Starbucks in the Hospital.

The service guy behind the counter has put on a new CD - Latino, or something. He puts a spin on his heel as he froths the milk. Seven doctors sit on the the centre couch discussing work over coffee, ocassionally cracking a joke, occasionally leafing through the magazine rack. Two men sit in another corner, business suits bent over serious matters, trying not to melt their starched bodies. I sit at the last corner alone, spent from making phonecalls, in a blue armchair taken from a childhood dream, sipping a grande latte.

A bit of perspective goes a long way.

Lord I'm (going to be) one,
Lord I'm two,
Lord I'm three,
Lord I'm four,
Lord I'm
6754 miles away from home.

The Old Man in Bed 56

makes an odd rasping sound. It takes a while for me to realise it is deliberate. I scan his bio-data almost automatically, reading his 84 years in 6 lines and 1 alphabet. He speaks Malay.

I go to him. The odd rasping sounds are words.

What do you need, Uncle? I ask, in spite of the language. I think I catch the word tandas, which means toilet, I think. A thick canvas chord runs industriously around his waist and behind the mattress. I’ve seen those chords before – bundled by every bed. I know that on some nights, when family isn't around to, they hug my grandfather to sleep. But I have never seen them in use. Until now. I do not understand him. I put my hand on his loose shoulder, trying to pretend that his thoughts would seep through his stained pajamas and diffuse into my arm.

He tries to sit up, but the green vines catch his vertebras and root them. I tell him I will get the nurse. I try to speak with my eyes, but I don’t really know how to.

The nurse hurries in; a young Chinese girl who immediately picks up the sharp, loud voice of every nurse, doctor and officer that enters the geriatric ward. The old man is getting frustrated. She croons and cajoles and probes. In Hokkien. I cringe and tell her he speaks Malay. Her plastic face falls to her feet and scuttles away to bring back a Malay colleague.

Apa? The second nurse calls into the hollow of bed 56. The other patients begin to stir and frown. Uncle 56 relaxes gratefully into familiar words. He begins to explain. The nurses are tightening the knots.

He’s demented lah, the second nurse flicks a laugh carelessly. The two nurses giggle, link arms and leave.

The rasping begins all over again. I cover my ears and sit tightly by my grandfather at the other end of the ward.

The rasping is no more. Now I am sure I heard the word tandas.

They said I could be a writer, so I tried

"The whole history dwindled soon into a matter of little importance but to Emma and her nephews: - in her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital."

-- Jane Austen, Emma.

Fiction, written with an austere pen trying too hard to be a debonair, has taken over my life. It always begins with some kind of expedition to uncover some kind of small truth, and always, ends in a smothering, woolen fabrication (never free-size), marked with a price tag.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I suck, but I do it anyway. Shucks.

A Memory.

He would place his hand just briefly, barely, briefly over mine (like a promise), putting his body slightly forward (like a shield) whenever we were about to cross a road. I would stand still and silent (like marble, or glass), hardly daring to breathe (hardly daring to be real). I always wondered if he would let his brushing fingertips slip through mine and pick my hand up.


(How fragile a memory that belongs only to me! The danger passes, we are on the other side, and you let go, as if it never was (and we never were). Nobody to check back with, nobody to witness - even my own eyes never stopped upon the small space between your body and mine where my memory lingers.)

On Dying.

Once you catch the smell dead and rotting human flesh, it never really leaves you - until you start to wonder if the stench really comes from within you.

Eh Buddies

We don't have much time left! Apart from the time I'll be spending in New York next month, I'm just a phone call/message away until... it's too late. (:

I'm calling you lah, but you must also take initiave what.

(My wings! I can feel them growing.)

A Dinner

Dinner at Yunsong's last night, with Olivia and Karweng. And of course, Yunsong.

If I ever need a moment to confirm the realisation that writing never perfectly captures a thought or feeling, this would be it.

Everything began on Wednesday or Thursday, 23rd or 24th of April 2008 in a white envelop I couldn't recognise, bearing the words "Ms Charmaine Han" and my address. I wondered so hard what it could be I didn't even wait till my standard post-dinner treatment of mail. It was a black card, handmade, bearing Yunsong's unfamiliar but known elaborate signature. An invitation to (a homecooked!)dinner! I couldn't stop smiling for the rest of the week. In all honesty, if everything had stopped with that card, I'd still be over the moon.

I thought the day would never come since the invitation bore no date I could count down to or mark on my dandy new calendar in bright colours. But it did come - last night. Yunsong, Karweng, Olivia and I had a lovely dinner of Asian Style Shrimp Soup (we still don't know which part of Asia), Coq de Vin (the french way of chicken romantically marinated with red wine), asparagus wrapped in raw ham (the fine dining way), carrots sweated in orange juice and herb, and home made custard (which tasted like chawanmushui that soon gave way to vanilla. We are no chefs, obviously). I hate cooking, ordinarily, but I think I would cook everday - okay, every month - if the three of them were around. I would have never imagined friendship could lead to a dimly lit dining room washed out with our favourite songs, over a lavish dinner.

Cooking is love. I am now convinced that I'd have to be thoroughly, ridiculously, compulsively and hopelessly in love to slave in the kitchen to touch the insides of smoeone else (or helplessly indebted). Even knowing the wonderfully romanticised person Yunsong is, the dinner - its planning, finery and effort - took my breath away. His handwritten cooking notes were planned in quantities for two, but I wouldn't have guessed he how he originally wanted it with the enthusiasm displayed at the suggestion of turning it into a gathering. But I think it was just lovely the way it happened. If it had been any more intimate, I think I might have taken him in the kitchen and ruined us forever. Men who cook romantically are not to be resisted.

For the sheer effort that went into that single dinner, I think my heart moved a little. (I think I'm still in awe of Yunsong's parents too, who took everything in their stride and played amazing hosts to the point where I felt really bad.) I wish I had better ways of describing how immensely nice it was to be laughing among Karweng and Olivia, chopping stuff, making messes and injuring each other.

I have given up. I have stopped seeing things as beginnings or ends in Life's plot. Only moments. Beautiful moments.