真他媽的孬！

I will become like the sun. I will be blind to and blinded by my own
beauty. I will shine, my light an unintentional indifference.

I will float.

How You See The Fullness of My Being

I led her by her hands into the garden I have become. I had no idea
why she wanted to see it– I knew the garden by heart, and there was
nothing beautiful in it.

First, I took her to a flower patch near the edge of the garden. An
ill tended patch of nameless, withering flowers. I thought she’d lose
interest, so we can quickly get out of the garden. But she looked at
it, and said, quietly, “it’s beautiful”.

“Right…” I rolled my eyes, and looked at the sorry flower patch with
some contempt. To my surprise, I saw it exploding with colours! Pink
roses, red roses, white poppies, red tulips, marigolds, and magolias
of splendid beauty. I didn’t know all these flowers grew together.

“Show me more,” she said.

So I took her a little deeper into the garden. We stopped in front of
two giant trees. One was upside down, its roots extended into the sky,
extracting nourishment from whatever little moisture there was in the
air, and its foliage buried deep into the ground, depriving itself of
light. The other was missing half its trunk, so its floating foliage
shriveled because its roots couldn’t provide any nourishment for its
thriving.

“Sorry, these trees are a bit… awkward,” I apologized, with a bit
awkwardness, “I might have planted one of the seedlings upside down.
And I forgot to water them for some years when they grew.” She looked
at the trees, and found herself puzzled. “They look perfectly normal
to me,” she said. I looked at the trees again, and sure enough, they
were upright, complete, and bursting with health.

“Show me more,” she said.

My head was spinning a little. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Show me more,” she said.

So we walked together, deeper into the garden. We came before an abyss
we had to cross. Only a rickety bridge spanned over the yawning
darkness. “Please, PLEASE do not look down into the darkness,” I
begged her before we crossed the bridge. I held her hand, and she
chose to close her eyes, as I led her over the abyss, so she saw
nothing of its darkness– all she felt was the moistness in my hand,
its trembling, and its warmth.

So she opened her eyes again, and smiled at me. I saw the grass on
both sides of the abyss grew and grew, covering over its bottomless
depth.

“Let’s keep going,” I said.

So we passed by a tree bearing glowing orange fruits. She asked me
what they were. I told her that the tree feeds on my hopes. The fruit
tastes like sunshine, but the seeds are incredibly bitter. She stood
on her tiptoe and strained for a fruit. She picked the biggest she
could reach. I took over the fruit, splitted it open, and tried to
remove its seeds the best I could. But the seeds were tiny and
transparent, so I missed a few.

When the fruit touched her lips, I’d swear that it glowed a little
brighter. It was probably my imagination playing tricks on my mind.
She said she didn’t taste any bitterness. The seeds, she said, tasted
like almonds. That’s impossible, because the seeds, as I said, are
incredibly bitter. It must have been her imagination playing tricks on
her mind.

We sat under that tree for a long time. When we were rested and ready
to leave, the rotting fruits on the ground came alive, and imbued the
air with a drunken aroma full of life.

“Let’s keep going,” I said.

So I decided to take her to the place where I define myself. To get
there, we must pass through a narrow passage that had clocks growing
on the cliff walls.

Even at some distance from the entrance, I could hear the cacophony of
grandfather clocks chiming, cuckoo clocks chirpping, digital clocks
beeping, analog clocks ticking. Each clock marked a different time.
There was one that counted down to the time of my death, one that
chimed each time I ate a grape, another that ticked with my heart, yet
another to my sense of her breathing, and so on.

I hated going through the passage. I never could make sense of
anything with the thousands of clocks drowning out my thoughts in
total noise.

I entered the passage with some reluctance. But the moment we stepped
across the threshold, the clocks, thousands of clocks, swung in synch
in an instant, tick-tick-ticking in perfect rhythm. And as we went
deeper and deeper into the passage, the ticking became slower and
slower. At the end of the passage, in front of a cave, it stopped.

“Let’s keep going,” I said.

So we were surrounded by complete silence in the cave, except the
echoes of our footsteps and breathing. What I wanted to show her, was
a shrub about waist high. Each of its leaves a mirror that reflected
myself in a different perspective, and with a different distortion. I
often went into the cave to examine its leaves, and each time, I’d
find new pieces of my complete self.

I brought her to where the shrub was, and lit the torches I had around
it, so that the shurb was engulfed within the flames of its self
reflected light. This was so she could see the fullness of my being.
She looked into the shrub and gasped,

“This is me! More beautiful than I had ever known!”

When Imagination Falls Silent

A ventriloquist was hopelessly in love with his wooden dummy. His
wooden dummy was in love with him. At least that’s what he told me.

“But a dummy is a dummy! It doesn’t speak! It is you that speaks!” I
tried to reason with his absurdity. He looked at me with some pity, as
though he couldn’t comprehend my naïveté, and said, “no one in the
world knows her better than me.” And to prove it, he kissed her on the
whorls of her cheeks. “See how she’s blushing,” he said triumphantly.

I didn’t see her blushing.

And the dummy knew everything about the ventriloquist. At least,
that’s what she told me (it really did seem that she spoke). When I
asked the ventriloquist what inspires him, he said one word, “Sweets.”

Before I could ask him to elaborate, the dummy spoke. He likes
cheesecake. He always has mango cheesecake. And it’s not the cake, but
the tea he drinks with it. He wouldn’t admit that it’s bitterness,
rather than sweetness, that inspires him.

As I was scribbling down what she said in my notebook, the
ventriloquist gave me a knowing wink. I still don’t know what he meant
by that.

A few years later, I went to see the ventriloquist again. He called in
the middle of a performance, telling me that he was in trouble, and
had no one to turn to.

“She stopped speaking to me!” he shook me by my shoulders when I
entered his backstage room. He had the dummy put behind a veil. He
said he couldn’t bear her indifference any longer.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Ohhh, the things I didn’t say. The things I wouldn’t say.”

“Maybe you should try speaking to her?” I suggested, feeling a bit
self conscious saying the obvious.

“No!” he glared at me, “you don’t understand. She wouldn’t speak to
me! She wouldn’t speak to me!!”

Then he broke down crying.

He did not finish his performance that night. The next day, he was
dead, and his dummy sold at an auction.

What Accompanies My Journey

A centipede is hiking up a treadmill. He doesn’t know what for, but
watching the counter going up makes him feel at the same time
accomplished and urgent for more.

The centipede sometimes pauses to reflect what the counting up could
mean. Maybe at 100,000 something would happen (only 7,399 ticks
away!).

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s nothing to its counting up. Maybe it’s
just walking and walking, and there’s no end to it.

This idea depresses the centipede. He would stop walking, count his
feet, and for a long time, untie and retie his shoes. After his shoes
were retied, he would feel perfect again.

The counting up may not mean anything, but it is the surest thing. How
silly, he would think, to have stopped walking.

Usually the young centipede would walk a long time before feeling the
need to pause. But these past months, many pebbles somehow got in his
shoes. First a pebble in the 36th shoe down to the right, then one
41st down to the left, then one 10th down the left… He kept taking
these pebbles out, but they kept showing up!

He’s had enough. He smells with his tentacles the pebble that he just
took out of his shoe (a jagged one 88th down to the right). He doesn’t
like how it smells.

“What do you want from me?” he asks the pebble.

Look at me.
Revel in me.
Find meaning in me.

The pebble seems to say.

“But you are making me miserable. My feet are blistered. What can you
possibly mean for me?”

Find comfort in me.

How I Became Wise

A child was lost in the woods of my consciousness. A place populated
by Wild Machineries and Wondering Beasts.

Wondering Beasts that devoured his simplicity. They hid in the
bushes, hung from the trees, pounced at him from behind, and lept out
from the ground underneath him, to bite into his soul with sharp
questions: “who/what/how/when/why are you?”

And Wild Machineries that grew into his body. Rusty nails hidden among
fallen leaves. Poison arrows coming from no one. Shrapnels shooting
out from imaginary bombs. Words. Razors. Bitter memories. These
objects, inert parasites, would cut into him and become alive at the
taste of blood. Once embedded in his body, they blossomed into
constellation of gears and wheels.

These machineries grew larger than the child’s tiny body. Antlers that
extended into the heavens, making it difficult to balance his head.
Wings that spanned 10 feet, anchoring him on earth. His teeth
sharpened into fangs of empty rhetorics. His nails lengthened into
claws that grasped for existence…

More and more these outgrowths slowed him down, ane less and less of
his simplicity– his bouyant lightness– remained, devoured by the
Wondering Beasts.

One day the weight of the Machineries became too much to bear. So the
child sat on a rock and became a philosopher, his lightness no longer
enough to float him into the air.

To this day, he still sits on the same rock.

Maybe one day the rock he’s sitting on would vanish under him.