‘I feel like I’m too old for exams
Why do people still have examinations in university
It’s like primary school
memorise, make notes, feel nervous, feel happy when you do well
I feel like there’s no end to this cycle of life
Even when you go to work
Everyone wears the same thing, takes the same mrt, walks in
the same crowd
The feeling is the same as in kindergarten
There has to be more to life than this
And then, get married, have children, children go to school,
you retire
I can’t do this’
‘I have the same feeling with you when I was in the university. Yes just go through it and take it as some kind of training. I have no more exam. It takes at about 20 years to prepare a person to get ready for the rest of her life. With that kind of years I am in better position to live as what I am now.’
‘I’m so glad you understand.’
Once upon a time there was a dog.
He liked to play fetch.
In the winter, he would fetch snowballs.
He leapt,
And they exploded over his nose.
the girl sitting on the bench felt her own nose shiver
how lovely winter is, she thought
It should be human instinct to take the pain from life and turn it into something beautiful. I have a friend Euginia, and that’s what she’s just done. She’s written a book. While I think of it as a single tear distilled from haemorrhaging emotion, here’s what she has to say:
Featuring fifty poems, Songs About Girls was conceived during the author’s most difficult times. Mental disorder is currently a taboo, yet unfortunately, it is undeniably a rising phenomena especially among the youth. The author hopes to be an advocate regarding the voice of troubled young adults and to instill in them the beliefs and strengths they might have suppressed, but always had in them. As well as this, the author hopes to create awareness to the masses who have carved a certain stigma in their minds regarding mental health. Breaking barriers are a fundamental aspect in creation – therein, Songs About Girls has broken many walls and transcended boundaries to prove that everyone has an innate ability to create.
Songs About Girls is currently available at Kinokuniya, Times Bookstore and BooksActually. Do pick up a copy, I’m eagerly awaiting mine in the mail!
I stole these in 20 minutes with the pentax 1000 rot borrowed from school; i didn’t have time to think. I didn’t stop to think if it would make a good picture or not, whatever my instinct picked up, i took. Now looking at them I am myself looking at myself, not understanding the promptings behind each picture, not understanding the appeal they hold to me. I spent ages staring at these images, wondering why I like them. I like them each in their own right, but together they piece up the of the past month i struggle to put in words. How do i begin to describe the visceral uncertainty I have felt, mocked by the cruelty of the everyday? The everyday which stares at you in the scratched walls, the etched cracks, the plastic-looking flowers spelling artificial life in someone’s barren garden. Inanimate objects calling out my name, daring me to stay as still as them, to stop breathing so my ears may hear something else but the sound of my own breath. I think about the rhythm in which the days take on, so silently transitioning into the patterns our lives often take. school, work, marriage, childbirth, maybe. Who put those rules into place? We recognize the familiar, but will we recognize what is real, dare we? or will we say, hush, you do not belong in these scratched walls, the cracked edges; you do not fall in line with the pigeons on the window ledge?
Apologies for the long absence; I have been squatting in a little tiled cubicle in my mind, between who I am and who I want to be. Many things i have written about the past month, filed under the drafts section because I felt they weren’t exactly how I wanted them to be. Now i’ve started taking them out one by one, publishing them as they were, as long as they felt real when i made them. These were from the day I cut class to sneak into art school because my wonderful housemate offered to bring me to the darkroom. We were on a tight schedule; I had no film to develop. Give me 20 minutes, I said, and walked out with the camera, exhausting the entire roll, never stopping to think in all 36 times my finger pressed on the shutter. We set off. At least you look the part, she says- architecture or photography, apparently. We tap past security; mission accomplished, technology decided to give me a day off. The darkroom is magic; I study the instructions and pretend I am a chemistry student again, reading off the meniscus, drowning my film in developer and diluted acid, agitating it every 30 seconds, smiling to myself like a loony. This is what visual poetry feels like, I think. A class comes in and I don’t see my scans till the day after.
