fixation

A diary of trying to stay in my skin this week —

Monday: something inside has shifted, I can feel it. My head is miserable from screaming but barely comprehensible voices, my body nauseated from trying to ignore it all. 

The second I see sun, I lace up my shoes and hit the road. I tell myself to run slower so I can go further, run longer. I steady my breath. I focus on the pain. I run till I can see the ghosts, but I don’t stay long enough to hear what they have to say. 

*

Tuesday: a balancing act to keep the ghosts at bay. Every minute I am productive is a minute I worry I will soon lose. I decide on a walk today, but, buoyed by the day before, I begin to run. I play an old game with myself although I know I am flirting with a line I shouldn’t cross. I say, surely, you can run faster now? (Pick up the pace.) Surely, you can be better than this? (Pick up the pace.)

Surely, I should know how this ends. The pain from today, breath ripping through chest ripping through muscle, quashing the gentle ache of yesterday. My ghosts taunt me at the finish line.

Welcome back, they say. This is how it will always be.

*

What do I remember of Wednesday? Laughing as I listened to a voice note from a friend. It’s a red flag, she is saying, but a shiny, glittery one that she will forever be drawn to. God help her, I think, for I know she really loves her glitter.

I walk around the block to return her voice note. I tell her that’s why we learn from our past, why we supposedly grow wiser with age. We learn from all those mistakes we made.

I say nothing about the ghosts walking next to me.

*

Thursday, endless rain. I buy a ticket to the earliest screening of Barbie.

I am not expecting to sit next to three teenage boys. They wriggle and fidget the entire time, as if none of them wants to be there. They are positively tortured when the Kens start doing an extended musical number — I can feel them sinking lower and lower in their seats. But when the Barbies reveal their end game, the boys gasp. 

“Shit,” one boy talks-whispers to the others. “That’s fucking smart.”

The movie is, I think, as smart as it can be. It’s fun, it’s funny, but it also makes me cry. When I walk out, I text W, “I just finished and I cried and cried.” 

But I could not explain why.

*

12 hours on, this is what I have. Maybe, like Barbie, I feel impossibly trapped, unpretty, adrift. And like Barbie, all I want to do is lie on the floor, waiting for someone else to fix this. 

I have ghosts to exorcise right now. The problem is, these ghosts are mine.

No one else can see them.

No one else is coming.

out of service

I tell the girls the dress code for Wednesday drinks is Vogue funeral, as a final farewell to my lost youth. We drink glasses of these beautiful cocktails — balanced, refined, storied — then finish with a nightcap of cup noodles by the curb. I turn 35 taking a video of the girls singing a spirited rendition of happy birthday, disposable chopsticks waving high in the air. 

*

At lunch the next day, our server is trying desperately to fix the restaurant’s polaroid camera so she can issue us a birthday memento. We are only here because I mixed up my restaurants and told pb to book this place, when really, I was thinking of the restaurant opposite. By the time the camera is fixed, the candle has been blown out. Two forkfuls of cake have been had. Still, we take the photo because the server has tried so hard.

When we return from lunch, I pin the photo to my board. It now sits next to a scrap piece of paper scribbled with the words Nostos Algos for when I learned it. Nostos — Greek for return. Algos, pain. Together, the root of nostalgia: unabated suffering for unattainable desire. Together, the good among the pain of life.

*

I buy a coat the day after, mainly because I like how I feel when I put it on. I say to pb, this makes me feel like a rockstar, which really means, this makes me happy, even if it is a bit ridiculous.

I think it’s a pretty good motto to live by.

tomorrow

A friend tells me she is trying to find the good in life. I tell her she has always, always been the good in my life. So in honour of that, happy memories. Glimpses of good. The lightest moments of all these yesterdays. 

1. 24 June

I am having lunch with someone I’ve only seen on TV. We are in the home of her very good friends, strangers to me until two hours ago. There is an old dog asleep next to us, so old that he’s gone a little blind, partially deaf. He’s sweet but according to his owners, sometimes grumpy. He visits the hamsters that live next door every day. 

Lunch wasn’t even supposed to happen. We were scheduled for a shoot — time in the kitchen, some follow-up interview questions,. Now here we are, sucking off chilli oil from prawn shells, drinking 8-year-old homemade umeshu. The meal opens with a bottle of fizzy grape juice and finishes with buttered Malaysian-style bread. It lasts almost 3 hours.

2. 25 June

On a whim, N and I are breakfasting at Chu & Co., our kinda neighbourhood bakery that we visit only when there’s a car at home to hijack. We pack a picnic mat and split four fresh, generously topped pastries, plus a loaded cheese toastie. We almost finish everything too! The breeze is light but the air cool. The clouds are on our side today. In front of the counter, visiting dogs take turns to sidle up to say hello to the staff. They’re really waiting for their treats but look, so are we, all of us crowded on cafe grounds biding our time with food. One dog gives up waiting and zips right into the kitchen. 

To my right, a floppy haired boy hosts a live commentary of a snail making its way across the grass. Because the picnic mat we’ve brought is more than 20 years old, the morning’s rainfall seeps from cement, through mat, through shorts, finally sticky onto skin. But what good decisions we have made this Sunday morning, all before 10am, without a plan.

3. 1 July

A picture of unbridled joy: my dad with both hands high in the air, shouting yay! after trashing everyone at Mortal Kombat. He does this repeatedly throughout the night.

I love seeing it each time.

4. 3 July

On a site recce this morning, we bump into an old client whom I know through his wife. I yell his name while he’s withdrawing money at the ATM, and soon we are taking a photo to send to his wife. She’s in London for work, he says, though he thinks she’s there for Primark. He tells us how work is going and jokes about a client. When I was first getting to know him, he told me that in another lifetime he would never be working the job he has. His wife later said he would rather be a comedian. It shows every time I speak to him.

I am losing track of our conversation. We’re in the middle of a memory — London was the first overseas trip he took with his wife, then girlfriend, he tells the girls. “I know, she’s totally out of my league, everything also out of my league, but this goes to show that you can get what you want if you’re serious about it. Nothing is impossible!” He evangelises with an enthusiastic fist pump.

It’s true: we accept the love we think we deserve. We just have to get past heartbreak first.

*

I turn 35 on Thursday. I am finally feeling better about it.

cancer season begins

Friday night: distractions, detours, a little birthday.

K says to L, what do you wish for this coming year? And L answers simply: peace.

*

To mark her birthday, L has booked tickets for a show — a sad lesbian film, she tells us. I come ready to cry, but it turns out the film is more hopeful than what was billed. We end up laughing an unexpected lot.

What’s also unexpected is the viewing experience, which is a bit of a circus. A woman two seats from L practically yells a sneeze during one emotional scene. An unknown alarm goes off in the middle of the theatre. And when we finally get to see the onscreen lovers run into each other after decades, it is to the soundtrack of intergalactic battle bleeding in from the theatre across the hall.

*

We head off in search of dessert after. J leads the way as he walks behind us. “Turn left!” we hear, so we careen from darkness into one long, brightly lit corridor. Many roads are crossed to get to Fortune Centre, though it’s half closed by the time we arrive. No bar, restaurant, or dessert place wants to take us. 

So we’re on the road again, and finally, in the last half hour of L’s birthday, we close with cold, sweet, sticky dessert. There’s screaming. There’s laughter. There’s love, and very best wishes.

Happy birthday, L. May peace always find a home with you.

lemonade

My hairdresser told me she knew someone who had recently died of brain cancer. “So young,” she said. “34 years old only.”

That’s my age, I told her.

“1988,” she said.

Yes. 1988.

*

For reasons unknown to my technology-addled self, the bookmarks on my phone are synced to my 2012 life, specifically capturing the time between dropping out of grad school and finding full-time work.

There’s a whole folder dedicated to job listings — 13 pages, none of them functional now. There’s another folder dedicated to writing — 29 pages of submission guidelines for magazines, journals, anthologies, and a lone Thought Catalog essay. I google the author’s name. Content strategist and creative director splashes across her homepage. Her portfolio indicates she stopped writing essays in 2013. 

If this is a sign from the universe, I don’t think it’s a good one.

*

Someone I interviewed for work told me how she hopes her children will grow up knowing what they want. She said, I ask all my interns this, “Do you know how to dance in your work? What made you dance during your FYP?”

I nodded politely. I wanted to show her I understood the importance of this.  

I am 19, 23, 30. I cannot answer the question.

*

I turn 35 in 14 days. Help.

running

A smattering of the last 10 days, lest I forget. 

1.

I find out on Instagram that someone who was once important to me is about to be married. Newly wed, in fact, by the time I’m putting this down. I think about the last we spoke and I realise I don’t know for sure when it was. By the roadside? In my apartment? I think there was ice-cream. I think I was deep in sadness. I think I was a terrible friend at the end. 

I want to tell her I’m happy she’s happy, but I don’t think this means anything now. I scroll past without double tapping.

2.

I am rereading a book I have long touted as a favourite. It is 607 pages in a font size that makes me feel like I need to get my eyes checked again. On the title page, an inscription: To Melissa, very best wishes.

This is the only signed copy of a book I own. I can’t remember how it ends.

3.

I find out over lunch that C is allergic to prawns. The problem is we’re splitting a dry laksa and kueh pie tee, each crowned with half of said allergy-inducing prawn. She assures me it’ll be fine — she’s almost positive she’s eaten her way to immunity. She used to get a rash on her face; these days, almost always nothing.

Later, as I watch her scratch at her cheek, I wonder: was it worth it? How do you pick the mistakes you want to make? Why do we choose the same pain over and over again?

4.

One week after biting my lower lip in the same spot — twice, maybe thrice? — I still have a blood bruise to show for it. A constellation of four ulcers, now down to two, only hurts when I apply the Bonjela that pb made me buy. 

I can measure my days with the marks on my body: a band of trapped blood under my toenail when a slab of wood fell on it last September, matching cuts on my shins from when I walked into my bed (4 weeks ago on the left; 1 on the right), and now, more spilled blood.

Sometimes I feel like I am sleepwalking through life.

5.

How does that phrase go again? This moment is the youngest you will ever be. 

None of us get to go back.

stargazing

Supposedly, 35 marks the beginning of middle age. I have no way to describe how I feel about this other than: the. fuck.

In an effort to “focus on the positive”, as they say, I am trying to remind myself of the very non-adult adult life I have, summed up by a list of absences: No mortgage. No car. No kids. No boss.

I should probably reframe this perspective, but this genuinely is how I take stock of my life. I still don’t have all the things I never wanted. It feels like the easiest way to live — total hypothetical freedom. 

*

I always knew I would have trouble growing old. Now I see I am also struggling to grow up. 

*

Last week, some happy flashes: on Thursday with L, eating popiah and gossiping as enigmatically as we could manage. After, we adjourned for ice-cream where we held hands and gave up talking in code. I told pb that night — all the important friendships in my life are marked by hours upon hours of conversation. And if we ever have our own place, I love you, but please go to bed so I can talk to my friends in peace.

On Friday night, a team dinner after work, followed by the third scoop of ice-cream I had had in just two days. I cannot help but hear my dentist’s voice every time I eat ice-cream now. “Maybe cut back on the ice-cream,” she said once after six months of stress-induced ice-cream bingeing had given me two new cavities. She couldn’t understand how it had happened, but I knew better. I was eating ice-cream in the middle of the day, late at night, after meetings and before.

R and I never finished our ice-cream. She took my half-eaten cone, and hers, and dumped it in the bin.

*

T said once that it’s impossible to go out after breaking up with someone. You see them everywhere you go, think of them with every song, every funny little word you hear in passing. You can’t order the same dish without remembering how you used to split it. I found myself thinking about this on Friday, only with all the friends living lives I never imagined possible when we were kids. 

— Thinking, here’s where you tripped and almost sprained your ankle. Here’s where we walked drunk and you threw up. Here’s where we met that creepy dude we probably shouldn’t have. Here’s where I was trying to convince you of an alternative life for yourself, without realising you knew what you wanted all along.

ghosts

I’ve been having trouble sleeping again. Almost every night, I wake between 3-4am, my body groggy but my mind ready to party. Exercise hasn’t helped. Neither has reading, nor writing, nor making the room extra cold to induce deeper sleep. It just leaves me, in chronological order: wildly energised, fully awake, fully awake and ever so slightly manic, with a sore throat the next day.

*

For a few years, I was on prescription meds for allergies. The doctor said it was perfectly safe, she had given it to kids as young as a year old, and since the adult meds hadn’t worked for me, maybe this would. There were minor side effects but the drug had existed for so long, don’t worry, perfectly safe.

On it I was immediately better. And almost immediately too, I began having these wild, vivid dreams. Nightmares — a listed side effect. Years later, it would be reported that the drug “caused extremely unsettled dreams, which led to exhaustion and depressed feelings” in adults.

The thing is, I loved all my dreams, even the nightmares. It was like disappearing into a different world each night. Once, I dreamt dinosaurs were on our street — the dream began with me waking up from a dream in my bedroom and fleeing out the window with my sister. I remember running barefoot down the main road. I remember the gravel cutting, my feet bleeding, and us breathless, running forever. I remember people around us screaming, panicked. We were trying to find the rest of our family, but we had left our phones charging in the room. 

When I woke up from that dream it was still dark out. My sister remained asleep in her bed. Our phones were where we had left them.

I stayed awake.

*

I phoned the clinic to tell them I was coming in to refill my prescription, but the receptionist told me she couldn’t do that anymore. “Change of rules,” she said, “Dr. Angela needs to assess you first.” 

I waited 50 minutes before it was my turn. When I was finally called in, Dr. Angela broke the news. Worldwide, more kids were reporting incidences of hallucinations. It was only after this consultation that I would do more research — in Singapore, an 11 year-old had become paranoid about being stabbed. She hallucinated about being pinched. She was constantly panicked about misplacing stationery, so she became obsessive about counting what she had. Reportedly, kids were showing signs of aggression and irrational behaviour the world over. They had night terrors. They became sullen, withdrawn. Adults too, doctors were now saying, could exhibit signs of depression on the drug.

Don’t worry, Dr. Angela said. You don’t have any of this right? We’ll just do a routine assessment. Answer a few questions and I can refill the prescription.

We began.

Do you have vivid dreams?
Yes.

Do you often have nightmares?
Yes.

Do you ever feel sad (and here she hedged), not normal sad, like depressed?
I hesitated. Yes, but depression runs in my family.

Yes, she said. That’s quite common. But have you ever felt depressed while on this drug?

*

What I wanted to say was: my grandmother was depressed for years because she lost a child. A cousin once removed remains committed in an institution somewhere. He had a breakdown in uni, and now he is my dad’s age. I only learned of him in my 20s. I was once more depressed than I’ve ever been on this drug, but not as depressed as others around me have been, and after so many years, I’m not even sure what I feel can be considered depression. What is normal people sadness anyway? I cry in the shower a lot but can still get out of bed. I remember a time I couldn’t.

Instead, I said: I don’t know.

As if it would help, I added: But I’m seeing a therapist now.

*

I was given a prescription for a 1-month refill, and after, Dr. Angela said, we would have to start on something new. At the counter, the receptionist told me the drug could no longer be dispensed at clinics. Go to Guardian, she said, the medicine will be there. When I spoke to the pharmacist at Guardian, she furrowed her brows. “We don’t have this here. You’ll need to go to the hospital to get it.” 

She checked her records. “Oh. Only 2 hospitals have it in stock. 3 boxes left.”

So it came to be: the drug that had helped me breathe more deeply than ever before was apparently also suspected of altering my mood. Dr. Angela had tried to explain it to me as gently as she could. “I believe the drug is safe. My patients have never had problems. But… since you have so many side effects… There are other drugs that can help you. Don’t worry, perfectly safe.”

I think my mistake was bringing up the therapist.

*

The drug I was on is now more tightly regulated after the UK, US, and Canada issued warnings of “serious mental health effects”. Here, a mother led the charge with a petition to get the drug removed, because ultimately, children couldn’t tell the difference between their dreams and this world. Their fears were bleeding into real life.

The kids won — as I know they should have.

But I sometimes wish they hadn’t. Is that wrong to say? I cannot explain this without sounding selfish. 

Let me try. All my dreams, all those nightmares, they were like life through the looking glass. I was funnier, faster. I once dreamt I learned how to fly a plane with teenage Josh Hartnett. I once had an unimpressed toucan with purple feet deliver a cryptic message about an upcoming project. Many times I was unprepared for math exams. Sometimes the entire dream would be about forgetting I even had an exam until it was over. I was always losing people, finding them, redoing my past. 

Even if the drug did make me sad, no matter what, I always woke up thankful to be alive. My nightmares bled into my life that way.

mr. wolf

W was talking about timing. “Sometimes it’s just not the right timing,” she was telling M, and went on to give examples of businesses that had folded due to mistimed events. He leaned forward, listening, nodding.

*

As I write this, a lady four tables away is telling her friend the very same thing. “It wasn’t the right timing, but I really think it is now.” From the context I can gather — eavesdropping is a habit I cannot quit — she ran into an ex, started seeing him again, and now wants to get married. Except, she says, “he just wants to enjoy our dating life. He says he really likes it.”  

I cannot see her friend’s face, but she sounds much older and clearly alarmed. “Okay. Enjoy it while it lasts,” is all I hear before I put on my headphones to give them some overdue privacy. 

For the record, I am 100% with this friend.

*

When I was 15, the boy I thought I was so desperately in love with was desperately in love with someone else. I still remember her name: Tracie. Over months and months, this boy and I hatched plans to make Tracie fall in love with him. 

Some context: I was a year younger than him. I hadn’t yet been in a relationship. The term “friend zone” did not exist, so I felt sure this story would pan out eventually in my favour, a la My Best Friend’s Wedding but with the ending rewritten for Julia Roberts. Surely, on a date with Tracie one day — while she tittered on about something insipid — he would realise he was hopelessly in love with me, the girl with whom he so freely shared his thoughts, fears, desires. Everything would fall in place.

Over Christmas, he texts, “I’ve got good news.” He had met someone new! Her name is J*. He’s asked her to be his girlfriend, she lives in a different country but they’ll make it work because she said yes.

It was great timing, he says. She’s only back in Singapore to visit family.

I put down the phone and decided I was not just out of love; I was, on behalf of Tracie now, annoyed and deeply betrayed.

asunder

Monday night, 15th May. Z and I attended the graduate fashion show at LASALLE — both of us trying to play it cool even though we were underprepared. On the way there, I texted her, “FORGOT MY GLASSES. I will be blind tonight” to which she replied, “OMG SAMEEE!!!” And I laughed out loud at the crosswalk, thinking, will we ever be too old to be this vain? (Never, I hope.)

Pre-show, she joked about how we would probably only be able to make out silhouettes. When the show finally did start, I realised there was truth in that after all — everything was madcap in a fashion-ey way and therefore fairly easy to see. I liked the closing collection best because it reminded me of the word “cloister”, but then I spent too long wondering if “cloistered” was a verb that could also be used as an adjective, and how that might be used in a sentence, and how lovely a word “cloister” is, how you’re forced to say it slowly, and why was “cloister” making me thinking of “sisterhood”, how uncanny, or was it just this collection, and wait, hadn’t we already seen this design? In a rush, the show was over, and then came the delicate task of avoiding eye contact with many familiar faces, because work would have to wait! We were two girls determined to be nameless in a crowd.

The sweetest moment of the show: when I saw an excited mom, half-standing out of her seat, turn on the flash on her phone to record her daughter’s designs coming down the runway. She had on an electric blue sari and beamed throughout. 

*

My mind keeps returning to a conversation I had last week. I had asked M, “ At what point will this become too much?” in reference to running a business, to keeping things together for the team you’ve committed to even though your insides are steadily falling apart. 

I remember working through this in therapy. What would it mean to close the business? How would it feel like? Why those feelings, and what comes after, and what does that mean, and how do I feel about that? I remember saying, but not believing, that I am more than what I do at work. 

A few weeks later, I decided the only way I could keep going was to believe it.

*

I’ve been thinking about ambition. Days of grit, glory, drive. I’ve been thinking about this because someone told me I lacked ambition half my life ago, and perhaps… now too? The moment she said that, all hell broke loose inside my head.

A good friend offered counsel. “You had so much ambition,” she said, “you just struggled to articulate what you’re looking for in this world.” Which begs the question: can ambition and knowing what you want truly be divorced from one another? This year, I decided I want to run my business on my own terms, even if it makes no sense in this world. Even if it means one day, maybe, we will have to close. I want to remain small forever. I wonder if running a business this way makes me unambitious.

Now, 36 hours on, things are clearer. I want time to think. To write. To do work I’m proud of, even if it makes me neither rich nor famous. I want my girls to be happy with what we’ve built. I want anyone who’s running a business to know good lord, this shit is hard and we are all doing the best we can, just making things up along the way half the time. I want to be a better human being. I want to continue having unbilled, 5-hour meetings with clients because I genuinely like knowing who they are beyond the work we do together. And after last night, I want to learn how to be that mom on the sidelines too. 

Proud of everything, all the moments, for everyone I love. Beaming always.