive that friend before he left. And it hit me hard when I heard that because it occurred to me that this guilt she was feeling couldn't be erased in her lifetime. She was blaming herself again, shivering in the cold like a helpless little kitten, and even her shadow was small, as if sadness had engulfed not only her existence but also the proofs of it. She reached out her hand and held mine, while saying how brave she thought I was and how weak and vulnerable she had become. She kept asking me how I did it, but I didn't know what to tell her. I put my other hand on her back to show my support and it was the closest gesture of assurance to understanding. I knew I would never understand what she was going through. The human soul can only be shared with others to a small degree; even though it craves the company of others, it must exist alone and look to itself for answers. And no matter how many boyfriends you get, how much therapy you engage in, or how welcoming the doors of the Churches are, these are all false justifications for the flaws and weaknesses in people's characters; they can never explain the complexity and mystery of human beings' ever-growing sense of isolation even in a world of activity and interaction. Her ex-boyfriend arrived not long after. He was suited up, polished and collected. He asked for a cigarette. "Come on, let's go home," he kept his voice low, looking down at Julia who was still squatting down, casting a long shadow that covered her entire body. "Put your scarf over her shoulders," I commanded, after acknowledging his lack of tendency to do anything to keep her warm from the deduction of his body language. A scene flashed across my mind and it reminded me of a chilly night in April almost three years ago which I wrote an article about. "Sorry for all the trouble," Julia said to me before I got on a taxi. "It's alright, I forgive you," I said. And I meant it. It was almost 4am when I got home. I went to bed right after and I cried till the morning.

The first day my mother sent us off to kindergarten, she said to us, "If someone hits you, don't cry about it; you either leave the problem out of our house or go back the next day and beat them up until their nose bleed." I knew she said it as a joke; she would never want us to get violent with others. What she meant to say was, you either endure it or you pay them back what they deserved. You compose yourself and come back safe and sound. Long before we knew the multiplication table, my mother was already teaching us how to brave the brutal world. Of course, in reality there aren't people that come beating you up out of the blue. People bully you with love, or to be exact, the murderous impulse that masquerades as love. The embodiment of the cruel side of human nature often appears to us as angelic and friendly beings, like the way hunters disguise themselves in camouflage. I can only agree with Carson McCullers to a small extent when he named his book "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". All hearts are lonely, yes. But not all of them are hunters. There are two kinds of people in the world: lonely hunters and provocative challengers. The hunters go around looking for weaker souls to dominate and claim victory. The challengers seek confrontations with the hunters as if they volunteer to be the gladiators thrown into the pits against wild beasts. And that's me – throwing myself out to someone that would shatter my heart and coming back bruised and scarred. Then I would take pride in surviving the battles. All these achievements and sick little games that I do – I am just pretending to myself that I am getting stronger day by day, proving to people that I am unbreakable. Whether you're a hunter or a challenger, the soul seeks redemption and solace through the company of another. And the tragedy of the modern era is the never-ending battles between the two kinds of souls who both want and need each other but refuse to give in. I used to think it was hard to be with someone who's fully intact, because they wouldn't understand my thirst for domination. I never understood the endurance part that my mother suggested but I guess it was a call for truce. I used to look for someone who's not complete, but as I grow older, I just want to be with someone that's whole.

My father hasn't come home for dinner for quite a long time now. He wasn't home for his birthday either. And he's not spending Christmas with us this year. All these pieces of advice that my mother said to me, I always thought they were coming from her just because she was cynical – I used to think we all grew up to be cynics. But lately they are coming true and I am very certain that saying this doesn't mean I'm becoming cynical. The things that boys said in bed weren't real; not even half of them. I have this theory that life is constantly rendering lessons to us, and the ways that it gives them depends on our different abilities and tolerance. If we can't learn it the easy way, it lets us do it the hard way – and we learn it in the end nonetheless. Because like I said, we are always going through. Sometimes we've seen it coming because we learnt it in the previous teaching but refused to acknowledge what we grasped, so it would come at us again, tougher than the last one; and this time we see it coming too. One way or another, life will keep slapping us with difficult lessons until we admit complete understanding. The sooner we learn it, the sooner we can get it over and done with. We are going through not because we want to, but because it's not poetic to suffer. If I were to write a letter to my younger self, I would tell her to stop forcing herself to go backwards.

As I start to become aware of the purpose of those old rules I used to follow when I was little, I am also coming to the conclusion that my mother didn't intend for us to do it or say it just for the sake of seeming more polite, but to train us until we understand the real meanings of them. I haven't grasped the true meanings of each of these phrases yet, but I am saying them less often now. There has been a few times where boys didn't get any response back after mumbling "I love you" to me in the bedsheets; I think I am still several lessons away from learning what love is. And while all the other clichés are coming true, I am definitely anticipating the one that says "I love you too" to realize itself. I don't know what love is, but I do know for sure what it isn't. And if "I love you too" means waiting for someone who's not coming home for Christmas then I think I'll pass.