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"The days are so long, but the years are so short"

I told S yesterday that I read something recently that really hit me, "the days are so long, but the years are so short". She asked me why I thought this was so. I told her perhaps it is just the way humans perceive time - we forget so quickly but we always live the here and now in all its intensity.

Today is the start of a short break. I won't really have much time for myself but I'm happy because I don't often have the time to be a good friend to someone I care about. So, very early on in the year, I applied for the leave, knowing that this would be the only way I could help Y in her wedding. I wonder how I'll feel when I see her walking down the aisle. Y was always like the moon to me - ever-changing, always morphing, and now she will leave us towards the other side. Literally, as she emigrates to Australia, and metaphorically, as she becomes someone's wife. I suppose I always believe that we remain true to ourselves, no matter the changes in our circumstances. But, even the shore, when repeatedly hit by the wave, will change - what more our souls that are perhaps made specifically to be pressed upon by the world's waves of joys and sorrows?

Love letters always makes me want to cry.

From: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/i-love-my-wife-my-wife-is-dead.html

In June of 1945, Arline Feynman — high-school sweetheart and wife of the hugely influential physicist, Richard Feynman — passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. She was 25-years-old. 16 months later, in October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife the following love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988.

(Source: Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman; Image: Richard Feynman, via.)

October 17, 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don't only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it, darling, nor can I — I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address.

A Kiss in Cyrano De Bergerac

I just finished Cyrano De Bergerac. Oh there are so many fabulous scenes! The opening theatre scene, the famous balcony scene and most of all the wonderful ending full of "panache". Oh Oh Oh Oh, I would pay anything to watch the play in real life!

CYRANO:
A kiss, when all is said,--what is it?
An oath that's ratified,--a sealed promise,
A heart's avowal claiming confirmation,--
A rose-dot on the 'i' of 'adoration,'--
A secret that to mouth, not ear, is whispered,--
Brush of a bee's wing, that makes time eternal,--
Communion perfumed like the spring's wild flowers,--
The heart's relieving in the heart's outbreathing,
When to the lips the soul's flood rises, brimming

countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible

"In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible." - The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

It's funny when people tell me that I'm naive. My first internal response is always, "Oh gosh! If they only knew me in secondary school". Perhaps, everyone was idealistic in secondary school, but reading my blogs in secondary school and junior college even I want to laugh and hug myself. I sometimes worry that my younger self will be disappointed in me.

I feel the great need to tell everybody to love love love and dare dare dare. I hate seeing people tired and worn out and weary and becoming disaffected and disinterested. Because i hate seeing my soul come out real life in all these people's faces. We must clutch on tight to our hopes.

Oh, everything is so fragile these days that when somebody turned and told me, "crystal, i think i can never be as idealistic as you", it went right into my heart and stayed there.

I'm scared one day my naive words would become signposts, signposts in a foreign country.

Words i no longer understand and unable to guide me to the places i want to go to.

But now, they are my signposts. And i own them.

So, love.

- 2006

Even stranger, when I was seventeen I said, "Young love have a whole future to live up to, and old love a whole past." You were so right, my dear.

Written on the 2nd day of Chinese New Year:

I used to carry a book everywhere as a child. Adults foist you into all kinds of awkward social situations - such that the only seemingly decent thing (besides nodding vacantly at the middling conversation) was to read. Unfortunately, what as a child was looked upon as a romantic whimsy is now as an adult seen as inconsideration.

It's a real pity because I could use more reading time.

Declaration

I want to be a writer. Sometimes, I want it so bad that it scares me. What if I turn out to be really mediocre in something I love? It may kill me. I don't imagine I'm going to be great. No, I don't actually aim for greatness - to write The Novel of the Century or any time period (however small). I just want to write something simple and true, and hopefully have people enjoy reading it too. It scares me so much. But, it's worth trying right?

Then again, there are so many other barriers to cross. Those barriers are neither about time nor money. It's about being able to really go deep into your soul and write. Sometimes, when I think about this, the fear makes it such that I can barely breath. God, give me courage, for it truly is a long day's journey into night.

Insomnia

I have been having trouble sleeping. As if I was afraid of what tomorrow might bring.

So, I've been reading my old blog. Funnily enough to have my twenty-one and twenty-two year old selves giving me comfort.

And then, I reached this old entry written when I was twenty:

And so my seventeen year old self gives me a little hug, and tells me to carry on.

It's time to sleep, my dear.

Prayer

I sat down and prayed for all kinds of people and all kinds of love and we lit two long white candles. There's something about lighting the candles that feels especially warm, more than the physical warmth of the flames. Perhaps it's that feeling of leaving a part of ourselves, here, to burn for someone else.

- Written on 21 December 2008

Why Regret?, Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Andrea Gibson, How it Ends (an excerpt)

You kiss me deep as my roots will reach and I want nothing more
Than to be an eyelash fallen on your cheek
A thing collected by your fingers
And held like a wish
I promise whatever I do
I will always try my best
To come true

Echoing Light, W. S. Mervin

When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings

Thank you, young self

I'm re-reading my old blogs now and I just want to reach out to my young self, hug her and say "thank you". I feel real again - even a little beautiful.

But today was an incredibly good day, the kind of day that just builds up as the day goes by as if God was sending me morse code, tap tap tap , on your shoulder, you can do it , tap tap tap , I was almost waiting for a dove with an olive branch to fly towards me. I can almost hear him whisper, Why carry all these hurt around?

- Me, 22 years old, 21 Oct 2009

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Carrot's Book Launch

This morning, I went to Carrot's book launch. I haven't read her book yet, but D and I excitedly bought it before the writers started speaking about their works - this slim tome that seemed far heavier than its actual weight.

What hit me this morning, besides more inspiration in my head than I've felt in a while, was the existence of so many different tones in this world. Each speaker spoke in what was undeniably, their intrinsic voice, and with the way they emphasized words and even the words they chose, it brought out so much character.

The first speaker (not the actual author) was male, incredibly earnest and boisterous and delivered a rich text. The second speaker read out his own work and it felt incredibly personal and private, as if you had uninvitingly found yourself in the middle of a lover's quarrel. The third speaker was a woman whose written words took on a completely different character from how she was in real life - yet it wasn't disconcerting, and actually kind of gelled after a while, you could see, I think, how her natural bluntness in real life eased into an honest, yet forgiving, poetic voice.

The fourth speaker was M, Carrot's representative, and she was, in my objective and completely unbiased opinion, the most brilliant. M has such a lovely voice that seems to spring out to your ears. I felt she gave a different texture of Carrot's words, there's that sharp consciousness in M's tone, that world wry humour, that inner knowledge, that gives Carrot's words a surprising edge. I imagined how it would sound in Carrot's own voice, and I think Carrot's tone is more wistful, more hopeful and more indulgent. I loved both interpretations (M's one and Carrot's imaginary one in my head, or at least how it sounds in my head when I read her works).

The last speaker was a playwright, and there's something about the way she enunciated her words, that while entertaining never completely felt fully genuine, as if she was always performing.

So, it was extremely interesting to see how people spoke orally as compared to how they spoke with their written words. Someone once told me that I speak exactly like how i write, I was surprised at this for I don't think it's often for the two sides of myself to come together at once.

I am not a dog/ But you are the moon

Robert Frost once said that all metaphors
break down somewhere.
I call you a lion,
But you are not a lion,
You will not eat me up and
Spit out my bones.
I call you many things,
But clumsily
So you do not hear the truth in them.
Many like to use the metaphors
Of a key, a room, a door,
But you won’t even give me the pleasure
Of a door-knob.
If our relationship can be called love,
I am the dog barking at the moon,
I am not a dog,
But you are the moon -
and there will never be enough metaphors
to cross the distance between us.

Robert Frost - Education by Poetry

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

- from Robert Frost's speech "Education by Poetry"

The Beauty We Find When We Aren't Looking

There is a reason why I write rarely. I can find lots of pretty justifications - (1) Work is such a big part of my life and I can't write about Work as Work is Confidential, (2) I write so much as part of my Work that I can't write anymore in my free time - kind of like a comedian who doesn't tell jokes in his personal life or a Cook that does not cook family meals and (3) the ever trusty, classic Writer's Block.

The truth is less pretty. The truth is that I'm afraid I can no longer write anything beautiful. I am scared of producing personal words and realising how plain they are, hence how plain I am. I am afraid, I guess, of facing myself. I paused here for a while and contemplated if I should delete that line - "I am afraid, I guess, of facing myself". There is always the desire, however hard one tries to suppress it, to paint one's self in a good light. In this novel in which we write, who of us are writing as if we are the bad guys? Or more precisely, does any of us imagine ourselves as one of the minor characters in the novel - maybe that secondary character who was at the dining table and told one joke - and that's it - that's all the role he'll ever play.

But I do force myself to write. To make it an activity, a habit even. Everyone has a different mode of self-reflection - but we all need that mode. If one does not live consciously, one perhaps does not live. One is just an apple, waiting to ripen and to fall off a tree. And, so, let's abruptly transition now, to a reflection of my Penang trip in August!



When I recollect it now, the first sentence that pops into my head is: Penang is such a dusty town. I remember the first cab ride from the airport to town, it's always full of anticipation. You watch the windows with such intensity, it is as if you imagine a dinosaur is going to come down the road at any moment - yes, at any moment, don't blink! And then, we arrived at our hotel, and immediately the heat hits me and than the DUST. Penang makes me feel like it's an old dusty cowboy-like town, except instead of cowboys and sheriffs, we have incredibly talented hawkers and taxis waiting to rip you off.



And then, the next thing that hits you is that you feel anachronistic - you feel out of sync, you feel out of time. It is as if you were a modern person walking around in 1960s, or however I imagine 1960s to be - which is slightly peaceful and off-coloured. So, we dropped off our bags, and we started wandering around Georgetown as if we were time-travellers, wandering into our childhood. Oh, it really felt like my childhood - when everything around me felt so old and established, and I felt eternally small and young. Oh, the buzzing cars and motorcycles and the streets that felt like puzzles to cross. And all the different mosaic floors. It was, in all sincerity, beautiful. Beautiful in the way you spend an afternoon in your Grandma's house - it is everything you have grown up with, it is not exciting but it is so real that you feel that if you paused, completely pause for an instant, it is as if you are capturing a moment that would stay with you for as long as you believe in simple things.



We had a reason for going to Penang. Besides the cheap flights and the fact that we could double our spending power, we came to Penang because we wanted to see fireflies. I've never seen fireflies in my whole life. Although sometimes, I wonder, if I did when I was young, or I was merely imagining beautiful little lightbulbs now in my memory, kind of like imaginary childhood friends, but in this case, imaginary childhood fireflies.

So, we waited eagerly for the driver to come pick us up for our long journey to some secluded part of a forest, around some secluded mangrove swamp/river. This was a real journey of faith - because not only must one trust the driver will not abandon you at some remote corner, one must believe in fireflies in this world in which we constantly erode. There were constant warnings of not getting your expectations up too high - fireflies won't come up when it rains, their habitats have been destroyed over the years, there are hardly any left. On the first night, it rained. It not only rained terribly, the windows of the car that came to picked us up got jammed. Hence, we were stuck in this car that was getting rained in. Literally. We aborted the first journey.

The second time, the weather appeared well. I prayed to see the fireflies so badly, I must have sat cross-legged and cross-fingered all the way. We did get to see it in the end. No words can describe that feeling when you first realised THOSE are fireflies. And, you realise, there's so many things left in this world that can make you feel like a child again - to make you stand in awe of the world and want to cry. And I thank God for all the magic in this world. At the start of the boat journey into the darkness, the kids in front of us cried: Are we there yet? Mid-way through the journey, the kid cried: Why are we still here? The kids didn't really appreciate the fireflies. In fact, the people who appreciated them most were the three precocious teenage boys that directed our boat. I found the expression of their faces really beautiful - it was pure joy. No matter what they grow up to be, I hope they always remember that for a few nights (however many), they drove a boat in the darkness, and loved finding fireflies.




At the end of our trip, I asked him what was the best part of the trip for him He said, "Old Trafford Burgers". It was this special stall that only opened late at night, two streets down from our hotel. The Old Trafford Burger was a gigantic burger with four slices of meat. Even today, he speaks of it in a tone of awe.

For everyone else, just keep your eyes open as you wander in Georgetown. Don't miss Love Lane. There's nothing on this lane. Absolutely nothing. It doesn't even seem to lead anywhere. And that's why I love it.

To have lived like Steve Jobs

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. - Steve Jobs

The speech Steve Jobs gave to a graduating batch of students at Stanford University still rings so true, inspirationally and beautifully. Indeed, the mark of a Great Man.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma-- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. - Steve Jobs

The truth is can we be brave enough to lead the live we want to seek? There is also a fear of finally having the courage to do what you really love and realising that you aren't good at it. An arrow straight to the heart. But, if one never takes that first step out of that door, one will be eternally shut in. Coasting through life, living at the shallow edges - kind of like the safe part of the sea our parents always made us stay at. Don't go too close to the waves. Don't let yourself get carried away.

But how I miss it! That wild abandonment and the fresh salty taste of the sea. How the salt gets in your eyes and it hurts. But it's alright, you just shed a few tears and you are all ready to jump back in again. And, you come up, in your clothes, terribly unsuited for the ocean, and you just lie on the sand, with sand in all kinds of uncomfortable places (haha!) and let the sun and the wind do its magic and hug you dry.

We did it so often, jumping into the sea in our school uniforms, that the ends of my long hair got so dry. But again it was alright, I just cut it short and felt as free as ever.

Life is not about reaching an end point. In a way, it's not about achieving something. Life, sometimes, is about breathing. And when you forget to breath, or when you fail to realise you've been holding your breath, holding it all in, for such a long time... oh my dear, you have been forgetting to live. But it's alright, you just shed a few tears and you are all ready to jump back in again. Yes, you shed a few tears and you are all ready to jump back in again.

Mood Board: F1 Race

from net-a-porter