Archives for category: Stories from everywhere
Celest: report – im still alive, surprisingly
luelle: HAHAHA
luelle: congrats
luelle: hows desertation?
Celest: desertation?!!!!
Celest: DISSERTATION
Celest: but yeah, i do feel like i’m drying out lol
–
Just how could I not love this girl to death?
TWELVE DEGREES?!!!
In the beginning of August?
On the way back from dinner with H, I practically ran home. Mercilessly, I was too optimistic about the deceptive midday sunshine just a few hours before and had worn shorts, a loose tank and one of those terribly thin oversized sweaters masquerading as a real, well, sweater.
A parting shot: three dollops of Moët in a waiting chilled flute. We had those nights before.
In the waiting lounge there are many languages. They tell you Thank you, go right ahead to the middle and oh, have a nice flight M’am! The ladies in blue berets rip tickets and hand over stubs with clinical accuracy. Hi, Next, Hi, Next, Hi, Next?
These continental flights: breakfast, lunch, mystery meat for dinner. And then breakfast all over again. The plastic fork (thanks to 9/11) breaks itself into soggy sauce and the low rumbling purr of the jet’s engine beneath – it only whispers to me, to you: 3,200 miles. 5 hours. Your day as my night. Slippery fingers punching out unfamiliar numbers. The phone that keeps ringing. Ringing.
My parting shot is that there are none. Really, you shouldn’t be surprised. I know as well as you, that you are in the everything; the everyday.
You are in the words that spray across my crusty legal pad (London’s rain turns all uncovered sheets crusty). You are in the worn keys of my laptop, that all fit the warm groove of my fingers (and all over the space bar). You are in the spring of my step as I walk home, hands slipped into my coat pockets. You are in the rickety train with me and the man nursing Thursday night’s hangover with lukewarm Americano in a paper cup. You are in the lines of my balled fist, rubbing my eyes open in the morning. You are in every corner, every crossing, every aisle, every shelf, every room.
You will stand in the merciless snow to play out the financial forecast for the next quarter in your head. You will roll your eyes in relish at your American classmate when he says in all seriousness that Singapore is in China. You will take out your numbers and equations with practical feminism sucked up from your well-thumbed copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s offering. You will work your summers with fierce obstinacy, turning the most mundane internships into the greatest investments. One pebble at a time.
So yes, we’ve got this distance. This uncompromising, unrelenting distance that throws echoes off the highest cliffs into blind territory. This distance that etches across scratchy Skype lines and multiple calling cards in the last slot of my wallet. Best friends for five (forever) and apart for even more. But you, the girl taking the Friday morning plane to Montreal. You will make me proud.
So I took my grandma to the Singapore Garden Fest last Friday, thanks to tickets from the sister. Truthfully I possess no green thumbs and horticulture is hardly up my alley, so it was no surprise that the whole shindig was quite a huge bore for me. But – and there’s always a but with events like these – my grandma was like a kid in a candy store, pointing out all sorts of flowers, swearing my grandpa planted the same ones years ago and that she would go home and tell him what she saw. Oh yes, even flowers native only to South Africa – my granny told me my grandpa had the same ones in his garden at No. 10.
That alone, was enough for me. More than enough.
(The one display I found most amusing would have to be that of the Otaku desk from Japan. Because it reminded me of B and how he took O and me to visit the likes of his sort at Akihabara in Tokyo!)
NEW HAIR!!!
Well actually, let’s make that NEW NEW HAIR. Because this is the result of a major save-my-hair operation that I went for today, after what was possibly the worst salon trip I’ve ever made in my entire life the day before. Trust me on that; the night before I looked like a little boy in a Korean drama. Something like this.
Here are a couple of things that I was trying to figure out in the emergency visit to Raymond today. I don’t know what possessed the stylist from the day before to over-layer my hair so feverishly, as if his life depended on it. I also don’t know why he chose to give me an inward perm even though I repeatedly showed him a picture of an unlayered and extremely straight hairdo. Most of all, I don’t know why I just kept quiet and bit my lip, hoping that the final unveil would not confirm my worst fears true.
Whatever it is, thank you Raymond Lee! And thank you Sue, for sharing your best tress’ed secret with me. I would never have been allowed to live it down otherwise.
Bleak much?
J doesn’t believe in it and T, well, she pretty much convinces me of its non-existence.
Bleak much? Bleak much.
So this is my mother, steezin’ through the eighties.
(I especially love the first picture; it was taken at her engagement party)
For most of my childhood I took swimming lessons on Fridays and Saturdays. My parents knew how much I hated competitive swimming and would always be ready with a chicken rice treat at River Valley or a night at the amusement arcade at Parkway Parade after those dreadful lessons. I must have been about 7 or 8, and it was after one of those lessons when my mother came with a towel to get me out of the water. I looked up at her and she had on this peach eyeshadow that really made her eyes light up and the shortest layer of her hair was bouncing atop her shoulders. She didn’t have any other makeup on and her cheekbones danced as she spoke. She held out the towel for me and said that the coach had said that backstroke was turning out to be my pet stroke, and could I come out for a bath quickly because we were going for chicken rice after.
She looked so beautiful. It literally took my breath away and my usual chatter ebbed rapidly into an awed silence. I stood there, dripping wet in my Speedo Y-back and just looked at her. Even as she hurried me into the bathroom and gathered my clothes along the way, I couldn’t stop looking at her. This beautiful woman; my mother.
She turns 50 today.
And she’s still so, so beautiful.
Happy birthday Mommy.
I love you.
Happy 22nd, little sister!
This was the moment she arrived at her surprise party. The surprise party that was meant to make up for the shebang 21st she never got last year. If we’re looking at the three-inch megawatt smile that never left her face and the fact that she was alternating between tongue-tied and teary-eyed through the night , I think it more than made up for it.
