Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

just kids

Arrow in, arrow out.

 

I am not a visual thinker. I think squarely in words and cadence, never in pictures. When we were 15 and learning about the human body, a friend sat with me after school, patiently teaching me to draw the eyeball, the heart, our reproductive systems. I was failing bio and she was the only one who cared. 

Each day, we would practise: a squiggly line here, fuzzy ovals there, an impossibly narrow triangle in the centre of it all. The heart, I remember, was the most complicated one with its valves and atria and blood flow in opposite directions. In one way, out the other. I couldn't understand how our insides could be represented with just lines on a page. Thump thump thump goes the heart. Arrow in, arrow out.

This is what I remember of growing up. When we weren't talking in class, we were passing notes, writing letters, sneaking looks across the room. We felt extra special, and therefore, constantly misunderstood. Once, in the middle of a thunderstorm, we ran unsheltered all the way to the bus-stop outside. I dropped my math textbook in a puddle on the road, and for two years after the pages dried wavy and crinkly, with bits of leaves speckled into the spine. Once, when we were exiting school, a bird shat on my shoulder. I screamed until S emptied her water bottle on me. It's supposed to be good luck when a bird does that, she said over and over while I forced my blouse as far away as possible from my body.

There were always break-ups and make-ups and third-wheels. For almost a whole year, F's girlfriend made her a bottle of homemade honey water every morning. Till today, I associate honey water with unadulterated devotion. I spent an enormous amount of time on the phone. Listen to this song I just learned to play, N would say, and because I had a crush on her I would, even though S always told me N only had a vocal range of 5 notes. Later, when my crush blew over, F sat me down and asked as gently as she could: what were you thinking? 

When I think of myself through teenage years, I remember the feeling of heartbreak the most. I can taste it in my mouth: the wet of disappointment, bitter drunk, shame too dense to swallow. But the bad is dredged in good too, like the wild joys of being young and reckless, of having friends you love who love you back. You christen one another with ridiculous nicknames, make mixtapes and handmade presents that you keep for years in a box under your bed. On Valentine’s Day, everyone says from dawn to dusk: never forget — I love you. 

I think now of all these years past — too many memories compressed into words and lines and letters long forgotten. The heart thumping away in a chain of hands that have cradled me more gingerly than I ever did. Arrow in, arrow out. Love coursing through each little vein.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

ghost

Lucid hauntings.

We went to dinner with a friend last week. Have you heard of blue lotus, she asks. It gives you these vivid dreams, she says, and immediately I am intrigued.

But since that night, I have been dreaming non-stop. Every night: a nightmare, a dream, a visit from a past life. Hello, I want to say, but even my dream self cannot do that. This morning, my dream self sat locked away on the bathroom floor while someone I have literally not seen since I was 20 leaned on the other side of the door. Do you remember the last time we were in a bathroom together, I want to say, but I cannot get that far. Your girlfriend’s really pretty, I want to say, but my mouth suddenly fills with soggy bread. I think about you often, I want to say, but now I can’t breathe, and in between gasps, I hear a knock.

I have to go now, Jien. Wish we had more time together.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

retrograde

Remembering the last night of Public Culture.

 

We celebrated the last day of work with dinner and drinks. “I hope everyone is ready to get hammered!!!” I text the team that morning in a fit of excitement. I was soon to eat my words.


When the first bar closes, three of us decide to jet to town for round two. G, drunk but still able to walk, makes off with her glass of G&T. Down the escalators of Jewel, she looks up at the Apple Store and shrieks, “What is that?! Oh my god it’s so beautiful, it’s SO beautiful!” while knocking back more G&T. I prop her up from the side, the bottle of gin from dinner sloshing around in my bag.


One harrowing car ride later, we reach our destination. In my haste to find a bar that opens past midnight — what happened to these spots?! — I hadn’t realised I had taken us to a secret speakeasy. G and J scamper outside while I frantically figure out how to get in. A waiter pops outside to get the next group of people in. “Excuse me,” I ask, “do you have a table for three?” “Not now, but scan to make a reservation. We’ll call you when your table is ready.” He disappears behind a mirrored panel and instantly I go from step 1 to step 0: forget looking for the entrance, I first have to find a QR code to get a table. 


I turn to the stranger next to me, who has been diligently using a playing card to trace the length of the wall.


“Are you trying to get a reservation too?” I ask. 
“No, my friends are inside but I can’t figure out how to get in! They gave me this to use.”


I feel like I am in an absurdist film.

*

Outside, I find G smoking, and J trying to smoke. “You smoke?” I ask J, and she proudly tells me about the first time she “smoked tobacco” — just last week. After a single puff, she excitedly, repeatedly announces, “Now I have smoked tobacco twice!!!” 


“Oh my god, nobody says that, please stop,” I reply. G, in the meantime, is almost to her knees trying to pick up her cigarette off the ground. “OK, that’s it, we’re getting food and coffee!” I declare, and the three of us haul ass to the only place I know still open at this time: Starbucks.

*

As a creature of habit, it’s not surprising that I’ve ended up here, a place I have lost many nights to. As I hold back G’s hair while she pukes, as I watch J zigzag up and down the pavement hysterically looking for her “lost” phone, as G falls asleep at the table and J slurs I missed my chance, it becomes really easy to take stock of the years. I have a fuzzy memory of a first date I had across from where we are — though I cannot remember who it was with now, only what I was wearing. On that bench G and I sat on? That’s where I had two big fights. This Starbucks used to be a restaurant styled as a diner; the nearest bathroom after dark here always has baby roaches; the bar on the corner that used to give me free drinks no longer exists. 


This night was not what I had in mind, but it is perhaps the most fitting representation of — and end to — this part of my career. You make plans. You ditch plans. You didn’t ask for a lot of this, but life happened and you have to find a way forward. So you make do. You’re miserable, you’re alive, you’re thankful. 


Change happens in the space between. I understand this as I sit under the night sky with the girls. And though I fear I will always be nostalgic for what was and could have been, this is where the years have brought me to now. 


It isn’t so bad after all.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

apogee

Regrets, I’ve had a few.

 

I’ve been living in a state of jet lag, so life this week has felt dreamlike and unreal — or nightmarish and unreal, depending on how you want to look at it. Without any sense of time, there is no regularity. Each day is bookended by meetings where I struggle to focus. In between I alternate between barely keeping awake and remaining stubbornly sleepless. Is it breakfast, lunch, or dinner when you’ve been up all day and don’t eat till 4? And do you actually need food if you never feel hungry?

I ducked into Kino to pick up a book I’ve been meaning to read. I inhaled a third of it in one sitting but now find myself unable to progress because here is the first inflection point: where giddy, unbridled joy gives way to everyday heartbreak. I bought this book knowing full well what happens, knowing full well that this is the sort of story I seek out, and now — now I am paralysed, stuck on a line in the middle of nowhere: The answerable questions were the only ones worth asking.

Maybe this is my greatest flaw: being absolutely certain of something until I am inevitably not. Just today I found myself saying I shouldn’t have closed Public Culture, as if I made that decision in a tizzy. It was years in the making — rational, patient thought — and still, three days from our closure, I sit here thinking maybe I can walk back this announcement. Logically, of course, I would never do that. Logically, I am too proud. Logically, this is the most fiscally responsible decision I have made. Logically, I need this change in my life. Logically, isn’t the grass greener where you water it? But let’s be honest: I have never been assuaged by logic.

So instead of working through my emotions like a healthy being, I cram my schedule with work, catch-ups, check-ins. My WhatsApp is a tangle of half-answered conversations and harried scheduling. Let’s do lunch, a client says. Can I take you out for coffee? I say to someone else. Saw you’re back, can’t wait to see you! texts a friend. I repeatedly double book myself.

What I would love to do is to lie still and watch the world spin. I want to be that bored, that present, that ready. But I am terrified of what will crack open if I do that, so I let my work self leach into my private calendar. Persistent extroversion does not come naturally to me. But right now, I choose company over the mess inside.

There have been moments of reprieve. Like when pb and I caught up on basketball in bed, half-asleep, or the night I paced under the night sky, confessing my innermost thoughts to W. That’s when I feel the knots untangle. I want to choose this simplicity always, but I am equally fuelled by ambition, pride, fear. I stay up writing, hoping the hurricane inside me can quiet long enough, but avoid talking about how this feels to anyone else. Why do I feel like every decision turns into a mistake? Why does it always feel like I’m making the same ones? And when does regret turn into something you learn to live with?

— I really hope the answerable questions aren’t the only ones worth asking. 

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

space

Found in Switzerland: a false sense of security?

 

From where we stayed in Switzerland, my world very quickly started to look different. Out the window, there were rolling hills cascading from imposing mountain peaks, winding dirt roads, gondolas cycling up and down, the occasional smoke from a chimney. Twice I watched a DHL van steadily make its way up the hills. Closer to us, we were surrounded by cows, cats, dogs, foxes. A brook ran not 50m away from the house. One temperamental afternoon, I found myself standing in the middle of a literal cloud. One evening, I watched my dad take a pencil to paper, sketching this storybook scene.

Still, no matter how spectacular the environment, the humdrum of life goes on. On Saturday, the kids spilled out of their homes to mow lawns and rake up hay. Our neighbour tended to her garden almost every evening. Dogs were walked, laundry hung, bills delivered. And after a day of mountain gazing, we still always found ways to annoy and be annoyed with each other. 

I often tell people that I am a wide open ocean kind of person. I like roaring, thrashing waves that threaten to engulf you. Put me in the mountains and I am lulled by its idyll — after all, from where I sit, it looks like I can pluck off any cabin I want and put it down somewhere else. Homes have no foundations; trees have no roots. I am surrounded by age old rock and somehow impervious to its permanence.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

LUCK

5-7 March, excerpted.

 

On Monday, I find myself crying on a work call. The person on the other end of the line is telling me how uncertain she is to start this new part of her life — how, in school, she was once someone special, but now watches her peers at work go on to start their own businesses while she’s left in the dust looking for her old self, working under someone else’s name. I believe you can do it, I tell her. I know what you can do, and how hard you can work. And then I put together a game plan. 

I cannot tell if she’s crying because she’s comforted or overwhelmed, but my tears are partly sprung by guilt. What privilege I have to chase my dreams unfettered, and how slowly I seem to be going about this. 

*

Tuesday is a big day of deadlines and meetings, and deadlines pushed because of meetings. My body is going through yet another period of inexplicable inflammation — at this point, the only way to get through the days is to remind myself it could be so much worse, though realistically my heart sinks whenever someone exclaims, “!!! What happened to your (body part here)?”

But the reminder remains true, right? It could be so much worse. 

*

On Wednesday, we take our sign language test and pass! What sweet relief. To celebrate, we head eastwards from the south of the island, and land ourselves a rollicking hotpot supper. The restaurant celebrates at least 4 birthdays during our time there, and each time W joins them in song, word for word, clap for clap. Her exuberance makes me laugh. What a precious spirit. What a precious friendship.

What precious, precious days.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

method acting

A January check-in.

 

I feel like I’ve been having the same conversation the last few weeks. In the home of a client, over an online meeting, in one friend’s studio, then another, then another, in an almost empty hawker centre, and at a cafe during the brunch rush — the conversation goes: 


Me: I’ve decided to wind up the business.
Them: What? why? when? what will you do? how are you feeling? how did you know it was the right decision? have you thought about (x,y,z solutions)?


The most surprising thing I have learned is that almost everyone is apparently thinking of closing their business too. The second most surprising thing I have learned is that, in the midst of two job offers and my daydreams of non-boss life, I have decided I don’t want the stability of being an employee after all. I explained this to a friend today as we sat in her workshop. “I know how I work, and that’s not going to change whether I work for someone else or myself,” I tell her, when she interjects, “And why work so hard for someone else’s dream when you can chase yours, right?” 


“Precisely.”

*

Speaking of dreams, mine, as always, are trying to tell me something. A few days after a friend texts, “Are you still working on your book?” — hell no, I want to tell her — I find myself holding a book that I know is mine in my dreams. Two sleeps later, the book resurfaces, and this time I get to read what is inside. I wake with the first line so fresh in my head that I record a voice memo for myself, with my eyes closed, narrating that first line in entirety and the plot of the book. It is terrifying to live with this unplayed memo on my phone, but comforting to know the story can live on in this way, unscathed from this world.


I reply the text a few days later. “Not anymore. Maybe one day.”

*

We started sign language classes this year, a mid-week reprieve to Mon-Tue-Wed crashing into each other. Our teacher is 44 and a natural comedian. He wore a fedora to our first class and has since lived up to all expectations of him as a drama teacher. “What happens when your hand is broken,” W asked the teacher last week. He looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Use your other hand?!” He gesticulated while rolling his eyes.

Coincidentally, my right hand has started cramping from all the practising. It seems on top of learning how to sign, I may end up becoming ambidextrous. (One can hope.)

*

I don’t know where this is going. There isn’t much else to say except that this is a new year, and I want to make it a good one. Because I think I am happy now. I feel it in the little things: running when the sun is out, eating pizza mid-week with friends, sitting in a car, the rain relenetless around us. Remembering to look up to find Orion in the night sky. Making plans for next week, next week, next month. And making plans for this next part of life.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

new year, new you

I keep reminding myself to not call this part “the end”, but it continues to slip in almost every day.

 

I keep reminding myself to not call this part “the end”, but it continues to slip in almost every day. “The end has begun,” I text to pb, then delete and retype my message. “The final phase has begun,” I say instead, like I am hatching a big, bad, very evil plan.

Whatever this next phase is, there’s no turning back now. At this morning’s breakfast meeting with a client, I tried to say it as clearly as I could: Public Culture is closing. But when the answer that came back was “what do you mean?” I realised I couldn’t do it. This is the plan, I wanted to say, this is how we will transition your work, these are the freelance services available after closure. I wanted to project calm professionalism, reassurance, but all at once everything came tumbling out of me, incoherently, randomly, and as the words left my mouth all I could think about was oh, so I am still sad about this after all. 

Tomorrow I speak to a client I have worked with for 10 years. I am afraid I will cry at her dining table.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

this hill to die on

December 2023: I have finally decided how I want to live my life.

 

It took me all year to find the words to realise this next step. Isn’t it funny that it is today, 23rd December 2023, that the specks of doubt and fear and hope against hope have finally settled? 10 years ago, on 23rd December 2013, I registered Public Culture as an official business, ready to start the new year with a new career. 10 years on, the weight inside has lifted enough for me to say: this new year will be our final year of business.

I am finally able to walk away because I look at the business and know there is nothing more I can do for it. There is nothing else I can compromise on to make this worth it. There is no more joy in running a team. There is no commercial demand for the type of work that we want to be paid for, and no fucks left to give for the work that people actually want to pay for. The older I get, the more I ask myself: was this what I had planned for the future? Is this work I want to do? Who am I outside of this business?

I announced the timeline of the closure to the team on Monday, and all week I have cycled through insouciance, excitement, and complete terror for the future. For my future, really, because my future has never been independent of this business until now. I was running on adrenaline until I looked at the date and saw the number 23. Now here I am, a sentimental, weeping mess of a person, wondering what’s the bigger waste here: walking away from 10 years of hard work, or working this hard for 10 years and still not knowing what it is exactly I have to give in this world.

But I am so proud of myself. I have to at least get that down on paper. Tina and I started this with $1,000 each. I grew the team, made payroll every month, drew up policies and systems. I was shit at paperwork but kept at it anyway. I learned how to read and revise contracts to better protect us. I learned how to streamline proposals because I was tired of giving away ideas for free. I kept accounts every month for every year. As we grew, I drew up more policies to better protect our downtime. I took 2 clients to court, won both cases and still never got paid. I walked away from money when we were disrespected. Walked away from money when it cost us peace of mind. Walked away from money even when we had everything to lose.

Because I’ve always believed that if you want to run your own business, you must remember the privilege of running it on your own terms. Sidestep what you don’t like about industry practices. Break convention. Set a different standard. For the most part, I think we’ve achieved that in our little world. It wasn’t always perfect, but I sleep knowing we’re not complicit in bureaucratic bullshit. That’s what I’m proudest of — not the work done, but how we’ve done it on our own terms. We never lost sight of who we are in this capitalist rat race of bigger, better, faster, shinier. We always dug deep and held fast to values and instinct: people over profit, purpose over profit. That’s the reason why we never did big jobs — and probably why we were never able to scale — I wanted our work to make a difference to the lone entrepreneur out there trying to realise her dream, not help some big business grow even bigger. 

How many people can say the same?

*

I came across a beautiful epitaph recently. “We were girls together,” the inscription reads, as a dedication from one best friend to another. And this is how I feel about the last 10 years. The girls, all of them coming into Public Culture fresh-faced with youthful idealism. That was once me, filled with fervour and ambition and a desire to exist in this world on my own terms. This is what has powered us for a decade.

So today, I mark 10 years of a stubborn, guileless, highly opinionated way of learning adulthood. I celebrate the audacity to daydream a little and the drive to work even more. I remember the days of showing up for each other, the times we failed, then tried again. For everything it was not, Public Culture was at least a safe space for us. Now it is time to reach for something new, but please may I never ever forget: it was here, for 10 years, that we were girls together. 

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

dramamine

“Where have you been?” I am asked repeatedly by friends whose texts I have left unanswered. Lost in a haze of work, I want to say, and trying to reorient myself for what is to come.

 

The most intense season of work is finally over. I have spent this last week looking at the year’s numbers, trying to determine if I want to keep the business going. 10 years is a good run, right? I am not ready to give it up, but I’m not sure I can rekindle whatever fire is left inside of me. There have been signs everywhere since covid days. A slew of my favourite brands closed shop — people who had been in the business 10, 15, 20 years taking covid as their last push into the newness just beyond the corner. Earlier in the year I emailed my accountant for advice on what to do. “Outsource,” he said. “Move operations overseas where labour is cheaper.” Another sign to close, I thought.

But even as I write this, even after countless conversations where it seems like the only solution is to close or compromise, I cannot bring myself to yield. I have not always liked the work we do, but I have always liked how we get it done. There is trust and I hope, empathy, and mostly a great degree of professionalism, efficiency, and distaste for bureaucratic bullshit. I just cannot seem to get the numbers to work, and in the world we live in, the tally reads: me-0, system-fuck all.

*

I went for my first ever medical exam recently. For weeks prior, I had thought the weighing scale was broken, but at the clinic I learned that my intense season of work had resulted in an almost 10% weight loss. The nurse tells me I need to put on 20kg to be considered healthy. The doctor tells me to keep an eye on my weight, but after learning I have always been this way, changes her diagnosis to “metabolically gifted”. It is kindness I will never forget. 

I think about the blood tests I was always being sent for in search of something wrong, of the visceral shock when I was 15 and told the school nurse I hadn’t yet had my period. My body has always been measured in units of lack and belatedness. In a single moment, it is bestowed with surplus. 

*

In the flurry of days, here’s an accidental dad joke that must be memorialised. I recently bought straps for my phones because my wrists were hurting from so much added but necessary screen time during Boutiques. Before I left for work one morning, my dad watched me clip my phone to a strap and asked, “Why is your phone on a dog leash?”

I laughed so hard. “You’re right,” I told him, “it is.”

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

written in the —

A snapshot of 11.5 days in Japan.

 

We got back from Japan 28 hours ago, and even though I am so unbelievably tired now, even though I was already tired before we left, even though work never quite abated, I am glad for that time away.

A collection of the days past:

1. It is late afternoon and we have walked past too much construction to get to Daikanyama. Before we can get to the main event of books and shopping and architecture, we stop by the Kyu Asakura House. True to reviews, the gardens are beautiful, the home surprising for something in the middle of a very hipster neighbourhood. But it is towards the back of the house where I am besotted by a tiny, nondescript room. I gasp and tell pb how much I love it.

“Congratulations,” she says, pointing to a sign on the ground. “Your favourite room is the storeroom.”


2. In Niigata, I bookmark an art installation housed in a now defunct school that I can’t wait to visit. We have to drive out to see it, and along the way I yap about how meaningful the project is, how sad it is to see a location fall out of use, a community devoid of children. We pull up at the site, pay the entrance fee, and walk in only to spend less than 5 minutes in the space. Fetishistic is the word pb used to describe the work. PARALYSING TERROR more accurately captured my experience.

Before entering the site of trauma — sheer excitement

After 5 minutes inside — 0/10 do not recommend


3. On our last night in Osaka, we head out to a tiny joint for Japanese curry, where soon the salaryman next to me is leaning over with his phone, showing me an Instagram account of a random woman with 38,000 followers… who thankfully turns out to be the wife of the restaurant owner. I am tired and disinterested in making conversation in this muddy zone of basic English/barely Japanese that requires an extraordinary amount of focus, but this fellow diner seems to be capping off a long day at his place of comfort, and the owner is a smiley, jovial, extroverted dude who’s dressed for a beach holiday with a spirit to match. They are warm and beckon with kindness, so I try my best to keep up. I still don’t like curry, but the salad we have ordered is giant and delicious and I am very into it.

I swear this salad was much larger than how it looks here


4. Speaking of salads, oh! How pb indulged my proclivity for fresh vegetables this trip. We had salads almost every day, and although the best thing we ate this time were gyoza that I will probably dream about forever more, this salad mixed and eaten straight out of a hotel ice bucket was, hands down, the next best thing. 

Salad in ice bucket, Niigata

Girl with salads, Tokyo


5. At Tower Records in Tokyo, taking in the simple joy of pb surrounded by her first love: music. Watching this one uncle shopper move down the classical music aisle, patiently scanning the shelves, pulling out album after album, studying each one. Being in a space where everyone just wants to listen, not talk.

Days later, in Niigata, pb maps our way to a secondhand clothing store she thinks I would enjoy, but my reading of the map unintentionally lands us at a music store instead, where the tagline seems to be “PUNK SHOP NOT DEAD”. We are both drawn into the space because of the music — in fact, we like the song that is playing so much that she ends up buying the album. The owner of the shop has told her the band is Maki, the name of my cat, which I take to be a sign from the universe.

In the car, driving out to the seaside, we listen to the album once through. I realise the only song I like is the song that was playing in the shop, and I tell her this is the very definition of kismet: a missed turn leading us to the last minute of the last song on the album of a band that shares the name of my cat, of a song that cannot be found anywhere on Spotify or YouTube or the rest of the Internet, it seems. What are the odds? We were destined to be there. 

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

too late

My body is falling apart but life trundles on.

 

Days upon weeks upon months of lost sleep and manic energy have turned my body against me. It started with fatigue and a fever, then quickly morphed into inflammation everywhere: throat, lips, gums, ears, eyes. I never know what new pain I’m going to wake to these days. It has been two weeks and still I feel I have made no progress.

As I write this, I have a crushing pressure in the top left of my skull — the sort of pressure that feels like a toothache, the sort of pain that I in fact once went to a dentist for because I was sure my teeth were rotting out of my head. Instead, the dentist took an X-ray, looked me over, and said, “It’s not your teeth, it’s your sinuses.” What else could I expect him to do after that? 

I was already seeing a specialist for my sinus flare-up, so even though the pain was enough to tear me from the desk in the middle of a workday, telling the girls sorry, I really need to do this, the pain is blinding — the only thing left to do was to wait.

But patience is a virtue I have yet to learn. And will I ever, in this lifetime? I am constantly surprised by how agonising it is to just sit and be still.

*

The doctor today looked at my swollen eye and told me it wasn’t that bad. Mild, his exact word was. Thank god, I thought, this can all be over soon. After all: he’s only seeing one presentation of my body’s protestations. He missed an inexplicable eruption of ulcers, canker sores, smarting lips so raw they were perpetually flushed red.

I am trying to manage my expectations. Regulate my emotions. I am torn between gratitude and raging betrayal every day — things could be worse, I remind myself (but couldn’t they be so much better too?). When I feel like I can barge through life without consequence — work, run, write, skip meals, not sleep, ferret out all the excess adrenaline, become a supercharged self — my body tends to pull a hard stop.

I know this. I have been through this. I often see it coming, and still I keep barrelling down the same path, making these mistakes over and over and over again. It’s not just the physical flare-ups that frustrate me, it’s the dissonance between my mind and a body I have so little control over. Last week I cried myself to sleep because I had woken with an exciting agenda of things to do, and out of nowhere I am sapped of energy, stripped of joy. In place, I lie in darkness, oppressed by fatigue. It is mere hours but it feels like the fog will never lift.

*

My body is falling apart but life trundles on. In the morning tomorrow, the girls arrive to celebrate a birthday. In the afternoon, there are deadlines I must meet. This is the rhythm of my days now: a desire to care about the little things, the major things, countered by a pit of hopelessness, exhaustion, physical hiccups, betrayal. Which will win out this time?

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

state of mind

A hard pass on adulthood this week.

 

I discovered this morning that I have the coping mechanisms of a teenager. Half-asleep in bed and reading NYT on my phone, I click into a piece on what parents can do about worsening adolescent mental health. I have no children, but I like reading these things to understand the state of parenthood. It comes in handy at work, but mostly, there’s nothing like someone saying BEWARE THIS SIDE for you to appreciate your lush, green, child-free, grass.

It is this paragraph that gets my attention:

It’s important for teenagers to express their emotions. Verbalizing feelings and talking about their internal world is one way that they do that. But it’s not the preferred option for every teenager. We need to respect that sometimes teenagers “get their feelings out” by going for a run. Or by putting on a playlist that matches their mood so that they can deepen themselves into that mood and then speed their way out of it. (via)


Or in my case, all of the above. 

I think about this all day, wondering if I am the one who’s emotionally stunted, or we are all, in fact, just overgrown children playing an adult game of charades. Towards the end of the workday, I chat with a friend about relationships — the ugly side of fighting, cheating, the slow death of taking someone else for granted. I find out that she has to ply herself with alcohol whenever she and her partner decide to talk about their feelings. One time, she drank so much she passed out instead.

*

I laugh, but at this point in my life, I am no better. I think back to the days when I was still seeing my therapist. I learn on hindsight that it takes me two months to move the conversation beyond descriptors of “tired” and “angry”. “Anger is a secondary emotion,” she would say all the time. “What else are you feeling?” And I would talk around situations and issues and happenings while she graciously waited, week after week after week. 

Towards the end of our 16 months together, we laugh at my baby therapy self. She tells me I am much better at articulating my feelings, regulating my mood. I tell her for the first time in years, I can hear the voice inside my head again. The voice, I say confidently, gives me clarity on whatever is going on inside of me. I feel more at peace now.

The thing is though, this voice that I was so happy to have back has not shut up since. The voice is what has always guided me, especially in my teens, so I have learned to trust it. But age has not dulled its bite. It is blunt, relentless, and sometimes unkind. It creates drama out of microscopic nothings. It is so loud in my head, narrating my every move, and yet it won’t make clear how I feel about my life until it’s too late. 

So, in an effort to drown out this voice, I run. I write. I wallow in music. I eat erratically and sleep best when I am held accountable. I become a teenager haunted by my very worst self.

*

I end up reading the parenting article four, five times. I need an adult way to deal with myself, and here I am given clear guidelines on red flags to look out for. The priority is that teenagers have ways to get their feelings out that bring relief and do no harm. 

My coping mechanisms can surely be classified as balms, but it is the “do no harm” part that is unclear. The definition — abusing substances, using technology in unhealthy ways, being hard on the people around them, or taking things out on themselves — doesn’t help. Maybe that in itself is worrying.

I keep being asked if I’m happy. I’m not sure how to answer that question truthfully. Is anyone just straight up happy? 

In my life, there is so much joy, and in equal measure, hopelessness, frustration, despair. Some days are grim; others are easy. Life, right? Here is the pain of being ordinary and wanting the extraordinary. It is both acute and incredibly mundane. And it can be masked by teenage wilfulness, for as long as my adult self will let me.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

heart, pirated

Mixed feelings about Past Lives and life in reverse.

 

Even in the cool dark of the theatre, in the middle of a film I have looked forward to for months, I am restless. I have bought popcorn because I thought I would need a distraction from feelings too intense, possibly too familiar; instead, I am snacking because I am — I really hate to admit this — bored.

There are 13 people in this theatre. I know because I checked the seats before going in, and again when I find myself losing focus during the film. I count them off in my head. 13 people here, 7 of us who have come alone. This is not a film you want to watch with someone else. It will bring up too many questions, and some things are better left unsaid.

There is one girl who comes ready to cry. I know this from her attire: she is dressed in all black, with a cap pulled down impossibly low. She slinks in early, jaw set, shoulders squared. She looks straight ahead the whole time, even before the lights dim. I imagine she is preparing emotionally for what is to come.

Except — I cannot tell if she does end up crying, because even though I am antsy, distracted, impatient, bored, I am the one who ends up in tears. I cry so hard in those final moments that the man one seat away asks me if I’m ok before he leaves with his wife. I continue to cry as the credits roll, as the lights come on, as the other 12 people leave and the janitorial staff comes in with a flashlight to check for popcorn on the floor. 

I know I need to leave this theatre, so I walk down the hallway, still crying, into the bathroom. I lock myself in a cubicle and think, god, this must be a new low. 35 and crying in a public bathroom. So I get it together. The tears peter out. I regain control. I clean my face, re-tie my hair, stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, and say, “Ok. You can do this.” I have said this out loud without meaning to, and now the lady washing her hands two taps away looks up at me. My reflection smiles at her.

Then I decide to get sushi for lunch.

*

I end up writing at Genki Sushi. I overstay my welcome — at the 2-hour mark, I am unceremoniously asked if I have any last orders. Diners are still coming in. There are tables aplenty. And don’t they use a QR code to track orders? Puzzled, I reply, “Are you closing?”

“No. But our dining limit is one hour and you have stayed for two.”

So I pack up and leave, because they have given me the guise of a dignified exit. The expectation is to take it, even if you don’t want to.

*

Here’s the thing I learned from Past Lives. We have this one life. We could have been someone else, but could-have does not matter in the face of what-has-been-done. The dwelling, the hoping, the pining — it’s all impossibly futile resistance when we have to live in present tense with present-day consequences. So here we are: hearts on sleeves. Here we are: a life familiar. Here we are: apart, together, in the dark, making it to the light of day. 

We have one life. We spend so much of it running so we can hope to know when to stay. 

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

may

Picture this: you are at a crossroads. You can go right, left, forward, back. Which path do you choose?

 

On Friday, I fall into bed tired but happy. I write two lines before I succumb to sleep: Today, today. Today, my heart is light, despite the weather, despite my daylong headache.

Now here we are, 24 minutes to Tuesday. I can barely remember that lightness.

Instead, I remember this: someone in the audience asks a question. “What is the hardest part…” she begins, and the rest of the question falls away. The hardest part is always the trade-off. Learning to live with it. Remembering you chose it. Wholly believing in it. It is the single hardest bit, so do it right and it can also become the very thing that saves your soul. 

I remember J talking about her old job. The pain, the shame, the hopelessness. The emotions that never get easier swallowing. I tell her she’s right, you should always walk away the bigger person. I give her new versions of maybes and what ifs. I say, it is not your fault — nobody can be a creative director at 24. I know none of this will make her feel any better, but still I hope. I hope she looks past the folly and pettiness of youth, most of all, and learns one day that this will grow into conviction, intuition, a thicker skin, a drive to prove to no one but herself that she can become the person she believes she is.

*

Now it is Monday night. And even though I never go for night runs, I make a rare exception. I walk over to the field where I run laps, up and down slopes, past shadows slinking under street lights, past bodies lying quiet in the middle of the grass, faces illuminated by the light of a phone. I will go on to have the best run I have had in a while. It is like I am flying through the night. 

But before I get there, something catches me off guard: ash falling out of the sky. There is no trace of a source in the vicinity, not a single whiff of smoke. So my first thought as I look up is not this is ash but could this be snow? I stand square in the middle of the road, watching wisps of maybe-snow floating down around me. And I tell myself, yes, it could be snow. Improbable. But maybe. Impossible. But maybe. 

*

On the side of the road this morning, I asked pb if she could take a picture of me. So here I am, about 12 hours ago now, shorts askew, hair a mess, wearing fuzzy socks that aren’t supposed to leave the house and a sweater that isn’t mine. I told pb I wanted to remember my outfit, but how true is that now? I look at this and am compelled to say: remember me here. Remember me now. Remember me this way, on a whim, on a lark, when it rains. Remember it was a Monday, but it could have been a Friday, a Thursday, maybe a Saturday. Remember me, us, you, we. Remember: you chose today. You will choose tomorrow. 

Remember, remember, remember: one day soon, all over again, this will become yesterday.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

thrum

Tired but trying to be grateful.

 

Bone tired is how I feel these days. I’ve been overzealous with work and now I’m paying the price: consecutive late nights, early mornings, my to-do lists writing themselves in my sleep. All those lost hours at night have finally morphed into literal fevered naps, a cycle of freezing and sweating and sniffling ebbing with a roster of medicinal relief. It sounds bad, but in truth, my temperature has barely spiked — I am just deeply, deeply tired. 

*

I triple dosed on medicine yesterday so I could make a shoot today, a last-minute one arranged on my day off, a last-minute one for an almost 10-year client that only I could manage anyway. When I got to the location 20 minutes ahead of everyone — 40 if you account for the latecomers — I realised how upset I was about this whole thing. It was not yet 10am and already I was seething: white hot angry on the inside, coated with an armour of professional pep timed to run out at 120 minutes.

It all sounds so juvenile. Because it is. It is! I could have rescheduled the shoot, pushed out the timeline, doubled down on boundaries. Instead, I spent all of yesterday dreading today, and all of today upset at my routinely bad choices. Just last week I told one of the girls: we teach others the respect we deserve. I conveniently forgot how easy it is to forget what we deserve in the first place.

*

Amid fatigue, amid deadlines and general busyness, there has been joy. I must remember that. Two weekends ago, we sang and danced in a freezing karaoke room. I asked for S Club 7 and Stacy’s Mom (Fountains of Wayne) because apparently, underneath it all, I am a 13-year-old child who enjoys screeching about hot moms and true love. On National Day, we trundled out to ECP at the crack of dawn, joining hordes of other huffing, puffing, holiday-optimising folk. At the skate park, I realised how stupidly stubborn I am: my mind saying, yes, you can learn new tricks, here’s how — while my feet worked their old patterns over and over, disinterested in potential.

And then there’s been the World Cup: a bright spot in humdrum work days. Most games, my dad and I take turns to yell at the TV in the living room. In the final minutes of a recent game, he startled me by shouting, LEFT FLAAAANK, which is, I suppose, a proportionate response to me yelling CRRRRRROSS! every couple of minutes. He says his favourite part of watching women play sports is the crying, though I suspect this is patently untrue — he has only seen crying once, and when he’s not watching the games, he’s reading up on the teams.

Just a few years ago, this probably would have never been a thing: the both of us blocking out time to watch sports together. I’m glad that’s changed. I am glad for these moments.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

probably corporeal

(Yes, the glove is still there, being kicked around by everyone using the footpath.)

 

Has anyone noticed it rains on Thursdays? I know this because Thursday is the day I absolve myself of responsibility. Thursday, now my favourite day of the week, is when I get to disappear. 

Each Thursday, though, I am greeted by wet weather in all forms — thunderstorms, drizzles that last all day, even that freak sun shower last week. I love rain, always have, but I struggle with the hold it has over me. It dims my mood and clouds my mind, which makes me think: forget the terrors of the sun and the moon, apparently I can be downed by something as innocuous as water.

*

Speaking of being downed, my body is threatening to quit. This is because I have finally figured out a trade I can live with, though: fatigue for sleep. Pain for rest. 

I am convinced the lack of sleep has given my brain a case of the jitters, so these days I am easily distracted, often bored. At work, I am thoroughly, inconsolably, restless. Because I cannot nap, I daydream manically. I work furiously for 20 minutes, then need a break twice as long to rethink the work. I have never multi-tasked more than I do now.

To calm my nerves, I bolt out the door at the close of the work day. I have found that venturing further from home only means my head has to work harder to not give up, so I take detours that loop into accidental pain. Each day, I say to myself, triumph lies just one road ahead, soon with a fully hushed mind.

Only — only now there’s a twinge in my right shoulder, a throb with every step down my right shin. A recurring sciatic ache on my left, and sometimes the familiar pain of an old, sore, misused knee. 

*

The good news is I drop off to sleep more easily now. The bad news is I continue to wake during hours I shouldn’t.

*

Also: I have developed the strangest tic. I didn’t even know I was doing until it started to rain one day and I was forced to race for shelter. And that’s when I realised I was catching raindrops with my outstretched hand. 

It seems, when my body tires, I clench and unclench my fists, then shake them as if to check they’re still attached to me. I watch my palms turn from pink to white to pink again. I dig my fingernails into the flesh of my hand just to see how long it takes for the indentations to fade. What is this?? Am I checking to see if I’m still in my body? That I haven’t yet died? Maybe soon I will regress to a 5-year-old child, wanting to slice myself open just to see what’s inside.

It reminds me of this time, when I was 15, and developed this cursed habit of snapping a rubber band around my wrist. All day long, even in class: snap, snap, snap, snap. I bruised so many vessels all the way down my forearm without meaning to. I stopped as quickly as I started — because the marks on my arm scared me, because even then vanity won out — but not before a classmate saw and said, “Feels good, right?”

I didn’t know what she meant then. I can’t decide if I know now, but I have this sick, sinking suspicion: my body must know something my mind has yet to figure out. 

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

feels like glass

An almost week inside my head.

 

This was supposed to be a record of days, wasn’t it? 

Last night, after dinner, I walked around the field nearby. Round and round, quiet, slow. I kept jumping out of my skin because I had headphones on and couldn’t hear footsteps behind me. In the opposite direction, a very pretty girl also went round and round with her family. Each time we passed, I would steal glances at her, trying my best to be discreet. I’m sure she knew anyway — girls always know when someone is looking. I passed her three times before I even realised she had a dog in tow.

*

I bought roller blades recently. I am trying to relearn a childhood trick, a pivot on a single wheel. I am trying to regain the blind courage of a child. The same guards I wore as a kid catch me every time I fall. For some reason, I haven’t outgrown them. 

*

You know, if you look hard enough, there are clues to everything in life. The sun is high in the sky and still there is rain — heavy, bloated drops smacking against pavement. In the garden, I run out to get the clothes. Aunty Leslie and I are yelling about the absurdity of this weather. Everything is getting wet but the sky remains blue and bright, mocking.

Minutes later, I am ready to leave the house for the day. I grab an umbrella but the rain has passed.  

*

At lunch, I think, is it possible that I enjoy being alone with the hellish place that is my mind? 

A man and his preteen daughter slide into the seats next to me. They doodle on napkins while waiting for food. I am not eavesdropping today because I don’t want to be distracted. But just because I’m not listening doesn’t mean I’m focused.

*

My sleep has been so poor lately. I can’t drop off to sleep at night; I can’t stay asleep come morning. I don’t even nap in the day. Instead, I stare at the ceiling around the clock, hypnotised by a life that cannot be mine — malleable, yielding. 

*

There is only one thing to remember from this week. We tell ourselves so many stories. On Wednesday, I killed my favourite one. 

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

mirage

Staying alive.

 

Sometimes, I think, it is so hard to stay alive.

Get sleep, they say. Food, water, movement. Get sun, but wear sunscreen. Keep your hair combed, teeth brushed. Find friends. Have purpose. Don’t worry about breathing, that comes naturally. But the world is on fire, so get an air purifier.

I am trying to follow all the rules. I sun, I water, I move. I remember to wash. I watch my sugar, even though I ordered an açai bowl this morning. I might as well be eating ice-cream, I think, so I pick at the nuts and chuck the rest.

Why do days like these always seem to find me? Why does my mind tend towards melancholy, and will someone tell me when this ends? Only thrice in my life have I physically, literally, medically, not been able to catch my breath: an asthma attack at 8, another at 27, a panic attack at 32. Yet I regularly feel like my body has forgotten how to breathe. Inside, I am gasping, gasping, gasping for life.

*

I checked my order history for the month today. It turns out I have 5 tubes of sunscreen on their way to me. 10, if you count the duplicates I ordered for “inventory”. But it’s necessary, right, for protection? Everywhere the world screams: UV rays? Bad! Think you’re safe on a rainy day? No! Think you’re safe indoors? No! 

So I’m doubling down on preventative measures. I re-apply before I head out for runs, even while thinking I’m just dripping sunscreen-protected sweat at the end of it. See, I am not without fight. I want to thrive in this life. I don’t want to succumb to the terrors of the sun, the whims of the moon.

Still, protection doesn’t guarantee anything. Think of all the babies born despite protection — multiple layers of protection, so many babies everywhere. There’s only one true lesson protection offers: you can do everything right and still have things go very, very wrong.

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Melissa Tai Melissa Tai

skid marks

Because nothing is open at 6.38am on a Monday in Great World City, I start the week in my dad’s office, watching the sun come up.

 

It is 6.38am. Nothing is open at Great World City, even as my dad takes me on a blitz around the basement, just in case. “Not even McDonald’s is open”, he says, as we make our way up. 

This is how I end up in a meeting room in his office, watching the sun come up over the city. I fire off a few emails while spinning around in an office chair. 

Another Monday. Another workday.

*

Because I was always lucky enough to hitch a ride to school from my parents, because I attended schools that were mostly close to home, and because my parents hate being stuck in traffic, I used to arrive in school uncannily early. Often, it wouldn’t even be 6.30am. 

Those years taught me that life does not have infinite workarounds. If I arrived in school before the custodian, I would just have to sit in the corridor, waiting. If the fuse box hadn’t yet been unlocked, I would have to sit in the dark, waiting. And if someone I didn’t like came by during this time, I would have to sit in the corridor, in the dark, waiting out their stories.

There’s a lot you learn about people when they haven’t yet donned their skin for the day. The coolest kid in my class came up to me once, when I was 14, asking if I could teach her how to put in her contact lenses. In 15 minutes, she told me about her dad, her sister, the fight they just had where they both barrelled down the staircase. She was bruised, mad, maybe a little sad. 

When the sun came up, she slipped back into insouciance. We never spoke about her family again.

*

I was thinking about that on the way back home today — how time can be so thieving, so elastic. How mornings are supposed to be fresh starts — the break of a new day, the dawn of new hope. 

And how, armed with the folly of youth, I used to sometimes let a great day deepen into a sleepless night, so when I turned up in school the next morning, I would get to live one long, unbroken, beautiful yesterday. 

*

I watched the sun rise in the silence of a meeting room this morning, and there I was, years before, growing up — yawning, laughing, bleary-eyed in day-old skin. Happy.

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