A reflection of self solidarity 
 A sad smile, full of the blues
 A smile I know will one day carry the mean reds
 A full blown explosion of unattended fears and mysteries, 
and a life as Holly lived in Breakfast at Tiffany's
 Or perhaps one that will finally accept its contradictions
 , confusions and reject its various interpretations
Recognizing that being lost is a sympathetic part of growing up
On the cusp
Of adulthood
And just like this, I find myself hiding any highlighter behind my back
 A comfort only you and I will ever know

 
 

 

A twin flame that was almost true, my little sister, a gem in the sand. Sunny days when my dad would pick us up and place one of us in the front, small legs in the motorbike basket, and the other behind him to go ride out and play in the neighborhood playground, wearing tiger eared helmets, sweat beads pearling and ears buzzing from the heat. We used to fight who swings who first and though it was always me, I always let her go on the slides first. We were always compromising for each other, and it was only when we were older that we realized most siblings don’t and at that point, compromising had become an absolute scarification for one another. 20 and we would say, “Only introduce me to the second best man you know, because I want the best one for you.” Or 16, “It doesn’t matter if I never get to leave this castle, but I want you to escape and see the world for me. Rapunzel needs to fight now. ” And I did. Crying over the  three page letter she wrote for me on the airplane, my hands holding it gently away from me, because I didn't want a single crease or tear to ever drop on its yellow pages. 

The day I left  triggered a separation anxiety for us that we never knew we had, and from then on, something foreign began to take shape inside of me, whispering how my life was now dedicated to protecting her. That was the extent of my love  for her. If she ever needed a heart, I would have gladly signed my name at the top of the donor list.

When I came back home in the summer of 2021, she had already turned 19 and stood a head taller than me, with a crisp driver license card tucked neatly in her turquoise purse. The weekend of the last week of June, we decided to go  for a midnight drive up Citron Hill, with the possibility of camping. With our pink and blue sleeping bags in the backseat, she revved up the engine at 11:59 and we took off. The night was young for us, and as we played up Nirvana, screaming their lyrics and spilling old and new gossips, we notice 



And I love her that I killed for her. 


And I love her that I'd let her kill me. 

 

 

There is an old story that came back to life. About what really happened to Uncle Charlie when he was a boy. 

 

The story tells of a girl who was born with spirals for her eyes. When the villagers heard the news, they swarmed around the mother and child, stretching their necks like gooses to inspect them. But no more than five inches away from the pale face that an uneasiness began to creep into the dense air and an indescribable but familiar seed of self-questioning began to take root in their hearts. As they felt their identities being questioned, they noticed the subtle coiling of the downward spirals. Over and over, the spirals in her eyes tightened, transmuting into a screwed-like eyeball that grew in ominous, magical intensity. Carefully, her calloused, blood-tinged lips parted, and she muttered her first word. Name. Silence breezed through the air, and nobody dared reveal themselves. From that day onwards, she was labelled a witch and her real name dispelled. 

When she turned 17, it was revealed that once she formed a strong image of someone and if she looked into their eyes for as long as it took a sugar cube to melt, the individual’s body would dissolve into fine salt and be whirled into them, the turns of the screw unwinding and winding as it took the body in. Inside the labyrinth, the body would become reinvented according to the names the witch had given them, inhabiting what the people called The Name Island. 

 

On one mild-natured winter years ago, on the night Uncle Charlie lost his first milk tooth, he disappeared. Nobody had seen him, but all the villagers knew what had become of him. For days, they wept and wept to the heaven above, in cries of passion for his return; his mother mourning over him in shrieks so shattering, the sounds echoed over the chain of mountains northwest of our village. 

 

The meaning of the name Charlie manifested in him as infinite curiosity, that he freely and fearlessly demanded. When his mother couldn’t explain to him why the sky was blue, he took the largest fishing hook from the docks and with all his might, threw it to the sky. Once he hooked it onto a cloud, he pulled the sky’s cheeks closer and whispered his question. So, when the story of the peculiar witch that lived in the castle at the beach front began to spread, there was no question that Charlie would start an investigation. Each day, he would stand by the shore; pebble filled shoes in the seawater and seashells clammed in his left hand. One by one, he struck the high glass windows of the castle and each time a seashell clinked at the glass, he shouted the same question. “Witch oh Witch, won’t you tell me your name?”. Unlike cats, we are blessed with only a single life, and relieving curiosity is not always satisfactory, sometimes deadly. 

 

It was told that when Uncle Charlie became visualized in The Name Island, he had turned into an earthy coloured pest who could not talk. Scratched onto his back was the name Méprisable. His surroundings were swallowed by kaleidoscopic, crystalized caves and azure clouds, too compact to see through and misty water that flowed out of springs, where mandarin ducks laid. Soon, huge pelts of teardrops began to fall from the skin-toned sky. Thirsty, he opened his mouth, and to his astonishment, found the teardrops sickeningly sweet. Coupled with the strange rain was wind that brushed against his exoskeleton like silk. Instead of a sun or a moon, there were the witch’s eyes looking in on the island from above; her irises moving erratically like a joystick being played around by a baby. Crawling, he felt his heart flutter nervously, for he understood for the first time, that he was perceived as a nuisance. 

 

By the fifth day of his entrapment, he was entirely consumed with the idea that all along, he had been fed with the sugar-coated words of being an inquisitive bright boy when behind his back, his loved ones had pressed against one another, mouths near ears, whispering how they hoped he would drop dead. As these thoughts clawed his mind, he succumbed himself to the witch’s rendering of his identity. While his mind rotted away, a particularly enormous tear crashed onto the sand; its burst revealing a berry-like fruit with translucent skin that radiated an overwhelming herbal scent. Because he was famished, he approached it unquestioningly and devoured it in less than a second. In that moment, a nostalgic memory engulfed him. A memory of a talk between him and his father. My dear son, sometimes when you’re older, you might get lost in the sea of others’ perceptions of you. Though you can learn a lot about yourself and your faults through these, you must know who you are. That is the most important. If you don’t, you’ve been caught in the trap. As his heart began to relax in the comfort of his father’s wisdom, he heard an ear-splitting scream and a blinding white light shined down from one of the witch’s eyes. In that instant, he felt his body elevate and whirled into the eye and back into the real world where he belonged. 

Now let me ask you something…the person you are, and the meaning of your name usually synchronizes. That’s why when it doesn’t, you try to find one that fits you better. A real name. A name made by your own self. A name that others gave you. Each of them is an image. Who are you beyond them?

 

 

“I didn’t want to bother him.” That was my greatest excuse. Because if you like someone, bothering wouldn't have mattered, so long as there was the slight chance of seconds turning into minutes and minutes into hours. That was what I was doing. You might have been busy too, but on the way home, I wanted to see you, so I flipped through the pages of our workbook, in a frenzied attempt to find a question that needed more than E=MC^2s but I ended up stupidly asking you about electrical circuits. 

 

As you scrambled around searching for a clean paper on your desk and as you drew diagrams and diagrams of bulbs and wires, I stared and wished that the ring on your finger was never there. What did she look like? Does she have the same lightly freckled blushed skin as yours? Is she athletic or is she a bookworm? No, I didn’t care about knowing who she was. She had been erased from my memory but as I watched the sugar cubes dissolve in my pot of delicate fruits, I remembered the acidic lemon zest I needed to add. For some time, I used to wonder about her. I wanted to know what you were attracted to and what made your heart tick. Like the Wittner metronome on my piano, did she make your heart beat in allegro… or was it in Lento? But you’ve always been tight lipped about everything, you never even told me your age. 

 

Even so, I knew from a mile away, you were the 100% perfect man for me. To her, you might be half of the universe but the strength of cupid’s arrow on different hearts hits differently for different people. To me, you were the black void at the end of every rainbow; the heat that deceives the cold Earth we live in. If I had been a little more evil, perhaps the distance between our lips would be less than 50 centimetres apart. Instead, I removed every prickly thorn in me as you unknowingly ate my heart whole - no spit backs but a complete swallow- leaving me with only a fist-sized hole in my chest to fill it with X spoonfuls of sweet, sour memory jam.

 

                                                                ***

 

Soon after that day, on a random night, I had a strange dream of a green fruit. At about 2 am, I awoke with the intense desire to eat the green fruit in question and though I couldn’t name it, the desire was so strong, I thought I would die if I couldn’t have it. I tossed and turned, an imaginary but familiar sweet taste at the tip of my tongue. The nerves that ran in me were jittering like a junkie that needed a fix. When at last I couldn’t ignore it any longer, I went into my mother and sister’s room, where they were still awake. My mother was knitting something purple on the bed and my sister was at her desk, buried in a medical textbook. On usual nights, their room was a black block with only a sliver of light from my sister’s desk lamp. My mother would have been asleep, and my sister would have been studying with her usual, feverish concentration. Barging in at such a time would often only remind her that nights were for sleep and dancing thoughts - a trigger I never wanted to pull. 

 

2am on that day, however, was stretched out, relaxed, and bright. 15 seconds in and my sister deduced that it must have been kiwis. With that, I started begging my mum to go out and buy them for me. I know I must have sounded crazy and to someone on the outside, I was acting like a total princess. 2am and insisting to my poor mother to go out in the cold to buy her daughter kiwis because of a stupid dream! But I wanted it so bad, I made my mum promise that she would buy them the very next morning. 

 

And she did. 

 

For months after that night, I ate kiwis almost every day. At some point, I realized that the one I would fall in love with would be someone who would do just that for me. Go out without question and buy the kiwis. And if for some reason I didn’t want them anymore, he would throw them out the window and act as if nothing happened. When I told this to my sister, she replied that I was being selfish. But I didn’t think so. I couldn’t give a proper response then. All I said was, “that is love to me”. I imagined that I must be the odd one for equating love this way, but years later, I stumbled upon Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and there, on a page number I can’t recall, was an exact copy paste of what I had said - only that it had been a strawberry shortcake instead of kiwis. Nevertheless, I realized then and there you were my Watanabe to my Midori. I fell in love with you because you couldn’t fall in love with me.

           

                                                                   ***

                                                      

On the third day of my admittance to the hospital, a new doctor was assigned to my case and perhaps it was the complexities of fate, but I saw an image of you in him. As if it had always been an instinctual habit, my gaze searched his hands and when I saw the silver band around his fourth, I felt my dear God playing a sick joke of Deja vu on me. Still, the whole thing was so laughable, I thought it wouldn’t have been too bad to die on that note. A boy friend gifted me Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being when he came to visit, and for pages of the sketchbook I had with me, I filled it in with Nietzsche’s theories and my thoughts, with loose drawings of daisies and dandelions and messages to you. Days passed and time passed, and bitter pills passed and soon, the beige feeling of the hospital room washed down to a comfort colour of leafy green, and my limbs started to relax in the space I was in and the people I was with. The doctor always came in silently just as you did, and as I sat cross legged on my bed, sketching tulips, I heard his voice only to meet with the reflection of my pages in his eyes.

 

 I slammed my book shut.

 

 Sensing secrets and a closed heart, the pace of his talk began to go over a 176 beats per minute. Pass the 4/4-time signature. The scene was sprinkled with awkwardness and my one-worded answers hastened him to leave but soon enough, he was kissing me. That was my first kiss. With your look alike no less. If I had believed in reincarnation, I would have wished it had been with the real you instead. I know that everything I feel for you is childish and there can never be words pretty enough in this world to describe how beautiful you are. But in that lifetime, I knew exactly what I would have said to you. It would probably be the worst pick-up line you’ve ever heard but it would go something like this:

 

 “In tennis, Love is zero. According to Einstein, Love is gravity. If we were to make a simple substitution, Love is when gravity reaches zero - a state of complete weightlessness. Both of our names start with the letter ‘a’ and in physics, it stands for acceleration. When we are weightless, the acceleration due to gravity is zero. So, in retrospect, we are zero and zero is love…..but every living and breathing soul on Earth is made to be in a pair. Is it possible to prove that L=A^2?”. 

 

Reflection:

When summer began, and the weather became warmer, I remembered certain memories and before I knew it, I started working on them during class. The memories were deeply rooted in me and came in a plethora of fragmented thoughts and scenes, motivating me to dive deeper and understand these memories better. In some sense, I chose to write this because it allowed me to establish the beginning and formulate somewhat of a closure for it in the otherwise chaotic mess of feelings.

I used the metaphor of pickling the love I have for the person like jam because of the unique beauty it possesses. The mental images I have of making homemade jam are of sweet aromas, unworldly colours, and the enchanting slow diffusion of the juices as fruits dissolve – similar to how it feels when you have a crush on someone. It made sense to use the concept of pickling and preserving because the feelings are still as strong as it was from when I was 17.

Additionally, I incorporated alliterations and repetitive words such as ‘different’ in “the strength of cupid’s arrow on different hearts hits differently for different people” or “black block” and “tossed and turned” to instill a poetic style as I tried to find my own voice as a writer. I even used rhyming as in the case of the consecutive sentences “blue in my veins” and “as I called out your name”. Besides this, I used braiding by creating three vignettes. This wasn’t intentional but I realised it was difficult to expand a creative non-fiction up to 1500 words without connecting it to other threads of thoughts, especially when there isn’t exactly any climax or resolution to work with from just one scene. By putting it in this way, it helped manage the problem and create a complete writing.  

I think I am most proud of having been able to successfully incorporate the “you” perspective in varying degrees. In the first vignette, I was introducing his character and so, I addressed him more frequently as compared to the other two. The writing has a timeline from the “you” from the first meeting, the “you” that I slowly linked with my ideologies and the “you” that was most memory ingrained. However, I think the struggle with this is that most people I’ve sent this to read, including the professor, were initially confused about how it links to the first. Only after reading the whole piece that it made sense. I decided to keep the style as it is because it seemed that the readers were satisfied in the end, and it helped maintain their curiosity and give a sense of unpredictability. At the same time, it would be nice to work on my internal structuring more in the future because it is important that the readers have a sense of theme.  

I’ve received feedback on my organization and formatting skills in both my short story and this one. I was very lost with how to go about improving it but during the consultation, it became clear to me how lengthy and continuous the structuring was. It didn’t allow the reader to have a moment of rest or to feel the pace entirely. Moreover, there was a lack of emphasis and distinction on key parts. With this in mind, I separated “and she did” and “I slammed my book shut” into a single sentence on its own in their corresponding vignettes because I want the story to have a moment of silence with it. I also did internal separations within the passages whenever I realised, I moved on to something new. I retained the professor’s suggestion to italicise the last hypothetical scenario as it aided in emphasizing the “what if”.  

1.In one paragraph describe a place that’s familiar to you

2.Think of a character, or someone you know, who’d find this setting outlandish, difficult off-putting or unfamiliar

3.Write a scene in this setting but narrate from his or her Point of View

My Roommate's Side 

She's a minimalist. That's was what she thought when she entered the room. 

There were hardly any items and the ones that existed were essential for daily use, rather than items brought home as spontaneous purchases. Twin bottles of sunscreen, black and beige books arranged in increasing height and a white basket of little trinkets occupied the first level of the three-tiered built in shelf. The second level had larger books, bottles and some fresh bananas while the uppermost tier held a large white paper bag, a carton of egg shells and empty, washed ice-cream containers. Neatly placed on her desk was a film camera and a small art easel that exposed the room's owner as an art student of some sort.  Her ornamental designed pillows were perfectly fluffed on her plain grey bed, with not a single crease on the sheets. Green and blue hues were dominant to the eye, and the bright orange walls were, with no question, the unwanted by-product of the otherwise perfect dorm room. Perhaps that was why she had covered the walls with polaroids of her friends, print outs of her favorite artists , a proud  H3965 label from when she finished the 10km marathon earlier this year and scenic pages ripped from a  Hayao Miyazaki art book.  Blue ribbons and charms had been tied onto the curtain railing and with the open window,  the long blue threads were gently dancing and little melodies from the clinking charms were whistling through. 

She and She always loved coming home to that.

When summer began, and the weather became warmer, I remembered certain memories and before I knew it, I started working on them during class. The memories were deeply rooted in me and came in a plethora of fragmented thoughts and scenes, motivating me to dive deeper and understand these memories better. In some sense, I chose to write this because it allowed me to establish the beginning and formulate somewhat of a closure for it in the otherwise chaotic mess of feelings.

I used the metaphor of pickling the love I have for the person like jam because of the unique beauty it possesses. The mental images I have of making homemade jam are of sweet aromas, unworldly colours, and the enchanting slow diffusion of the juices as fruits dissolve – similar to how it feels when you have a crush on someone. It made sense to use the concept of pickling and preserving because the feelings are still as strong as it was from when I was 17.

Additionally, I incorporated alliterations and repetitive words such as ‘different’ in “the strength of cupid’s arrow on different hearts hits differently for different people” or “black block” and “tossed and turned” to instill a poetic style as I tried to find my own voice as a writer. I even used rhyming as in the case of the consecutive sentences “blue in my veins” and “as I called out your name”. Besides this, I used braiding by creating three vignettes. This wasn’t intentional but I realized it was difficult to expand a creative non-fiction up to 1500 words without connecting it to other threads of thoughts, especially when there isn’t exactly any climax or resolution to work with from just one scene. By putting it in this way, it helped manage the problem and create a complete writing.  

I think I am most proud of having been able to successfully incorporate the “you” perspective in varying degrees. In the first vignette, I was introducing his character and so, I addressed him more frequently as compared to the other two. The writing has a timeline from the “you” from the first meeting, the “you” that I slowly linked with my ideologies and the “you” that was most memory ingrained. However, I think the struggle with this is that most people I’ve sent this to read, including the professor, were initially confused about how it links to the first. Only after reading the whole piece that it made sense. I decided to keep the style as it is because it seemed that the readers were satisfied in the end, and it helped maintain their curiosity and give a sense of unpredictability. At the same time, it would be nice to work on my internal structuring more in the future because it is important that the readers have a sense of theme.  

I’ve received feedback on my organization and formatting skills in both my short story and this one. I was very lost with how to go about improving it but during the consultation, it became clear to me how lengthy and continuous the structuring was. It didn’t allow the reader to have a moment of rest or to feel the pace entirely. Moreover, there was a lack of emphasis and distinction on key parts. With this in mind, I separated “and she did” and “I slammed my book shut” into a single sentence on its own in their corresponding vignettes because I want the story to have a moment of silence with it. I also did internal separations within the passages whenever I realised, I moved on to something new. I retained the professor’s suggestion to italicise the last hypothetical scenario as it aided in emphasizing the “what if”.