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INFORMATION

Someone speaks softly through the horror and pain:
'Love has gone, but it could come again.'
Spring arrives quietly, warming her skin
Her heart, now red, is beating again
- Hannah Fury, 'Someone Speaks Softly'

Not a writer but a professional student. Instead I can be the jaded passer-by that caught a glimpse of a fling or a fatal mistake, a murder in the back alley, and I keep it all to myself so I don't lose any of it during the spilling from heart to paper on an unimaginary dark night. I write opinions, facts, emotions and other satisfied sentences that are the offspring of my imagination and external influences. And I do not need your validation to live, for the record.

CONTACT

FS/augustkills
FP/thepapercult
LJ/snipethedoctor
WP/electricsleeves

CREDITS

Icon: DW/tablesaw
Layout: tuesdaynight
Inspiration: DayBefore!Misery
This is not an essay.
Written on: Friday, January 8, 2010
Time: 11:30 PM

I suppose much could be said of me right now, but I’ll simply write it down as distressing, when at roughly 9.40pm I realised it was finding things to complain about. Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake was open to The Pony Problem (page 3), inviting in a few unwitting words of wisdom and I was deep in thought after scrutinising the first two pages, seated in the cramped space with books haphazardly thrown into the rapidly dwindling available shelf space, frowning and attempting to match emotion and situations to paper by stringing words together. Or in some sense, leaving them out further created ‘final blows’ in my writing.

At the foot of stairs I saw that she was sprawled I saw her there, dead.

I thought hard if I would see those words in print on a Stephen King or a John Saul fiction. Well, they would look perfectly fine there, I thought. And I wouldn’t be disgusted if they appeared verbatim. Would they be just as suitable as mere occupants on wordy postings of a girl whose ‘O’ Level certificate was not even nestled safely in her hand? For a moment in time they resembled cheap hookers beneath a block of flats; one would be clutching a faux LV bag, the other in copious makeup would be blowing cigarette smoke in her face.

This is not even an essay, come to think of it.

Fifteen minutes into an essay and one meager sentence on paper. I was constantly clicking my pencil till the lead broke and I had to refill, time passed me by and as she sashayed, even-footed and deliberately, she cast me a pitiful, condescending—almost spiteful—glance (she made me feel I was wasting her youth) for being a failing aspiring writer. No, EXPIRING. My mother was going on in the kitchen at no one in particular (“Now where is that lunchbox?”), Utada Hikaru was crooning passionately in indecipherable words of Japanese in my ears and from the corner of my eye I came upon the library books I had newly borrowed this afternoon, stacked horizontally, their titles forming neat sentences one atop another.

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Romeo and Juliet
Naked
I Was Told There’d Be Cake

The whole arrangement struck me as a form of entertainment; almost like a poem stanza and made me laugh very hard as I read it up and down.

And then all of a sudden, the mild diversion dispelled, I was seized with an urge to shout, to scream a throat-scouring scream at the music I now found unloving—it was filled with everything foreign and fright-inducing—my mother who was demanding for the lunchbox as if her life depended on their existence and if they vanished she would, too, and myself glaring accusingly at the book titles that stared dispassionately back, telling them all to shut the fuck up, for the world to freeze over and come to a resolute standstill because the noises were affecting my concentration and disrupting the flow of words.

Which is why I ended up with one pathetic sentence, you ridiculous, annoying—

Like a broken dam I was picking out the misfits, settling on one of them, then haranguing about how talented David Sedaris and the other what’s-her-name were and how they artfully managed to turn the mundane, solitary activities into stellar essays of truth and reminiscence, acknowledging the strings tied to our hands and the entire world, while here I was barely twenty, the words refusing to come to my head while I sat in this bloody hot thirty degree Celsius weather in shorts and t-shirt and not feeling any cooler. But even if I were to pen this passing observation down I doubt it would amount to much; while these authors could go on forever (pages and pages) about a single event/thing from different perspectives so they never seemed like the same thing again, though we people know they are in essence (and we are still enjoying this transmogrification tremendously and marveling at their wit).


Finding fault with inanimate objects, or what is lacking. It’s like trying to talk like a diplomat with a malfunctioning washing machine. Blaming everything on that hollow in one’s heart without ever realizing how packed the other chambers are. Messy, dusty attics are classified regularly under negative examples of organization but today I thought that it would seem to be a charming thing to have bits and pieces of other people’s lives up there, even if it was your own or your mother’s, and to stare fascinated at the mess and cobwebs and things left forgotten. Then at least I wouldn’t dwell on how empty my wardrobe looks and plan to fill it up with Topshop or Gap, or that another book would fit just fine into my shelf, failing which I would need to take off in search of another shelf.

But even the act of finding—look, this is what happens when I find myself in the company of people who are very alike. People who whine about how stupid dusting the curtains is and how worried they are about maths tests. People that some would be more than pleased to slap them in the face and holler “Shut up; we know these things already!” Have a go at them, if you please: no one is stopping you. But they make the world seem more real to me, more than Customer Service counters. “Ah, I’ve been there. See, I’m not alone/abnormal/going to the loon bin!” It reassures me that the internet is linked to the world of my five senses so basic etiquette is a constant and we introverts have nothing to fear.

And damn, complaining is no big deal.

This is still not an essay; it never was to me, and so it never will be, if I could help it.

And I should have learnt to write better.

-FIN-

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