A Short Love Letter to The Moon

If you teach me how to shift the shores, I will teach you the ways of the sun.

Too Late

ǵhu-tó-m

What you wanted was an image of God. Your speech was thick; spun with words marred by years of believing; a belief without conviction. Believing without ever really knowing why you had to put it all in one place. You seized devotion like it was a threadbare rag, and with it you tried to wipe me clean.

"It's okay. It's okay. It's okay."


And so it continued; all of your careful little nuances gently stockpiled in the corners where we sat, on soil patches sullied by our footprints, behind that worried sigh you let out when I lost my way. Did you tell Him about my gritty fingers? Go on, tell Him. 

You looked at me like I was a revelation brought down to you in complete darkness. I was as curved as the Arabic scriptures you grew up singing; rhythmic liberation. We traded worldly verses in the prickly heat and you lost yourself in its familiarity. I tried to love you.

But faith isn't etched on rib cages. Divine intercessions come to me through other means - through sculptures, portraits of those long dead and gone, that first hesitant touch, melodic whispers of my qarin; through freedom. My hair exposes my follies as it cascades down my back, tumbling like wisps of weed. It bears a warning: I will leave you behind as I have done many others, in my blind chase for free will. This is why I cannot love you.

New Things.

I miss this space. As of late, I have been ambling through life with a rekindled love for Science, spectacular company and better life lenses. I've never been more sure of what I stand for; after years of contemplation, I finally let go of something that was a central aspect of my life. Which, surprisingly, has prompted a new found deep respect for the mechanics of chance, and the way chaos seems to knowingly find structure to instantly put itself in its rightful place.

All is well, save for the brief stints of sorrow that try to scrape their way through. But just like most things, it will scamper off, according to its own beat. I know that now. Honestly speaking, what else is there to say?

P.S. Caramel pudding really hits the spot.

Spirits, Part 1.

My late grandmother was a seamstress. I was a fairly new addition to the family, the firstborn of two wide-eyed individuals; and to top it off, both of my parents had 9-5 jobs so I was left in her care on most days. I remember having to spend hours in her little shop in Petaling Jaya, surrounded by pieces of clothing suspended on the ceiling beams like frail skeletons, watching her rusty sewing machine stab multi-coloured pieces of fabric; the needle narrowly missing her wrinkly fingers. She would give me small pieces of kain and we took turns on the sewing machine table. Her feet and hands orchestrated an effortless set of movements that I was unable to imitate no matter how closely I paid attention. To this day, I still don't know how those things work.

Her shop was in a two-storey marketplace, right smack in the middle of the upper floor. Sometimes, when I felt the need to escape the musty smell of damp cloth I would walk to both ends of the floor, just to spy on the other tenants. This was back in a simpler time, when toddlers could get away with these kind of expeditions. There was one Chinese uncle who sold fruits two shop lots away from my grandmother's shop. When I had luck on my side, he would flatten tufts of my curly black hair and hand me free apples. I'd spend the rest of the day annihilating my story books with streaks of crayon and ink doodles, sharing my looted treasures with my grandmother in that suffocating textile den.

When I grew a bit older, she replaced our sewing lessons with one-sided conversations of her past. The happier stories encompassed her stint as a teacher in a public school and stories of my father's antics when he was a young chap. Remnants of the educator in my grandmother was kept alive by her constant assessment of my school work. If I kept my work in check, we would take the bus to Jalan Masjid India and she would buy me ABC in the city, so I never really minded any of her inspections. Whenever my late grandfather's name came up, I had to brace myself. I never looked forward to these recounts. My grandmother married at 15 and was widowed before I came into the picture. I had a hard time believing that marital commitment necessitated so much suffering, but she made it seem like there was no other option. I would go so far as to say that her recollections of marriage gave shape to my current standpoint on relationships.

Writing this down has left me with an odd sense of  guilt. It feels as though I've broken a glass safe which was previously set aside in the shadowy recesses of my subconscious, but I've awoken from dreams of spirits one too many times to leave these tales untold.

Halved.

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros - Janglin

Bombay Bicycle Club - How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep

Third Eye Blind - Palm Reader

Aretha Franklin - Ain't No Way

A less scientific way to explain prisms:

When your fingers are intertwined with another's and you suddenly see different parts of yourself with laser clarity. You are no longer pure light.  Flesh to flesh, you are a forest fire, wiping out acres of land, desperate to be rid of your thirst for thousand-year-old sequoias.  Your flames grow taller than folklore giants and for one tiny fraction of a second, the embers appear to dissolve into the empyrean sun.

That unsettled heart which was once so green, muddled with jealousy and distrust, now thrashes against your chest to spring out of it's skeletal box. And when you look at the blue veins on the back of your hands creeping up to your fingers -his fingers- that seem to carry on all the way to his wrists, you understand that this is the closest you'll ever get to the gospel truth.

Under a sheet of indigo sky you lay, surrounded by splitting asteroids and indiscernible vortices; there is no safe way out of this galaxy. In the dark, his voice makes every word sound like rich purple prose; there is no safe way around that either. But you hold on to those glass fingers nonetheless and tie up the loose ends of his sentences like you would on any other day. This time, you're ready to be split into pieces.