Smoke

After a long while, nothing seems to have changed. I seem to be stuck in a time warp of some sort, living and existing in the moment and then looking back to see that time has passed and little has changed.
Perhaps it's a mid-life crisis, perhaps it's not. All I'm left wondering about is whether there is any meaning to life at all. Therein lies the paradox of existence - do we exist for others? To be part of the world, as we know it, to fulfill the roles that we think we are supposed to? Or do our lives really belong to ourselves and that we are free beings, to act as we wish?

I'd like to fag actually. As always, I think I am looking for respite, release. To smoke and to blow puffs of smoke up into the air, kick off my shoes and to linger on a steel chair and listen to the waves far, far away and the sounds of the planes taking off, transporting all those in its' steel body to different places, transporting them to their dreams, their desires, each trip a different one.

I tap my fingers languidly against the lined, steel table. I notice that one nail is chipped, so I decide to inspect my nails. I notice that my nails tend to slant in one direction, due to an old habit of mine - a tendency to pick at the sides of my fingers, and in this case, mostly just picking on one side of my fingers. My nails are turning yellow. I then look at my rings, my constant companions, not out of an inability to let go of the past, but rather, out of the way I've grown used to feeling them around my fingers - my fingers feel naked without them.

I walk towards the sand and take off my pretty sandals. My skirt billows in the wind and flaps around my calves. I think of fingers around my ankles and the last time I curled my feet under me when I sit. The sand is dry and crumbles beneath my feet. I do not fear stepping on glass or stones, for there is no more pain that I am no longer numb to. I walk towards the waves and then my feet sink into the sand. I think about walking further and further into the sea - there would come a point when the sea bed dips suddenly.

I was so close to you today, so much so that I believe we were looking at the same spots of light, inhaling the same wafts of cigar smoke mixed with the charred smell of grilled food.

Friday night was spent at a dingy pub called "Tattoo" at Far East. Dark, cramped and warm, uncomfortable stools that make one wonder where to place one's feet. Smoke wafts around and there was a hazy, unbelievable aura to the place. Add booze to the picture and everything turns into a dream.

Bright lights to hurt your eyes and to smash you back to reality, people rushing past as if you never existed as part of the human race - to each his own - is that not understood enough?
To think and wonder and then conclude that much is in vain - to stiffen up and forget to think.
To lose yourself.

I was close to you and I wonder if you sensed that. You've haunted my dreams for the past few nights. In one dream, I saw you sitting at the back of a room with a book in tow, a white book. Lost fragments, I can hardly fathom what the dream was all about, suffice to say there could always be better dreams.
The shutters were down but I spied lights beyond, beyond and beyond. The distance between you and me an endless one with boundaries that stretch far beyond.

Outside, joss sticks provided me respite with the knowledge that half an hour ago, someone rolled up the shutters and placed a few lit joss sticks upon the altar.

rain

walked past rows and rows of niches with photos of those long gone discoloured, in the place that time seemed to stand still. for those people, at least. immortalised within the niches, put to rest with two dates in red or gold, one when their life began, one when their lives ended.
looked at the niche of a baby sealed together with her mother's and wondered if her mother died of grief a few years after her child died at the age of 3. walked past the niche of a pair of twins who were born and died on exactly the same day. looked at the loving picture of a couple who died before they were 40. looked at the niche of a boy who died at 14 and wondered how many of the dead took their own lives.
saw the niche of a beautiful lady whom i remember died in a diving accident 7 years ago when i was still in JC.gorgeous she looked, even on the photo on her niche. what was left on her niche was a faded rose, droplets of water rising against the plastic wrapping, a testimony that she was missed. that someone perhaps dropped by on a hot and languid weekday afternoon, walked up alone to the 2nd storey of the row of niches in which she was placed, put a rose at her niche, stepped back, thought of her and her smile, her joy and laughter, her tears and pain, looked at her photo and tried to remember her full of life, but seven years on, that isn't easy. traced his fingers across the engravement of her name, perhaps. did a tear roll down his face? we shall never know.

***

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

***

it's like waiting for a sailor to return from sea, when the sea is turbulent and the skies are grey.

it's like waiting when you know waiting is in vain.

it's forbidden fruit.

and i wonder and dream about eyes, wet from rain and tears, droplets of water cogulating on a whisp of fringe.
your fringe.

***

you should fall. you should lose your balance. you should lose and have the taste of defeat. the sour taste of defeat accentuated by taste of tears seeping into the corners of your mouth as you desperately try to contain them and blink them away fiercely.
you should fall, you who have never fallen.
you the one in orange staring idly at the world going by, your feet in rubber slippers and you stare the the grey floor you trotted about as a child. the ants who weave around the floor in circles. you watch them idly, never noticing the girl on a bicycle.
you in orange. you the fidgety one. you the one i think of.