A Story I Wrote in Secondary 3 (reworked)

“I… No, no, no! This is all wrong!” I cursed myself. My mind was empty. Emptiness implies that something is supposed to be there but it’s not. Like a murderer grasping a kitchen knife, I squeezed my pen in my palm, tattooing the blank piece of writing paper with quick, hard stabs. Ink gushed onto the sheet, enveloping it in total blackness. I bit my lip. Hard. Perhaps too hard – I could feel something warm oozing out of my lower lip. No time to think about that, I’m in the middle of my exam!

One hour left to finish my free writing and situational writing papers. Plus, I have not even started on free writing. Well, at least I’ve spread ink all over my sheet. Breathe in, breathe out. I can do this! I remember studying English and the format for situational writing yesterday. I even read two books and analyzed how the novels were written. Well, so much for that, I don’t even have a single idea!

Forty-five minutes left. I sipped on my water bottle. Yes, we were allowed to bring water into the exam hall. Bam! I stared at my water bottle. It hit me, finally a subject to write on!

The life of a water bottle

It was a little corny but hey, I was desperate. Letter by letter, I started on the essay. But when I reached the second paragraph, I ran out of ideas! Darn it, just when things started to go my way.

I should change my subject. It was too informative and nerdy to write about. I prefer stories about detectives and how they solved cases. Dad asks me to read him detective comics every night, from Sherlock Holmes to Father Brown. I think it helps to take his mind off Mom. Mine too. We were close, very close.

I glanced to my left and right. My classmates were scribbling about furiously on their scripts. My best pal, Joseph, was already sleeping. He was a genius at writing essays. If only I could write like him. His feathery straight brown hair and faint freckles won the hearts of the girls in the class too. We dubbed him the class poet.  How romantic. Why am I feeling envious for no reason again?

Frustration and perhaps a bit of anxiety were getting to me. I had no more than thirty-five minutes to finish my free and situational writing. Staring into the dead, grey, classroom walls, I thought of Dad. Is this what it was like to feel so blank, to see nothing but blank?

I wondered how Dad coped with blindness after the car accident. It’s been three years since. It’s been only twenty-five minutes since I was blind – sort of, and I’m already going crazy. I wiped the beads of sweat from my forehead. Should I give up? I felt like leaping out of the open window. Maybe mom will catch me on the other side.

As a last resort, I closed my eyes and meditated. A myriad of thoughts raced towards and past my psyche. Three hundred miles a second. These were my… memories. I remember my mother, how her voice jumped and fell when she read my first bedtime story, the gentle creases of her proud eyes when I boasted my first story to her. How her hands felt so small in the hospital when she touched my face for the last time.

What did she tell me then? I strained my head and recalled. “Dear, when obstacles come your way, don’t give up, okay?” I remember that was when she held my face. “You have so much more life to live, ___ __ _____.”

That’s right! My life… I should write something about an experience in my life. I will write about this exam, how it felt like death to me and how I came back to life from it. But there are only fifteen minutes left. Crunch time. I picked up a fresh sheet of paper and started to write, my mother was right all along.

It’ll be alright.

Earth

When men are responsible for women and women are responsible for men, something begins to tick.

Like an old rusty clockwork that turns it’s gears once more.

As in Goldilocks’ own words, it’s just right.

Sacrifice begins, giving has meaning. Just as all was made to be.

Your heart will be at peace in this home, this garden.

Venus

A woman’s greatest mark is how she portrays grace to men who are graceless.

Sudenland: Epilogue

For the “city of progress”, the city itself was at a standstill. It could not settle down as a city. There was no culture, no language, no common identity. For Sudenland was always changing, always moving, always evolving.

The sun sets on Sudenland. A ripple in the pond, the workman was startled awake. “Oh no,” he gasped, “the new high-rise terraces were supposed to be built yesterday!”

Sudenland

A ripple in the puddle shocked  the workman awake. He was not supposed to be dozing off— the new high-rise apartments were due yesterday! That is how things were in Sudenland, the vibrant, diverse, “city of progress”, the true modern city-state, built on progress and change.

Everything was in a constant state of building up, tearing down, and building back up again. Every person in Sudenland was on the move; there was no time to rest, progress does not move itself!

It was not an oppressive state, dissidents of the fast-paced life of Sudenland were invited to leave at any time. The city officials had no time to entertain them. In fact, the city didn’t even have city hall— nor did it have a library, or a swimming pool, or a bus terminal, or a shopping mall. Sudenland had no official buildings or facilities at all!

No building could ever stand the test of progress, they had to be refurbished every single moment! Well, it seems to be true then, as some say, that Sudenland, for all its cutting-edge concepts, was a city of nothing.

New Year’s Day

Chapter 1: Love and other things

6:00 p.m.

I have read teen angst stories before. Interestingly enough, most of them are about homosexuality and coming out (nothing to do with my own sexuality). Accept yourself and how special you are, be proud! But, regardless of sexual orientation, I think that there is an underlying theme throughout all of these angst stories and it is the pursuit to be loved. And to be loved not only as much but also to be loved in a way which we want and especially by the people we want to.

I was thinking to myself, love is such a picky thing and as if preordained, I overheard the young couple at the next table say “You know, although I’ve only just known you, I think we’re made for each other…”. I couldn’t have stopped listening sooner; poor lady, in a world of 7 billion people, in which you are only going to meet let’s say, about a hundred thousand (if you’re lucky), there is a 0.00143 percent chance that you’ll actually even find your ‘true special one’. You have an even better chance of getting struck by lightning.

I can’t blame her, though, we’re in the french part of town on New Year’s day. The cobblestoned walkways were strewn with festive lights of every colour, the shops that lined the streets were playing happy love songs and every stranger you met outside was friendly. Throngs of people in their best suits adorned with glowsticks were heading to the riverside stadium a few blocks down from here for the New Year’s countdown. Thirty dialogues bled into one and it seemed as if no distance could hold anyone back from each other today. The sky grew into a beautiful warm shade of pink and orange as the streetlamps along the cold streets slowly flickered into life. This was going to be a long night, and it’s barely just started.

“Hello, sir, can I have your order?” I was so lost in my thoughts that I had forgotten to order something. My brain and my stomach went through a checklist on the menu:

Cheesecake? Not today.

Brownies? Nope.

Coffee? Nah.

Salad? Obviously not.

         I didn’t want to waste this waitresses’ time, after all, she’s probably had her fair share of difficult customers and I had no desire to make her working experience any worse. So I smiled, stood up, and left. Shame, I was just getting comfortable too. The quiet humble bookish ambience was spot on and I didn’t mind that in their failed but admirable attempt for french appeal, the waitresses were wearing gothic maid outfits. The conversations from nearby tables were good mental floss too. I was hungry, I just didn’t really feel like eating.

¶

Outside, I prayed that the waitress wouldn’t hate me for any longer than a minute. Then I called my mom.

“Mum, where is everyone? It’s been 30 minutes.”

I could make out people shuffling and things moving in the background and my baby brother crying before there was any response. “Hello? Hey, we’re going to be a little bit late. We’ll meet you at the stadium directly. Love You!”

“But ma-”

Click. Wow, my own mother hung up on me, that’s a new low. Was she even trying to talk to me? And what’s all that about love? Darn it if you’re going to say that you love someone, say it like you mean it and not just as a passing term (even if deep down you actually do mean it). God knows my parents love me, it must have taken Mount Everest depths of love to not disown me after all these years.

I thought to myself as waves of my past failures bombard me, each flashback more jading. What have I ever done to repay that love? We’ve all been there, feeling unlovable, unbelonged, useless; that you will never be able to live up to anyone’s expectations. No matter how much I tell myself that I’m being loved, it just frustrates me even more, and so I plugged in my headphones, amped up the volume and ambled down the streets of love away from everyone and their jubilant smiles.

¶

The Purple Man

Once upon a purple time, in a purple land far far away, there lived a purple man.

The purple man had a purple oval face littered with strands of ginger whiskers. When the purple man smiled, his face would twist and contort into innumerable patterns only rivaled by the twists and turns of feeling.

Feeling was a unique thing to the purple man. The purple man could only feel something when there is a purple bottle in his stubby, calloused purple hands. But even still, the purple man felt purple.

I see the sights of the future ties.

The Tale of Mr Whiskers Pt.1

9 lives, 9 deaths to die. Don’t you know how frustrating that is?

Grey—I can only see grey—my lungs were filled with the naughty odour of it. A hop and a skip away, the particles darken my skin. I just had to lick it off. Above me, the blindness beat down, it was paralysing; cooking me. The sound of silence that permeated the hairs of my thoughts were in complete contrast to the bustling hunk if metal below.

The Tale of Mr Whiskers Pt.2

There are many things that I am proud of. I’m most proud of hunting down a fairly large white bird. It was tasty. Birds like that do not frequent these parts—it was a rare opportunity. Although it did taste a little… different, regardless, the bones were licked clean.

The Tale of Mr Whiskers Pt.3

Blue, green and grey. These colours refracted across the water’s surface. I poked a finger into it. A shiver, a shock; like electricity. A nail, a whole limb, a relief from the midday summer’s breeze. It is a lie that cats hate water. It is also a lie that cats don’t like baths. I don’t care what the others say. I personally abhor grime and soot, blood is fine but being dirty is a pet peeve of mine. It is also a lie that cats don’t tell lies. That’s why we live so long.

The Tale of Mr Whiskers Pt.4

There was once another that I quite fancied. Big wide eyes, that shone with the spark of natural alluring inquisitiveness,  a bright-spotted pink nose that could sniff out bird from fowl and a propensity to meow at me more than any. She was a doll. But she was never mine, as with many of my other crushes. Sometimes I admonish my own existence for being engineered this miserably. It hurt to the very core of the pits of my stomach—Cats don’t subscribe to a religion.We know—But that doesn’t mean that cats can’t hate it. Cats are proud creatures. I remember a white coat splattered with spots of red. I remember a wheeze so imperfect, beautiful cracks stained themselves into my limited capacity. I could not do anything. In that moment, I was everything and nothing.

From that moment on, I became as cold as the steel that hit her. Running across asphalt was always a life or death situation. But if life wasn’t lived on the edge then what’s the point of living? 20 feet is as far as we can see, everything else doesn’t matter.

The Tale of Mr Whiskers Pt.5

The 9 lives that I have lived, I have done nothing; after all, I am just a cat. A cat with a cat’s mouth, a cat’s brain and a primal instinct. I’m sure that the city has much more interesting stories to share, with an echo that will reach past my soul and through the darkness.