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[littlestloaf]

she has always lived a life of deceit. there is no truth in her world, except the one most conducive to the state she is in at a certain point in time. as a child she thrifted, for free, a manner of things, from classmates and teachers. she once coveted a pencil. (in her defence, it was high-tech, white, sleek, not slim but beautiful. mechanical.) she didn't take that, perhaps out of compassion, out of loyalty, to a friend who once gifted her a drawing and to whom the pencil meant a lot. but likely mostly because the opportunity never came. she is not a liar, she is not dishonest, she is a lazy opportunist, too naive to fight for more, too greedy to settle for less. but her dishonesty mostly centred around books. she has never able to tell the truth about which she loves and feels for most. and she felt for books with a glowing, frightening intensity. her friends had bookmarks to make theirs pretty. she had neither books nor bookmarks, but the former could be obtained more easily morally free. now she has a drawer full of magnetic bookmarks she has never looked at again since. to this day she wonders if their owners know they are gone. the first time she borrowed a book from the public library she immediately incurred an overdue fine for it, which she hoped to escape by stuffing the offending item into a bin in her backyard. attached to her name now is a fine almost as old as she is, marked indelibly in the records which decide your rights to public property based on a simple vision of primary school motto responsibility. her dad tells her to plead guilty, to plead childish ignorance, but she does not plead, because she wants the system to plead, to kiss her toes and say sorry we were wrong sorry we never tried to understand you sorry we frightened you as a child sorry we continue to feed you fear as an adult. she, an escaped library convict, borrows under other names now. she takes on her mother's surname to escape the boundaries of her world. she becomes her mother, to live momentary lives outside her own. no one has caught her out so far, the perverted robin hood who steals not from the rich but the near and gives not to the poor but to herself who is indeed poor because few or much have never felt enough. what feels enough, in a landscape where scarcity is a rule and a bedrock of a life that is not to be lived but to be earned. what can she be, if not a lie of herself when truth is cheap and cannot buy her heart's desires.

last night i had a conversation with r about this thing we used to do back in jc called honesty hour. i asked r if we were really honest then. we both agreed that we would never be able to do honesty hour again even if we tried. “i’m too dishonest,” i admitted. what i meant was that i was never good at saying what i really mean, though i always mean what i say (or try to).

last week on my birthday i finished the lying life of adults by elena ferrante. in the book, lying is a rite of passage of sorts to adulthood. that if we didn’t embellish our lives, temper our love, mediate our hate with untruths, the world would be unbearable to us. we lie to survive.

“The lying life of adults is not an epic, a fable, or a romance like the novels Giovanna’s mother proofreads. It is not a bildungsroman or Künstlerroman in the way the quartet is. It is a novel of disillusionment, as the literary critic Georg Lukács once described the category: a novel that strips away its young protagonist’s major social relationships to elevate her interiority to “the status of a completely independent world.” From its origins in Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the genre explores an individual’s struggle to adapt private fantasies and illusions to an outer world hostile to them. The word Ferrante uses to describe this feeling of discordance is estraneità: “extraneousness,” “noninvolvement,” or, as Ann Goldstein beautifully translates it, “estrangement.” When Giovanna embraces her father, but draws no comfort from his familiar scent, she is overwhelmed by “a sense of estrangement that provoked suffering mixed incongruously with satisfaction”—suffering from the rupture with her family, from the loss of a shared world; and satisfaction at how her distance allows her to see her parents and aunt anew, her outer gaze clarified by her inner state of homelessness.” (brilliant review by merve emre by the way)

i’ve been thinking about whether the woeful inadequacy of language through which we filter much of our lives turns what we know into half-baked truths. for people like me who negotiate their world through their coloniser’s language, are we bound to be cleaved apart from something that could make our experiences more “authentic”? can two people truly share a feeling, a sensation, without the mutual unspoken untruth that none of us are really sharing anything, that we only ever closely approximate each other and that there will forever be an untenable, uncrossable gap in the bridge of our togetherness? is loneliness inevitable in a world where the closest we can come to the truth is believing wholeheartedly in our lies?

all of this assumes, of course, that there is some truth out there that exists and can be sought out. maybe there is no such thing. maybe lying is the #humancondition. if so can we moralise the human condition?

[littlestloaf]

birthday breakfast

it turned out to be a party of the largest proportions she’s ever had in her life. when asked what she wanted, she thought, it isn’t that big of a deal. if i wanted a house could anyone buy it for me? tsh. mere semantics.

upon walking into her home, the day before the actual day, she sees fragile gold letters strung along the wall, stuck-up gold balloons fat and full of themselves. she is struck, momentarily, by the numbers 2 and 1. then touched, almost to the point of tears. she wonders if she’ll cry when they sing the birthday song. (fortunately or unfortunately, she doesn’t).

the lights pulse, she throws herself to abandon, the party is big and loud and there’s an actual beer keg. she doesn’t even drink beer, god. but it’s fun. happy. joyous. she feels appreciated. an uncle says, “we have to thank the birthday girl, without whom we would not have been able to enjoy all this good food!” laugh wide, be acceptably embarrassed, be of service, and be glad to be of service.

she’s there when the decorations are taken down. the wall looks sad again. again? was it ever sad? she realises she can’t remember what it looked like before all this happened to it. did you ask the wall, she wanted to shout, did you ask the wall before you slipped a corset on it and pulled so tight? maybe it doesn’t like to dress up! maybe it hates parties! maybe it hates everything being a big deal! maybe it hates being an instrument to a big deal!

she doesn’t shout. she thanks everyone amiably for their effort. she greets every guest as they go out of the door. she picks up the balloons and takes them to her room. they sit quiet like bright bloated animals in the corner next to her wardrobe. her new pets, with an expiration date so slow and invisible you’ll only realise when they’ve become a wrinkly heap, tired and punched-out by time.

she wakes up the next day to messages, instagram posts and stories of the party, faces red blue and grey under the lights and behind the shaky cameras. numerous congratulations on her birthday, in various forms. when she goes to the bathroom to wash up she stares for a while in the mirror.   林真心 voice: 不知道二十一岁的我，会是怎样？it’s funny. she hasn’t stopped framing her life in film since she started obsessively watching movie analyses on youtube. she likes the idea of trapping extended moments in camera. in chungking express cop 663 drinks black coffee in slow motion as faye watches him longingly. cop 223 says if memories could be canned he hopes his has an expiry date a thousand years later. the extended focus, forced or otherwise, denotes importance. it draws attention to insignificance. paying attention is a currency of love fewer of us than ever know how to trade.

she’s hungry. the fridge is stocked with food from yesterday that some kind person has stowed away for her. she opens an old ice cream container, and finds her birthday cake, slices stacked and tilting and crumbling, held together by sheer will, cold and frosting. she grabs a fork and takes the whole box to the dining room. sits down and props a sweatpants-clad leg up on the chair. opens the box and finishes a small bit. takes a photo of the giant quarter slice left. it’s so metaphorical, she muses, like ki-woo.

she has leftover birthday cake for breakfast.

i wrote this two years ago, when i turned 21. today i am 23, and i am at once sadder and more joyful than that girl of then. today i didn’t have a cake, nor did i blow a single candle, yet my heart is the biggest it has been in a long time. i was up late last night reading elena ferrante’s the lying life of adults (a perfect coming-of-age tale), and woke peacefully at 7.30am to my sister’s alarm, forgetting entirely that i was born 23 years ago today. i enjoyed corn croquettes for breakfast at the cinnamon college dining hall, and headed to uhc for the second dose of my hpv vaccine in preparation for the non-existent mindblowing sex that could possibly give me an std and cervical cancer. (i still hope to have mindblowing sex one day. i paid $690 ($230/dose) to insure myself from dying from it.) i continued with the book after i got back, and eventually gave in to a nap against the backdrop of my sister’s zoom meeting. woke up in time to head to muyoo+ at jurong point to get the mochi breads i’d always wanted to try after seeing people review it on instagram, and ate one (sweet potato and cheese flavoured) while waiting for our bus to arrive. the bread was sweet, soft, and probably tastes better when consumed visually on foodstagram pages. heat it up if you get it.

i made dinner with my grandma at her house, and sat down to a hot, homecooked meal for the first time in 2 weeks. i didn’t cry immediately like i expected to, only felt bloated, but very sated.

i’m home now, also for the first time in 2 weeks. i’m thinking about every message i have received today - from my parents and cousins, l, v, g, x, r & r (hah) and of course j. i’m thinking about the stupid smile that fixed itself on my face and wouldn’t go away after reading l’s post, the weight of years and love, and how i’m ready to carry all of that through forever. i’ve been down with lackluster depressed vibes this week, but at the same time possessed with an irrepressible mania, unable to be normal about anything whatsoever, spilling my guts all over instagram and talking and talking and talking. the world is entering into me this week and i felt so small yet somehow large enough to take all of it. and i want to make it through. i want to kick ass. two days later i will see this and think SIKE stupid bitch you are tired you are lost you are SAD and i am all of these things. i’ll be sad forever. but i’m taking a chance on you, life! i’m throwing a coin into the wishing well of your murky darkness and watching it bounce off and out of your bottom and thinking FUCK IT if i’m gonna cry my way through this shit let my tears be the fucking river styx let them be a matter of life and death let everything take up such importance that nothing matters. i’m owning you, mediocrity!

sorry this is so unhinged. thank you to everyone & everything for having come together to keep me alive till now. my joy belongs to you. and i hope it will, for a long time to come.

Last August Hours Before the Year 2000 By Naomi Shihab Nye

Spun silk of mercy, long-limbed afternoon, sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems.   What better blessing than to move without hurry   under trees? Lugging a bucket to the rose that became a twining   house by now, roof and walls of vine— you could live inside this rose. Pouring a slow stream around the ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit,   I thought we would feel old by the year 2000. Walt Disney thought cars would fly.

What a drama to keep thinking the last summer   the last birthday before the calendar turns to zeroes. My neighbor says anything we plant in September takes hold. She’s lining pots of little grasses by her walk.

I want to know the root goes deep   on all that came before, you could lay a soaker hose across   your whole life and know there was something under layers of packed summer earth   and dry blown grass to moisten.

[littlestloaf]

i give you lots of kisses, / and i give you lots of hugs, / but I never give you sandwiches / with bugs / in

upon re-reading coraline for what i think is the third time, i came across a version which includes a short write-up by neil gaiman on why he wrote coraline. at the end he says, of the book: “it was a story, i learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares.” i thought this point really interesting. what happens between the age of 10 to whatever age we are reading it at that makes us experience it so differently? why do we fear more in a world that feels more in our control than when we were children? 

coraline, neil gaiman’s 2002 short novella titled after its protagonist, is about a perceptive, curious, snarky and constantly bored eleven-year-old girl who, upon moving into a new house in the english countryside (?), discovers a door that opens into a brick wall in the drawing room which houses old furniture from her grandma. in true neil gaiman fashion, that wall doesn’t stay a wall for long. it opens to, through a long and dark hallway, what we can christen as ‘the other world’, which is exactly the same as the one coraline lives in, except everyone she knows looks a little different, and have buttons sewn into their faces for eyes.

gaiman sets up, very wonderfully and empathetically, the adult world as seen through a child’s eyes - from her new neighbours miss spink, miss forcible and mister bobo who call her, despite her incessant corrections, caroline instead of coraline, to her parents whose brains and noses are buried in what seems like tedious anthropological research work, leaving their next main preoccupation to be telling coraline to leave them alone to do that very work, it’s no surprise that coraline is constantly bored out of her mind. she ponders, like i still do, “why so few of the adults she had met made any sense.”

a bit of a sidetrack here, but children’s book’s authors and illustrators have what is in my opinion the rarest gift in the world - that of never truly growing up. they remember exactly what it was like to be a child - the helplessness, the drabness of living in an adult reality full of things they neither understood nor cared to understand, but also the vast richness of one’s inner world, your first room, if you will, to be decorated and lived in as you please. a room with neither boundaries nor limitations, where imagination romps with endless glee. whenever i read children’s books i wonder when it was that i stopped making up stuff to cushion myself against the stark sharpness of real life.

anyway, because coraline was written as a children’s book (or at least a book neil gaiman wrote for his children), there are some very straightforward lessons, i think, to be taken from it. one is, very simply, that of bravery, of doing things even if you’re deathly scared of them. which is, now that i think of it, quite an adult lesson, actually.

but another lesson i gleaned from this reading is a little more complicated. what the other mother offered to coraline was a dangly carrot of all her heart’s desires, even those she might not be consciously aware of, like love and attention. near the end of the book coraline meets (supposedly) the other mister bobo, who, perhaps through the machination of the other mother, tries to convince her to

“Stay here with us,” said the voice from the figure at the end of the room. “We will listen to you and play with you and laugh with you. Your other mother will build whole worlds for you to explore, and tear them down every night when you are done. Every day will be better and brighter than the one that went before. Remember the toy box? How much better would a world be built just like that, and all for you?”

“And will there be gray, wet days where I just don’t know what to do and there’s nothing to read or to watch and nowhere to go and the day drags on forever?” asked Coraline.

From the shadows, the man said, “Never.”

“And will there be awful meals, with food made from recipes, with garlic and tarragon and broad beans in?” asked Coraline.

“Every meal will be a thing of joy,” whispered the voice from under the old man’s hat. “Nothing will pass your lips that does not entirely delight you.”

“And could I have Day-Glo green gloves to wear, and yellow Wellington boots in the shape of frogs?” asked Coraline.

“Frogs, ducks, rhinos, octopuses—whatever you desire. The world will be built new for you every morning. If you stay here, you can have whatever you want.”

whatever you desire? what a dream! however, coraline happens to be part of that percentage of kids that won’t eat the marshmallow even if you leave them with it in the room. in reply to the other mister bobo she

“sighed. “You really don’t understand, do you?” she said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?””

while there is, of course, the very real threat that the other mother means to do coraline harm (she’s swallowed the souls of three other children, after all), what i think adults fear when reading the novella, what truly gives us nightmares, is the fact that though a life in which every wish you have ever had is fulfilled is possibly somewhere out there, it will not guarantee your happiness. in fact, it quite possibly falls short. very short. an indication that what you want is not good for you, or worse, a web of illusions, of imagined happiness that threatens the joy and stability in what you think is currently a very mediocre life. you want adventure, you want hedonism, you want the things you want, but not only may these things turn out exactly opposite to your expectations, but that you may only think you want, but not truly want them. and with this alternate, ideal life served to you on a silver platter, you are still going to run from your vision of happiness, because that vision isn’t really happiness, but only what you thought was happiness. the biggest, scariest thing about coraline is not the other mother, but having your idea of fulfillment pulled out like a rug straight beneath your feet, thirsting after it, parched, only to find yourself grasping at a mirage.

maybe this is just a mantra to be happy with your lot, a simple lesson to children on not complaining because they may get more than they bargain for (a soul-eating beldam). but perhaps a more comforting message to us all is that at times when we fail to get what we want, it may be a good thing; the universe’s way of protecting us from ourselves. and when we do get what we want, it’d may do us good to consider not just the thing, but the want itself, with a healthy measure of caution. because who knows? it might be far, far more than you ever bargained for.

“Oh—my twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice Cream. I give you lots of kisses, And I give you lots of hugs, But I never give you sandwiches With bugs In.”

coraline, neil gaiman

I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dogs. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: “Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.”

theories about the universe, blythe baird

[littlestloaf]

my brilliant friend, and the unbrilliant me

i started this book feverish with the desire for new words, new worlds, and ferrante delivered - she transported me to a small town in italy and the lives of elena and her neighbours who live in it, their days fraught with quarrels old and new, with poverty and survival and the violence inextricably tied to it.

this book reminded me of a current friend, and an older one, and how those friendships, though filled with closeness and open confidance were, for me, inlaid with a sense of competition which no one but me could understand, and always filled me with dark, bloody inferiority. something ferrante really explicated is the inability to truly separate friendship from romance - friendship is not a shadow of romantic love, but fills its outlines, and oftentimes swells beyond it. it can be something very beautiful, but also rough-edged and ugly, selfish and restrained in all the worst ways.

i saw myself in elena and therefore disliked her - her desire to build beauty in the shabbiness of small town life, her easily yielding acquiescence, her few acts of defiance as just that - an act, a show, her fragile self-worth, dependent not only upon transient academic achievements, but also on the unequivocal validation of lila, the friend who makes up the other part of the friendship equation. like elena i admired lila, wanted to be her, wanted to be with her, as if her presence were a light and we would both shine the brighter for it. we recognised in her a meanness, a frightful, tensed violence, like a hand grenade liable to explode; it only needed to be thrown. yet all the same we are drawn to her; or should i say, precisely because of that we are drawn to her? i loved lila, felt for her a tenderness i feel for those friends, yet i knew that like elena, i loved her with the intensity with which i detested myself. this is not to render the love less in any way, but illustrates a relationship of dependence in which elena will forever strive to be of need to someone who doesn't want to need anyone. and she will be hurt by it, time and time again. in a way she wants to be the lighthouse of lila's life, a saving beacon of light in darkness, but most of the time she is an emergency torch - sometimes called upon when needed, but otherwise powerless to change any of their fates or to take up more space in lila's life than intended by the latter.

halfway through the book i had to put it down because i was filled with such dislike for all the characters and their unbearably human acts of cruelty, of greed, of pride and of humility when the situation calls least for it. i hated the men especially - the toxic masculine bravado, the wielding of women as trophies, weapons and property. but i soon picked it up again, returning to elena's world in time for her short vacation away from her riotous neighbourhood with their innumerable grievances and oppressive gaze. i made my way through the rest of the book with the ferocity of someone watching a train hurtling, with increasing speed, towards an inevitable crash, unable to tear my eyes off the imminent ruptures bound to tear elena away from what she knows and who she loves.

funnily enough, though i think i sound rather invested in the characters, i did not plan to read the rest of the quartet; i wanted my journey with elena to end peacefully with the conclusion of this book so i could stop witnessing accidents ready to happen. but ferrante ends on such an effective cliffhanger - you may not want, but you need to know what will become of elena and lila, if they move through their days together, maybe not in the way elena originally envisioned but easily contented with keeping her place in lila's life.

i notice, only now, that elena's namesake is the author herself, making this a kind of secondhand autobiography (if the events in this book hold any water). i think it's an admirable feat to write your life into a book, much less four. whether i'll read the rest of the series is still up in the air, depending on whether my desire to follow elena's life to the end wins out over my exhaustion of being so intimately involved with her drama lols. beginning to realise now that i love angst but also have little tolerance for it.

[littlestloaf]

“went home. came down. got sad. there was a note on the kitchen table. nomi: any plans for after graduation? that’s how we communicated large, vague ideas. on paper that can burn up in less than one second. i stared at the words for an exorbitantly long time.

       then i wrote. dear dad: i intend to become a model of courage and dignity.”

people say that book genres don’t matter because it was a construct made up to sell more books, so i’ve never bothered to find out what exactly miriam toews dabbles in, and have instead decided to name it a blanket of fun and snark swathed thinly over unbearable angst. or a cookie with popping candy in it, except the candy is really spicy and the roof of your mouth is slick with sweet and saliva and on fire.

a complicated kindness is toews’ third novel, a coming-of-age story featuring sixteen year old nomi nickel who is witty, brilliant and violently depressed, trapped helplessly in teenagehood, a deeply religious Mennonite community and the empty shell of a house her mother and sister left. she lives through long, boring days with her schoolteacher father, whose naive yet straight-laced commitment to atoms and facts and scripture for a shred of sanity and certainty keeps dad and daughter almost close and firmly apart.

there is a deep, fast-running undercurrent of grief in all of toews’ works. there’s losing the people you love, and there’s losing the life you could have lived because of some words a man named menno simons said five hundred years ago when he set off in europe to do his own peculiar religious thing. toews’ characters are often torn between faith and disavowal. they believe so it will make their lives not better, but easier. nomi believed until she witnesses her mother and sister’s spirals into frustration, debilitating bouts of forced cheerfulness for the former and relentless rebelliousness for the latter. nomi has questions no spiritual doctrine can answer, and she lives in a perpetual state of grief and numbness, trying to reconcile the absence of the two women with the rubble of a life she cobbles together with alphabet meal rituals she shares with her father.

every one of toews’ female characters have such rawness to them and she writes pain with a wondrous sensitivity and keenness.

“I didn’t want Travis to care for me. I wanted him to shove me up against the stucco wall of the boarded-up bus depot and tell me if he couldn't have me he’d kill himself.”

there is so much to come to terms with in nomi’s world, and her stubborn teenage headbutting against everything that makes up that world so she can see if it is as sturdy as she was taught to believe it was or if it shatters and falls apart makes you love her with a vibrant, aching tenderness you wish to offer every girl out there who is lost and hurting in fierce, thudding throbs. you’ll love her and them for every small way they try to go on.

“she told me it was impossible to send a letter to heaven because the wind does not go there. heaven is always calm, with no wind. she said other stuff but i didn’t really understand it. i understood there was no wind in heaven. that’s partly why i love the wind that blows around in this town. it makes me feel like i’m in the world.”

in this book, the complicated kindness is freedom, is ignorance, is self-denial, is love, because what else is love if not a leaving, a letting go, a knife that cuts two ways, a blunt severing that never makes it all the way through but sits like a nail in flesh?

truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was a little kid and how I loved to fall asleep in my bed breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass and listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.

[littlestloaf]

ponti: a review

call me superstitious if you like. i think i am. i believe in small signs, in fate, in meant-to-bes. in death as destiny. in the inevitability of suicide.

so it makes sense that on the day i found the bookmark ms chia gave to us before graduation in sec 4, tucked neatly in the front pocket of my journal, i would flip to the back to read the poem i so loved, and returned to, time after time - sharlene teo's how to be happy. and it makes sense that on that day i revisited an instagram account selling books for mutual aid, books i'd already seen before and had no reason to be scrolling through, yet found my eye caught on the hibiscus red of a book called ponti. written by sharlene teo. i bought it, and here i am.

sharlene teo's debut novel, ponti, reads like a hot fevered dream from the emptiness of 4pm after math remedial afternoons. i picked up the book almost immediately after i received it, and was drawn deeply to szu - her sullenness, her teenage broodiness. there was much intermittent reading in between - sometimes while procrastinating, sometimes on the train on the way to work, sometimes at night before bed to lull myself to sleep. something in the chapters i read tonight made it hard to put down, and i found myself leafing, steadily, page after page. "that's the sign of a good book," my sister said, and i rushed defensively, "i have no idea what it's about though. there's no plot. but i can't stop reading." "that's also a sign of a good book," she said.

i am undecided, primarily because i feel long past a state of being able to clearly divide books into good or bad, like or dislike. most of the time bad books are simply books i dislike. i haven't seen one of those in a while.

ponti traces the life of three women - szu, circe and amisa, who is szu’s mysterious, compelling, fatally beautiful and (you have probably guessed this by now) emotionally unavailable mother, an actress of a flopped movie franchise, also called ponti. szu is, of course, nothing like her mother. she’s a known weirdo in school, and often punished both socially, by her classmates, and institutionally, by her teachers. she meets transfer student circe, who certainly lives up to her greek namesake - fiery, acidic and vicious. 

if you are looking for plot you may be disappointed. the book is rather bare-bones, and nothing spectacularly exciting happens. no bildungsroman, no dramatic reunions or familial resolutions. but there is an uncanny magnetism in all of teo's characters - they repel and scare me, but at the same time the thing that sits unnameable in their chests looks the same as mine. it is a bug-eyed, frightened sadness, a lost grief. it has made monsters of them all, perhaps most literal in amisa's case. it's been some time since i've read or seen a teenage fallout that moved me this much (the last one being a scene from house of hummingbird), but looking at the fraught threads, the fraying and fiery unraveling of szu and circe's relationship, and thinking about the way we lay ourselves open, flayed and raw and bled out in the ugliest means possible, desiring visibility yet fearing, knowing rejection. "i don't know what to say," circe says, offering tissue to a crying szu; sadness makes strangers of us to each other, and vulnerability only leaves us angry and scared.

these days i find myself trying to define girlhood. that golden gleam of early afternoons fresh out from lessons, running down to the canteen for snacks, eating without a care on the floor outside our classroom. the aimless after-class hours, whiling time away talking, work forgotten on our desks or hastily stuffed into schoolbags. teenage girlhood is no sofia coppola movie - no pretty pastels, no soft lighting to round out and blunt our barbed edges - (if you’ve been to any kpop boy group concert you’d understand) we ran up against each other with an unrelenting, unforgiving fierceness. emotional brawls were common, and more often than not, lethal. ponti brings to bear all of this without the sardonism of mean girls, neither demonising nor romanticising female teenagehood. teo probes, instead, at the landscape of femininity against the backdrops of the trials of growing up, and the disillusionments of growing old. unfortunately, books which explore female characters so wholly, placing them not as good or bad people but simply as humans who have experienced life and are therefore still reeling from its blows, have been few and far between for me. these women are not aids to any man’s emotional development - the men are, in fact, largely absent from any of their narratives - either divorced, separated, or simply non-existent. in a way, their absence functions as one of the many ghosts in the book, a haunting that never ceases to prowl through the women’s lives, but the story is never about them nor the holes they have left behind, but about the women living with, within, without those holes, their lives containing yet never defined by them. 

ponti is a compelling read about grief and loss, and the inevitable ugliness carved out from surviving them. it is a deeply, richly coloured and woven tapestry of female girlhood, youthhood and adulthood, a blanket of the past none of us can help returning to, time and time again, for answers, for recovery, for hope. i spoke about fate at the beginning of this review, and like time, it is circular and takes us back with love, kindness and perhaps even forgiveness for the people we used to be. szu, thirty-three and rewatching her mother’s movies, says to the onscreen pontianak, her mother in costume, the same thing she wishes for her own daughter every night - “So it’s a hot, horrible earth we are stuck on and it’s only getting worse. But still. I want to care for you always. May you be safe, may you feel ease. May you have a long, messy life full of love.”

if you could meet again that thirteen year old girl, frightened, tearful, yet defiant, what would you say to her?

[littlestloaf]

back to the future: 刻在我心底的名字 and nostalgic hope

i am starting this from the get-go with an unpopular opinion - i did not like this film as much as i thought i would. it certainly isn't a bad film; it may actually be one of the best lgbtq+ films i have ever seen (i say this about every single taiwanese lgbtq+ film so maybe this doesn't count). but i do believe it gets off to a somewhat rough start with the pacing in the first half of the film. 

first things first, some plot! it's 1987, and martial law has just been lifted in taiwan. it is against this backdrop that our two protagonists, jia-han and birdy meet, in a lovely, comedic scene at the swimming pool where birdy tries to hold his breath for a ridiculous amount of time to break his own record. “后来我才知道 (i only found out later)," jia-han reminisces, ”他的名字叫 birdy, 不叫笨蛋 (that his name is birdy, and not idiot)." there is an incredible lyrical intensity to this meet-cute, with a soft piano in place of the gurgle water makes in the hollow of your ears when you're submerged in it, and the sun's glares refract into a stunning halo around jia-han's head. the two become fast friends, and spend lots of time together watching movies, sharing music, and taking a trip to taipei for president chiang ching-kuo's funeral tribute. amidst their growing chemistry and obvious affection for each other is the fog of homophobia that hangs heavily in their school, catholic and all-boys. the two come together, and apart again, in a self-destructive dance that you know is bound to implode with the intensity of their repressed feelings. and things come to a head as the school introduces a co-educational policy and birdy meets ban-ban (in a rather satisfying scene of rebellion against the school's authoritarian rule). 

funnily enough, i found a review of the film which gushes about the exact things i thought were the weaknesses of the film. the slightly jarring skips between timelines, and abrasions between the two boys which felt too much and over-dramatised at some points. i thought the editing could've been improved though i am, as of now, unable to provide any constructive feedback with regards to that. anyway, because so much drama was crammed into a short period of time, it was emotionally-exhausting too, which made the runtime feel a little longer than it actually was. i remember seeing where i was at after that felt like the 4895489th confrontation, and there was still 45 minutes left. it wasn't that i wanted it to be over, but the falling apart was certainly difficult to watch. 

upon more reflection, however, i believe the intense amount of drama was (1) intentional (2) inevitable. a quote by jia-han pretty much explains the former: 每個人的初戀，都跟史詩電影一樣偉大 (everyone's first love feels as grand as a epic movie). for the latter, given that we experience much of the film through the lens of a teenager in the throes of coming-of-age, the dramatisation was understandable. which one of us didn't brood intensely over lost love at 17, real or imagined? the socio-political context of the film also set much of the stage for the drama - shortly after the two boys meet we get an understanding of the oppressive pressure-cooker air of the era, encapsulated by the religious and implicit hysteria of homophobia of the school which espouses a monk-like asceticism despite full awareness of teenage boy hormones, and valorises a masculinity that turns their students against each other in an effective self-surveillance system of bullying. liu ensures that, like all the adults in the film, we audience keep a strict, hawk-eye vision of our protagonists. yet, what we experience is not a sense of voyeurism, but a building tension and anxiety as we watch them in spaces where the public and private overlap in terrifyingly intimate ways. the boys toilet, what looks like a karaoke bar, their dorm room, and even jia-han's bedroom back at home. privy to their interactions in these spaces where they often rest, eyes closed but hearts so, so open, we see, in shot through tiny, claustrophobic glass windows fixed onto otherwise opaque doors, how horrifyingly vulnerable they are to the cruel sanctions of peers and society, and also learn that the line drawn between love and care by the priest is an arbitrary one - they are one and the same. 

therefore, what was especially valuable in this film (and what won me over), were the heartbreakingly beautiful scenes of tenderness which were made all the more poignant by the relentlessness of violent drama. we get quiet sequences where the two share food and space under the orange glow of a nightlamp, naps on each other's shoulders, waiting by the phone for someone to call, washing of hair, songs played using a jukebox and over a payphone, and slow, careful brushing of sand off an arm. for all their dramatic and painful showdowns, there is so much to be said about these scenes - the gentleness of their hands which inflict the very same bruising blows. love in a closed fist. 

the water and blood were very reminiscent of wong kar-wai's happy together, wherein the couples' relationships are renewed in the baths that seem almost baptisimal, reverent, full of hurt, shame, desire and longing. but most of all, care. while the blood symbolises the violence of a society merciless in its sexual governing of the populace, the water, like birdy's namesake, offers hope for a free-flowing freedom - not just to love, but really, to be. a line from the theme song perfectly captures this sentiment - 如果有下次 我會再愛一次 (given another chance, i would love again) - a conviction to a choice in a society which offers little to none of it. 

this film is not an easy watch; i believe some trigger warnings (homophobia, implied sex, violence, some dub/non-con) are required before anyone decides to delve into it. despite all of that, however, it is one buoyed by hope. as birdy lashes out against the repressive authoritarianism of the school teachers (dressed in military uniforms no less), jia-han replies: 你以为这个世界改变了，其实根本没有变 (you thought the world had changed, but in fact it hasn’t at all)！thinking about that in context of the legalisation of gay marriage in taiwan, how much that must've meant to a community who had lived through despair in an unchanging world, yet held out, all the same. and the world has changed for them. these films are repositories of stories people have stored in them for years, words they never got to say, love and pain stoked like a small but ever-burning fire in their chests, things they thought they would surely have to bring to their graves. 

i think that is why, despite all the exhaustion i felt from watching the film, it was difficult to get out of my head. the emotional intensity is in fact a homage to the struggles of the community of that time. and a review i read put it well: that unlike most critically acclaimed taiwanese films such as 那些年，我們一起追的女孩​​​​​​​ (you're the the apple of my eye) which can only look back on the past of a youthful, nostalgic first love, 刻在我心底的名字 (your name engraved herein) is an ode to the future of reunion, the recovery of times lost and love never forgotten. 

so yeah, i have definitely overlooked the pacing problems in favour of the overall message of the film. just to add some nuance to what looks now like unabashed gushing about the film, i wish they added some of the scenes played in the end credits to the actual film!!!!!!! i personally feel like it would really have helped with the pacing i complained about (and who doesn't need some fluff after intense gay angst). apparently these were scenes from the book on which it was based so guess what i am reading now. 

[littlestloaf]

excerpt: how to be happy, sharlene teo

if you close your eyes / and keep perfectly still / a postcard sunset could be / just as lovely as a brown/ night over roof-tops; an / illegible brown, a slow night / with no stars.

[littlestloaf]

maybe around a month ago, i’d had to watch christopher nolan’s memento for my film studies module, and i’ve had a piece titled “memento: remembering to forget or forgetting to remember or simply doing whatever the fuck you want because reality isn’t real” sitting in my drafts folder since then. i’d really wanted to review it, because it’s the first time i had Thoughts after watching a nolan film. (in all fairness i’ve only ever seen one other nolan film which is inception but it was too much mindfuckery and i Did Not Like It.) i know never to procrastinate my writing because once i lose inspiration it’s Gone For Life (i have no reason to be capitalising random words but it is adding an Effect i cannot explain.) anyways. memento review not done, and it’s probably the only film i enjoyed in this module so far. go figure. 

last night, because of eye redness and pain that should be diagnosed as chronic at this point, i found myself throwing an ice pack we used as kids to break fevers into a green hello kitty handkerchief we also used as kids and slapping it onto my eyes to relieve the itchiness and scary red veins. while praying that this better not be linked to my diabetes or turn me blind, i decided to pick back up on my recent public transport hobby - listening to podcasts. the title was “why did two parents murder their adopted child?”, from the guardian audio long read. (highly recommended by the way, especially if reading long articles turns you off.)

and i thought, yes, why?!?!?!? i wanted answers. i wanted to know if they were monsters, who made them monsters, or if this was just an elaborate media conspiracy. 

this could be a spoiler if you plan to listen to the podcast, but also not very much so if you are an avid reader of keigo higashino’s books. which is that you pretty much do not get the why. there are speculations of course; the calm british male voice narrating the podcast points out that investigators thought the couple were selfish, narcissistic individuals, adopting the girl in a bid to elevate their already elevated upper middle-class nice friendly neighbourhood couple status. psychologists state that the mother was slightly mentally impaired by her depression and anxiety. the overarching theory was that, whatever reason they adopted the child for, they’d gotten tired of the effort required to raise her, the mental energy necessary to lavish on a pre-adolescent girl whom they’d already spent so much money and time on through ballet, violin, french, chinese, piano lessons. she was an intelligent, precocious young girl. months and weeks prior to her death she’d complained of giddiness, of feeling like someone was trying to kill her. it is unknown whether she was aware that, if the investigators’ theories were right, her parents had been trying to poison her with lorazepam for months, so much so that traces of it were found on the first 3 centimetres of a strand of her hair. 

if you’d watched memento you’d know that the basic premise of it is about this man who suffers from extreme short-term memory after a blow to his head from the murderer-rapist of his wife who is, by the way, yet to be caught. so he takes the investigation and revenge into his own hands. but the catch is, he can never remember anything for more than a few hours at a time. so he uses badass homemade tattoos on his body, polaroids, and little notes to self written on those polaroids to give him a narrative to return to whenever he forgets. except nothing is at all as it seems and you should really watch the film if you haven’t because it’s probably nolan’s best movie even if other people won’t tell you that. 

the similarity between memento and this podcast is that both tell the story backwards - nolan quite literally, and this author in retrospect through tracing the lives of those involved. and because they are backwards, you are sitting at the end of an event with all the evidence laid out right before you. yet, there is a strange unknowability to all of it. it disturbs me that you can never really get down to the root of anything, no matter how much you investigate it. maybe you’ve convicted a murderer, and they said they killed their victim out of jealousy. all evidence could point to that fact, they get convicted, etc. but did they really kill out of jealousy? did they even kill the person? what if all the evidence is only circumstantial and happens to point towards them in a very bizarre coincidence? honestly, that’s between them and god. between them and nobody if there is no god. 

i’ll always want to know why. i’ll always want honesty in a world where there is no objective reality whatsoever. maybe it has to do with wanting comfort. if i knew why they did it i could prevent anyone else from ever doing it again. maybe it’s just plain, simple curiosity. but it just sucks, for the lack of a better word, that i’ll probably never get any closer to the big, capital T truth. 

people who knew the couple expressed shock upon knowing they had become convicted child murderers, while members of the public accused them of devious heartlessness. i thought investigators were supposed to be neutral. calling someone selfish and neurotic isn’t neutral. my main point is that everything is so mediated, so filtered through something else, that perhaps by the time it gets through to you it may be unrecognisable. a large scale game of telephone. 

kurosawa plays with this premise in rashomon, coining what we know now as the rashomon effect, which occurs whenever two or more witnesses give competing interpretations of the same event, thereby preventing listeners from determining the objective truth. other forms of media which deep delve into the idea of public enemies, like miller’s enemy of the people and the untamed, similarly point out how perspectives are circulated, warped and destroyed. how power frames things one way and then another. 

even if my dreams of living in a world where everything can be simply Known will never be fulfilled, it’s nice to have these things that shine a mirror right into your face. our culpability can never be underestimated; we are all a node in a great big game of telephone. no message can hope to survive to the end, and can only die trying.

i guess this should be salient given the era of fake news and whatever but i am mostly thinking about how all of us are these tiny little beings in a large world, forever, strangers to the workings of it, to ourselves and to one another. we just...never know, you know. ha. (apparently my sister and i use “you know” so much at the end of sentences that L has started to imitate us. how do i let him know that nobody will ever know.)

[littlestloaf]

is this it then? is this my life? do i hold it by its two small, fragile hands? do i look it in the eye, draw it close to my chest? embrace it without breaking it?

tonight i met a friend, s, who i haven't seen in more than a year, for dinner. she is a companion of fate - that is, with her i am often reminded of just how much our lives seem spun, carefully and deliberately, winded and twisted in purposeful patterns of strings around the pinky of some unknown entity. we chart different, yet often same paths, treading in the wake of one another only ever realising it when we convene, however intermittently.

she mentioned a familiar name and that was how i found out her best friend volunteers at the same shelter as i do; we met one afternoon when one of us picked up a shift off our usual schedule. "it's a small world!" i gasp to s, every single time we meet. yet whenever we touch points after having gone about our separate adventures of the ebb and flow of life, the world seems to expand, just a bit, shores edging cautiously into the void of space. anxiety involves a lot of feeling trapped; it's claustrophobic in many senses of the word. you're shut in, tail clamped in a spring, hope slow and elusive if even existent. "you guys are doing so much," she said in admiration of her friend and i, shaking her head, and i see before me, for the first time in a long time, an eternity of doors.

i wear this life like old clothes; i've grown comfortable and snug in it, it fits over me loose and clean. i see its patches and flaws and know never to wear it out where it will be examined and picked apart by the mere power of a gaze.

perhaps this life is ordinary to me because i live it. no one can see it like i do. what would i give to see the world from the point of view of every single person i love and give myself to?

/

i am not getting any younger. soon my friends will be married, and soon they will have kids. soon the years shall succeed us.

but today, at least, i felt young. the same lightness of youth i felt at 17 when i didn't know better, when school was the most difficult thing in my life but homework was tossed, forgotten in the balmy heat of the afternoon, hours spent lulling, slow and languid, unrushed, easy, in the canteen, class benches, bugis, mcdonald's, boost. in those hours i stepped through to a green and gold liminity. where problems were enlarged yet miniscule, where i listened and my ears were sincere, warm with talk and laughter. it takes me a while to remember sometimes, but i live a life clean and blessed, full of familiar eyes and gentle hands.

[littlestloaf]

22 comes to me slow, a little sweet, quiet and without fanfare. she is unassuming, dressed in a long blue skirt, and a soft white shirt. i expect her to have brought some lessons for me, an epiphany perhaps, or a stroke of inspiration for my impending entrance into the awful adult world of work.

she holds out her hands - pale, pink, empty. i give myself instead, pressing palm to palm, skin to skin, our lashes intermingling in a fluttery waltz.

she holds me, and i let myself be held.

[littlestloaf]

i think: grief as a gun, but the bullets are ghosts and my body is riddled with holes no one can see. i’m afraid, constantly, of giving myself to love because there is so much to lose. i protect myself from feeling, swath myself in a thick, slick, wet jelly coating so the noise and grit of the world cannot touch me. i cry then cleave the pain from me, tear at it with a knife, and it leaves me alone, mostly. life and death turn over and over, a cold, hardened stone in my palm. 

l waved goodbye to jacob’s still, stiff body in the drab grey box with a weightless, carefree ease. “see you tomorrow!” he said cheerfully, and i explained to everyone who will listen how a child cannot possibly grasp the concept of death. and i turn back on myself: what do i understand of it, 22 years, loss a passing stranger whose name i know whose face i recognise yet never, ever truly seen. we sit down to tea without words. as the years pass their visits increase in frequency, my sister says whenever new life arrives old life must go, i am powerless against the impending births that will forever warp the lives i know. change is the only constant, the world waxes thick and wanes thin in renewal, we cannot seek immutability, arrest, moving on, no more suffering, yada yada. for such a profound and transformative feeling, our reactions to grief are often trite and heavily recycled. 

it occurs to me now that death registers, very briefly, somewhere at the back of my head like static. then it fizzles out and i plod along, always moving. on, through, past. i have never really believed in its existence. perhaps never will. it might be unnecessary to see everything in its binaries and opposites. life exists without death, death without life, because they are maybe the same thing and there is no other side of the cosmic coin we so yearn and dread. there is no “better place”, no “rainbow bridge”. if we believe in the soul, the essence then perhaps we understand that we are neither created nor destroyed but merely conserved, converted, an unchanging in a changeability. i hope the world believes in laws as much as i do. 

[littlestloaf]

staying afloat in the black tides of heaven

i borrowed this from the unicorn library not quite knowing what to expect. i always read book reviews then build up ridiculously high expectations then feel disappointed when i fail to relate to the book in the same way someone i admire does. thankfully, the library offered me less a review than a in-depth synopsis just enough to pique curiosity. but having read few (or no??) books by lgbtq+ authors spotlighting lgbtq+ characters, i harboured more than a fair bit of excitement. 

good news is, the book didn’t disappoint. rather, it left me laving at the crumbs of the ending, wondering why a whole meal left my gut wanting. yang builds a world just different enough dive into, but similar enough to our own to tug at your heartstrings and conscience. if anything it was our world turned externally on its head - a government of sorts called the Protectorate, comprising Tensors who are just above minimally versed in slackcraft, which seems to me the ability to manipulate the five elements by expanding one’s mindeye and plucking through a giant network of meta-strings (the fact that this network was called the slack did not lose itself on me; think co-workers sort of communicating through an app installed in everyone’s brains except there are no direct conversations just the 5 elements). the Tensors in turn are led by a Protector not so much devious as having learnt to navigate a world unmouldable to her ambitions. simplified she is an evil lesbian mother well-versed in mind games and emotional manipulation. a twisted milf, if you will. (not twisted, if you’re into that). the Protectorate rules over a population of laypeople who know, at most, the very barest of minimum of slackcraft. whenever they have the slightest bit of political awakening the Protector just kills them all and waters the crops with their blood (my own metaphor). so yeah, our world, but with superpowers. our technology of communicating by wires is made simultaneously backwards and revolutionary, especially in yang’s world where it is still in its infancy. 

but the book is a psychological exploration more than a political one. we trace the lives of twins akeha and mokoya, their shared childhood and divided adulthood. the children lived in a world where you lead a genderless existence till the age of 17, where you go through a Confirmation in which you choose a gender. i can’t be sure if this is a product of my own biases or the part of the author, or if the amazon synopsis left more of an impression on me than i thought, but gender did seem kind of subtly coded into the twins before they’d Confirmed. in any case, this is a utopia i would want to raise any kid in. 

on a sidenote, the relationship between twins, often depicted as telepathic and on a plane of mutual understanding no one can ever hope to reach, has always fascinated me. the force, the inextricable bond between the twins feel real and solid, the only grounding thing in a story of rise and fall, change and destruction. “come home,” mokoya pleads with an estranged akeha, “i don’t want to raise a child who’s never met you.” something about that reads so achingly like love to me; small and wanting, a tiny crack in an otherwise unbroken white wall, unnoticed but vulnerable, open and fork-tender. akeha’s affections, often barbed and cutting, only add to the inevitableness of the drifting-apart we know is to come. good intentions do not blunt its force. but their bond is a fleshy thing and blood and sinew can be renewed, albeit at a cost and not without irretrievable loss. (spoiler alert but also not spoiler alert: there is bloodshed, only to be expected in a book about love and hope and being in the world).

i love this book more for its telling of internal worlds rather than external ones. the plot was looser than i would have liked (though this may discredit yang because it is, after all, the first in a series); instead, it reads rather like a fantasy coming-of-age, of understanding self-determination in a world so ruled by fate and power, real and imagined. “The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives. But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.” in many ways the book is about akeha first learning, then choosing to swim. but mostly as a reader you’re buoyed by yang’s vivid world, staying afloat for the ride. 

[littlestloaf]

it’s not a myth that i sleep better on my side. something feels comfortable, about the way one arm is pressed under the heavy weight of a whole body. but not just any side. it has to be a side facing a wall, arm flattened out under me, face buried tight and beneath a bolster. it’s reliable to be curled against a wall of any sort - the side of something flat and perpendicular to the ground - close and closer, even if it means the possibility of shoulder ache.

i remember reading a study, years ago, about how sleeping on your side would damage your organs over the long term. and now a quick google search tells me that sleeping on your side could not be more beneficial for your gut, especially your left side. i try to take comfort in how nothing is certain and medical knowledge is like clinging desperately to a cold wall while buoyed and adrift in the untethered strings of your dreams. does it matter that i’m left-handed but sleep on my right-side? nothing is certain and i am not one thing but always another, always another. 

the other night i was on my back drenched in a pool of my own sweat, mind toeing and hovering the brink of consciousness, body lying in another shadow of a puddle somewhere else. i wasn’t in a state between wakefulness or dream; i was in a space somewhere beyond that, a place where the two were one and the same but combined and entirely different. it was a world in which opposites are wiped clean of meaning, where this and that, were and weren’t, open and close were merely sounds and sound and noise were nothing at all. nothing but also something but also everything is a stream flowing into another. the space simply grew around lines membranes division you can’t fill something with no boundaries to keep the insides in and so all was vast space. 

sleeping on your back gives you bad dreams. i curl up, a comma on my side, or risk staying awake forever.

[littlestloaf]

letter to her younger self, maya angelou

Dear Marguerite,

You’re itching to be on your own. You don’t want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You’re going to leave your mother’s big comfortable house and she won’t stop you, because she knows you too well.

But listen to what she says:

When you walk out of my door, don’t let anybody raise you — you’ve been raised.

You know right from wrong.

In every relationship you make, you’ll have to show readiness to adjust and make adaptations.

Remember, you can always come home.

You will go home again when the world knocks you down — or when you fall down in full view of the world. But only for two or three weeks at a time. Your mother will pamper you and feed you your favorite meal of red beans and rice. You’ll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again — one of the greatest gifts, along with nurturing your courage, that she will give you.

Be courageous, but not foolhardy.

Walk proud as you are,

Maya

if i should have a daughter, sarah kay

If I should have a daughter, instead of “Mom,” she’s going to call me “Point B,” because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.

And I’m going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”

And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.

So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried. “And, baby,” I’ll tell her, don’t keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick; I’ve done it a million times. You’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. But I know she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few that chocolate can’t fix.

But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that’s the way my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this.

(Singing) There’ll be days like this, my momma said. When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment. And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.

Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away. You will put the wind in win some, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.

“Baby,” I’ll tell her, “remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.” Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. Always apologize when you’ve done something wrong, but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don’t ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.