I am on a campaign to abstain from school(!) – from the bar to deliciously inane freelance projects.
Author: drugstruck
HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAZELNUT
If you were Thumbelina
Just think of all you’d see ….
The rainbow in a dew-drop,
The soft fur on a bee.
The sparkle of a spiders web
Hung with beads of rain.
The warm smile of a buttercup
When the sun comes out again.
When we first met, it was 30mins late to class and we were chased away by a furious lecturer. My nut, number one gruesome twosome relic of the triple-trouble girls, turns a year older. You are a happy presence in my life, especially for your awareness that, no matter how frustrating, how draining or demanding deadlines get, we. Cannot. Stop. The. Party.
LIFE ADMIN
Nights = random insight. Upon the routine activity of staying up to sob over schoolwork, my mind reached a startling revelation : my weight vacillates proportionately to the amount of milo available at home. My weight. Vacillates. Proportionately. To the amount of milo. Available at home. The two central compulsions in my life (1. stay skinny 2. obtain milo) are at odds.
Also, Halloween.
Me : This week’s submissions and I spent the last twenty-four hours on Youtube!
Jinesh : Some Japanese serial?
Me: Not even there.
Jinesh: No it can’t be that Chinese one with the four guys.
Me: T-T
HARD LIGHT
Five in the morning force-feeding Photoshop for Dummies into my head – by making a layer duplicate we can apply only the adjustments we want and discard the rest by changing layer modes. Multiply adds darkness while screen does opposite. Overlay lies between multiply and screen and is more subtle. soft light increases contrasts of extreme shades and is a weaker version of hard light. Hard light is a stronger version of overlay. Hard light increases saturation and reveals textures in underlying layer. Hard light like the midday sun upon the jetty, heat waves rolling off the tarmac and our bodies. You counted beads of sweat off my nose and I had your lap because the seat scorched my thighs.
I WANT TO SPEAK. INTO YOUR MOUTH.
Auntie may stopped to mingle, pulling Joe close by his neck – I’ve never known anyone to look so irrepressibly adorable while seemingly on the verge of tears. Dirk + Jinesh met Sheena + me for dinner after their Mandarin class. The NEA copped a cool two hundred from Nana and I EACH for narcotic dumping. Joe visited post-dinner. Sheena brought a stillborn chick from Science class for scrutiny. Jinesh had ginger tea which was a surprising bouquet of tartness. I remember laughter, catching kisses at the corners of our eyes, footsies, the familiar Newton hustle and sambal kangkong in the sublime pocket of time before the last bus leaves. Joy is such a touch-and-go affair isn’t it? A world apart from today ; stubbornly foolish, foolishly hopeful as I am, I am not used to letting go. There is a nagging feeling somewhere in my chest, somewhere off centre, slightly to the left.
TECHNICOLOUR MALADY
Rummaged for colours. Quadra-hue dresses. I laid out bottles and tubes of paints in ascending spectrums, grouped colour pencils by chroma and mused the gaudy Impressionist renaissance – Matisse, Monet, Sisley, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat. Then I opened my windows and leaned into the wind, trying to catch the rain with its rainbow prisms of refracted light. It is of no use; a particularly pervasive cast of tan fills my consciousness most adamantly, a beat between sienna and ochre. It is the colour of your skin.
It’s all about the ending with you, isn’t it.
All about waning, things dying, finished, days sputtering into messy dusks.
I don’t think you can even look at winter without feeling melancholy with its inevitable end in melting fire, destruction and roses.
You even hover around me where I end; the tips of my fingers,
The corners of my mouth, where my hip bone juts out.
You are a perpetual mourner, looking always at beginnings ended,
Fading sunlight, moans drifting into soft sighs. When you let me go
I’m never certain you will ever drape your arms around me this way again.
You breathe me in as if that air, that piece of me you take inside you,
Has such a limited life.
You smell me as if I am new, as if i am bounded, complete, an island.
You weave goodbye with every breath.On the way here you were laughing with me, I prattled on
I told you stories, felt your fingers between mine.
Do you know
you have the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard,
the most beautiful murmur against my ear, a voice like lust, like trust, like love.
You stroked my palm with your thumb and I felt the heat of you rise into my face.
But somehow between there and here I lost you.
Long ago I gave up trying to pinpoint the phrase, word, topic, expression, name, idea, belief;
I gave up trying to find the exact semi-tone pitch my voice reaches that makes you turn away from me.– In Dialogia ; ivy blossom and libertine
JARGON
My pencil case broke! A sure mark of industriousness.
In a school where my classmates struggle to string a coherent sentence, essay assignment time is my ticket out of the ass-end of the bell curve. It’s simple. A strong introduction and thoughtful conclusion, a story in between. More importantly, beautiful “intellectual-looking” but hard-to-read cursive handwriting and lots of vocab to thoroughly discourage anyone from reading beyond paragraph two.
<A not-so-hypothetical situation>
Sheryl : Let’s make more money so we can go to Khao San
Me : Gotta find a wall to paint then.
<Cue Pink and the Brain soundtrack>
Current activity – tripping into heartache like a seasoned tumbler.
HEART TOOK A ROADTRIP
Tim left on yesterday and I remember Sheena’s remedy for tears – “It’s flawed multi-tasking. You can’t cry on a cigarette baby; smoke the hours it takes you to stop.” but leaning upon the window sill with Jinesh on the line and Tim on the mind, I discovered that you can puff, laugh and sob like your life depended on it at the same time.