Mind Tricks

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

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

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

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

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

Cold War

Melted into the couch with my hair and arm dangling off the edges, the only movement I can acknowledge is my chest rising and setting along the tempo of slow breathing. From a distance, birds are hooting in a courtship ritual for wild romance, car engines roar to accelerations, water tabs are running in the flat 2 or 3 storeys below and my ears tell me about how the airplanes that are not even in sight are gliding across the sky. Up close, the windows on my balcony door reflect flickering golden beams from a hundred million miles away. Thin blankets are hanging on the cloth lines to dry and the scent of laundry diffuses into my nose and yet the clouds and even the leaves of the plant next to the balcony door are oblivious to the soft wind. I close my eyes and my world is filled with crimson. The sun always has a way of making her presence conspicuous. There's life happening but it's not within my reach. Everything near me is in a still painting, and yet I have no intention of connecting to the outlying zone in motion.

The last dose of Summer always captivates me the most. It is as if this is a wrap-up and the world is telling you it's time to forget about it all and enter another stage. We revisit to unvisit. We go back to put down the pieces where they're supposed be. Indifference has outgrown me in the past few months because I took myself out of a linage. I've been nothing else but detached with my inner world and connected to the external world. And now the final bits of Summer come to remind me that soon I'll have to reconnect with myself. I'd come back from the journey of figuring out who I really am and it was both rewarding and terrifying. I've been picking up the fragments, as if I was the third-party, of each moment I spent in life from my very own museum and re-arranging them to see if I could make something new out of them. The kid playing piano downstairs is getting louder and the beams on the glass are growing dimmer. This moment is fading away. If it was a person I would have left scratch marks on him. I was the type who would never let go without putting up a fight. But I feel like I'm perhaps too old for that at my age now. There's still so many inarticulate feelings I should've radiated in a particular time and setting and now it's coming to an end. There are so many things I have fixed but somehow still broken when I put them back in the right spot in my museum.

When Winter comes, everything becomes a charade. A perfect pretense, a fabricated version of Summer. Excessive layers of stitches have us cloaked from the external world. Our pulses muffled under warmness and everything that moves seems a little less sensible. Even the air is frozen, and everything in it just stagnates. Our internal realities are reduced and condensed into miniature, extending the distance between souls, making communication almost impossible for a divided nation.

It's funny how we classify people that have different preferences of seasons into different categories. We do exhibit one persona in Summer and another in Winter. It's only in recent months that I've started to understand the art of mastering different characters during different times. Summer is full of movements, and maybe that's why they're our distractions from paying attention to ourselves. Even heartbreaks seem less noticeable when we're too caught up in that moment to feel sorry for ourselves. But in Winter even the lights are frozen, they don't move. That's when we notice how the papercut from Summer got a slice too deep and that the pain is going to grow worse.

I'm a Summer person. Winter makes me uncomfortable because I'm sick of tapping into my own consciousness. And the décors everywhere are just awfully staged with a touch of paleness. Intimacy becomes distant but distance is worse. I remember a few years ago I called up this boy when some of my insignificant wounds started to grow wider. Being around people made me feel less like I was alone in an igloo. We lived pretty close to each other. It was late at night and we were smoking in his balcony. We were so quiet the only thing that could be heard was our steady pulses in our veins underneath several layers of clothes. In Winter I don't speak. I struggle with words to say. And he understood that, too. After a cigarette, we went back into his house where the temperature was slightly warmer. I tip-toed into his room barefoot and the marble floor stung me with coldness regardless. A moment later we were under warm covers and he was so close to me that his teeth were the size of piano keys. "You gotta learn to fill the distance with people that are less important than him," he said. I didn't know what to say, because I understood. Sometimes I think that the degree of our understanding of the external world is negatively related to our ability of expressing our internal world.

He walked me home and the whole time he kept talking while I nodded whenever he made small pauses. He wore his heart on his sleeve but both of us had our hands in our pockets.

Winter is a battle between two worlds.

An Honest Song

The time you confused
the frost on the plants for mould
in the Winter when we
when we wore socks to bed

The seeds I buried
I buried in the backyard
I buried them like a rabbit
a rabbit that's dead

I know we're lying
we're lying
we're lying
when we're lying together

We write poems
poems like soft porn
like a riddle to guess who's inside her
inside her heart

How do we live
when we're dying to survive
and how do we finish when we
don't even know how to start

I know we're lying
we're lying
we're lying
when we're lying together

Nothing is familiar
It feels like I'm floating away
How far do we travel
so home would feel like home again?

It's hard when it's easy
easy to swear
that you would become
become a better man

Cuz I know you're lying
you're lying
you're lying
when we're lying together

But with the persistence of memory
I forgot why I was angry
This is a bottomless pit
and we still won't regret a single day of it

If you were ever to go missing
it'd feel like I went missing too
When you say you miss me
I might do something crazy like believing you

I know you're lying
you're lying
you're lying
but don't lie to me baby please
when we're lying together

Stockholm Syndrome

A prayer in tears
begging for a miracle
in a chair, all tangled up
I was a target by mistake –
There's no ransom
There's only cold, hard love
that could slice our guts in half
I saw his face
He had a name, too
And he knew that I knew
But still, he let me go
I went back to say I wished I had something to offer
He said, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Molly

The brakes squeaked like a fat child was messing with the French horn and the crowd's screaming died down. People unbuckled and released themselves from the instant cages and regained composure. The ride's over and I still had my seat belt on, fastened sternly to my rib cage as if a wild creature was locked up somewhere inside. The sky was so clear tonight that the stars could signal the operator when was the best time to start the next round. But he didn't bother. There was no one waiting in line at this time of the night and I had been on the same roller coaster for the past 45 minutes. My hair's still messy and my knees shaking from the hype and yet my heart was beating steadily like an undisturbed tiger sleeping soundly near a lake. The duration of the ride was approximately 10 minutes. There were three peaks and two 360-degree turns in this ride and the frenzy happened in less than 30 seconds.

I should be feeling it. At least that's what I thought I felt when it dropped from the peak. But did I really feel it? How could I forget?

I waved at the man inside the control room and swirled my index finger. Again, I mouthed. He waved back, shook his head and pointed at his watch, then went back to Sudoku. This could either mean that I should wait a few minutes for the next round or that they're closing soon. I left myself strapped in the seat nonetheless.

What's the point of getting on a roller coaster if the person was not scared of height? My head was throbbing from all this thinking so I tried to distract myself by looking at the lights coming from the Ferris wheel. The music in the theme park was still on and each beat thumped on firmly as if it was mocking the weak beast in my chest. At times the lights extended like laser and at times they glimmered down like confetti. The whole point of this was to enjoy the fall because you're scared of falling.

People say life is like a roller coaster. But well, to me, life is the entire theme park. Because we get to choose to line up for the kind of rides we want. I shouldn't have protected myself from what I wanted but what I would do. And right now I am stuck between being fearless and being numb to the fall. 

The bell rang and the machine started running again. It roared with the metal's heavy clang. The train exhilarated gradually out of the sheltered port into vastness, and stars flickered in an instant moment of dark surprise. The Ferris wheel was getting bigger, the music louder. And the world was flat again.

To the Blues

To the boys I've ever loved
To the fast life and the loud pride
To the lost souls and the untold
To the boys I'll ever love

To the girl I always objectify in my own writings
To who's never enough but always in love
To going astray and then finding my way
To that girl with a messy handwriting

To the voice that's always changing
To fit others' tones before her own
To the molten gold that leaked outside the mould
To the kernel that will forever be unchanging

To the James Deans in my teenage years
To my rebellious force that died without a cause
To the sweet talks that made the bed rock
To the perfect one-time runaway we planned for years:

My love is a hollow conch
but it can hold the endless echoes of the seas
My love is a slow drift
but never an anchor
My love only grows deeper
but it never grows up
My love knows what to do
when you are silent it speaks the truth
My love may forget Titanic
and the Heart of the Ocean too
but my love remembers something blue
And it remembers you
It remembers you
It remembers you

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