Bless the telephone

I cry for the snails I murdered, for the version of me that needed to kill, for the part of me that still wants to.

Behind the stage is a blue night. The sun has finally set. On stage, behind the singer, are projections of the open road. Bonfire sparks shoot through the air. She is wrapped in an American flag, swaying. I am there with her. The desert sun is hot on the back of my neck. The wind blows through my hair on the back of a motorcycle. I am so many versions of myself at this moment: the underage one with too many vodka cranberries in me at a swanky nightclub, at home in bed staring up at the ceiling fan in the midst of a bad spell, here with my dear, dear friend. 

I look over and capture a look of disgust. She is staring at me, mouth slightly ajar. Laughing, sort of. Like I’m doing something terribly cringe here, small as an amoeba in this crowd of screaming thousands. I am disconcerted by this contortion on a face I know so well. The steep curve of her nose, the mole on the side of her mouth. The marionette lines she sets down with powder.

“Can you, like, shut up?” She laughs, but it’s not a joke. Somehow, I have embarrassed her. There is no one in this crowd paying attention to us. They are focused on the singer: her dark brown tresses, the sulky pout, her claws clutching her microphone. She is a scene stealer. And all my friend can think about is how awful it is to be here, witnessing her with me. It’s a blow I immediately registered. I’m not a violent person, but I felt like punching her. What I resented most was not that she had grown to dislike me (and could barely hide it anymore?), but for stealing this moment. How rare to live so fully in the present. How terrible to be taken from it. I am self-conscious now, hurt, and angry too. A punishment. And for what? For the rest of the show, I count how many ways I could make her pay for humiliating me. 

---

Oksana is trying to call on the spirit of Joan Didion. I am lying on the floor, feet down, knees up to God. We were talking about how difficult it has been to write. Not to get going but to make meaning.
“You lost the throughline,” she observed. 
She burns Palo Santo and walks through the room, letting the smoke waft up the corners in tendrils like ghostly fingers. They coalesce in the ceiling fan. I read somewhere that when you smudge you have to leave something open, a window or a door, so the energy can pass through. Oksana has left everything shut and now she is banging a small drum, calling out for Joan Didion in her thick, Ukrainian accent. 
“Do you feel her?” she keeps asking. “Is she here now?” 
I know that Joan Didion would rather die twice than swan through this ramshackle room—what used to be a colonial outhouse, with poor plumbing and a broken rooster in the foliage outside who caws at three, three thirty, and three forty-five—to give me a posthumous thumbs-up. Surely, her ghost has more important places to haunt. 
“She’s here,” I say convincingly enough to stop her drumming. 

---

My preferred reading venue is currently the bus. Specifically, the 143. I board at my stop, a vestige of ramshackle Singapore (changing now, changing so fast I can no longer catalog the slights), and sit on the top deck in the front row, placed in the big window bearing witness as a more beautiful Singapore emerges towards the city center. The roads get wider, the construction subsides, and the hedges are rounded. Healthier trees with freshly trimmed boughs pave the way. It's a compact vision of the Singapore story: we churn steadily toward modernity, progress, and perfection. That impulse lives in me. Get smarter, reiterate, excel. I am no victim of nostalgia. Theoretically, my past is everywhere. Even on this bus ride that I take every day. There is the corner where I had to ask the cab driver to pull over so I could throw up. Inside that mall is where I attended an ice-skating birthday party; behind it, in another mall (long demolished and replaced) is the Gymboree, where my mother took me to soft play and music class. A version of me exists on every street corner. Every now and again, I look up from my book and notice my infinity stones. But I am never tempted to displace them.  There is only today, now, this bus ride on this day, the book in front of my nose. Today, my headphones aren’t working. Rarely do I overhear the chatter of others. On occasions like these, when I am forced to, I remind myself to tune in more often. Two women are talking behind me. Their conversation disappears behind the groans of the bus turning, the puffing sound, like a choo-choo train, of the double doors opening.
“Jesus decided to get baptized when he was 30,” An Italian woman says. 
The doors open. 
“It was his own decision.” 
Heavy footsteps on the stairs from the new passengers. 
“I was, in my own way, discovering myself.” 
I return to my book:
We had a thousand things, like everyone. 
But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now? 
The bus lurches to a stop. The doors open. I close my book.

---

When I need to write, I get hungry eyes. Everything looks like a prompt: the granite slicked and shining after a late afternoon rain, the rooster who has lost his way and landed on a street corner in Tanjong Pagar on a public holiday, the beads of sweat on my upper lip that appear almost unnoticed, reminding me I am home. There is something gorgeous everywhere. But what meaning does it make? Is it enough to say the stray frangipani in the middle of the road that had somehow gone undisturbed by the buses, cars, trucks, and motorbikes moved me to tears? Why? Some things are best left unexplained. Or, their meaning is so universal it needs no saying at all. I am sentimental now, quietly, privately. Half the things that move me to tears go unwritten. Here is one from today: I circumvented a snail, struggling across the terracotta tile, and remembered how when I was a kid, I went out of my way to stomp on them, feeling the crunch of their hard shell beneath my shoe, the satisfying smush of their innards into the ground. I cry for the snails I murdered, for the version of me that needed to kill, for the part of me that still wants to. 

---

Part of my personal movement against nostalgia is to reject it in others. Not out loud, not in their face, but to call it like I see it: you are operating with information that no longer applies. For example, a reunion with two friends from college. ‘Friends’ is not the right word; these girls are extensions of me, extra limbs I have grown with their own tactile sense. When they hurt, I feel it. Their pleasure is mine. These two haven’t seen each other in some years. There was a falling out. I ached for them individually, for their friendship as a separate thing I admired, for me as each of their confidants. One was nervous about seeing the other, the one who initiated the falling out. That friend has undergone dramatic revision: she is a completely different person than who I met nine years ago. She is not who she was on the lawn in front of Westlands, carrying a spiked lemonade in a water bottle, smacking midges on her arms beneath a harsh yellow street lamp. You lose 500 million skin cells every day. She has been roughly 3 billion versions of herself. A charge (true, back then) that has been held against her: she is scary. Reactive in a destructive way. Someone to watch yourself around. Around her 2 billionth version, she thawed. Time heals, time forgets, time doesn’t give a fuck. Her current self is soft, kind, patient, and perhaps a bit more boring than before. The friend who is nervous reports to me halfway through the evening that she misses the ‘crazy’ version of her. 

“I kind of want her to dial-up,” she says over lounge music in a vaguely Japanese, mid-century modern bar with luxurious leather armchairs and low, grey wool sofas. We haven’t even made it to the real bar yet.

She is forgetting what dialing up entails: shots, sure, laughter guaranteed, but also…viciousness. The rot that rotted them in the first place. 

“She’s different now,” I say. “She’s better.” 

Later, after too many drinks at a club in a hotel packed with obnoxious, overserved expats, cabs are booked, and the night is winding down. Then, a party bus arrives at the cab stand like a sign from God. Windows open, music blaring. My two friends look at each other and cancel their cabs, exactly like they would’ve done nine years ago. They dial up. Time heals, time forgets, time doesn’t give a fuck. 

---

It’s nice to hear your voice again
I’ve waited all day long for you
Strange 
How a phone call can change your day 
Take you 
Away
From the feeling of being alone 
Bless the telephone 

Can you imagine a time when your phone was not the antagonist? Pre the screen of it all. When it was just a portal for disembodied voices with urgent messages that cut through the minutiae and charged your heart with a shock of adrenaline. Imagine the power of that. Most of my friends nowadays are afraid of the phone; constantly dodging calls from the doctor’s office, too afraid to hold that intimate court. I am acutely aware of the power of a phone call. Growing up far away from ‘home,’ whenever the landline rang at an odd hour, you had the immediate thought that someone had died. More often, it was just a relative who had forgotten we were eight hours ahead, but still, the lingering fear. How many mini heart attacks did we have from Dublin until it came true? Dreaded deliverance. Twice over. I didn’t get the first call; it was relayed to me later. 

The second call was a bad dream: I thumbed through the magazines in Tower Records, Tokyo, with a belly full of cereal-flavoured soft serve. I grew up with the Japanese exclusives of my favorite records. There was always a bonus track or a tour poster tucked inside those album booklets—the ones I tore apart and stuck up on my wall, whose CDs scratched and skipped on my favorite songs.

The Celtic knot on my ring finger tapped against the hard plastic of some cassette tapes. I bagged three copies of the in-house magazine Bounce, with Taylor Swift on the cover. Then I looked at my phone. Two missed calls from my mother within minutes of each other and a single text: “Call me. Where are you?” It was unlike her to call twice. I knew someone had died. But who? 

I was on the escalator, descending to the lobby. The walls were grey, and the shop floor was industrial—not what you’d expect from the explosive red and yellow exterior. My mother called, sobbing, and I knew it was Granddad. I said no. I asked what happened. I said, “I’m in Tower Records,” as though it were the most absurd place for anyone to lose someone. 

It was late on a weekday, and outside, it was pouring. I had been trying to write a story on a bench outside a mall in Shibuya: headphones in, immersed in another world. I longed for it then. The patterns and rhythms I controlled and made up. No surprises there. My goal for this trip was to spark inspiration. It was so long since I’d felt that itching feeling in my knuckles, spreading to my fingertips: the physical response to a dream that needed transcribing, seeing the world with hungry eyes. 

Stepping onto the street, my umbrella won't open fully, and it gets caught at the hinges. I make an awful choking sound and call my best friend, but she can barely hear me over the rain. My hands shake, I can’t move. A young family passed by, glimpsing the state of me then averting their eyes — a slight smile on their lips, heads bowed. Even the little girl focused on the sound of her pink wellies in the pavement puddles to give me a moment. I am thankful for this culture of deference. 

What was fun not ten minutes ago: getting lost in translation, moving like a ghost through swarms of orderly people, taking twice as long to decipher how to do something easy, like topping up a transit card, seems like terribly hard work. Now, my Granddad is dead, and I have to figure out how to get the bus and the train back to my Airbnb, where I will sit on a single bed in a tiny room with a window overlooking the side street and a grey wall, alone, and be Granddadless. 

I had, and still have, a turbulent relationship with his widow. She’s not well, mentally. It makes her cruel. She will tell me things like you are not my favorite grandson while giving me a hug, nails digging into my shoulder a bit too hard. Since she has always been like this, I wonder where her illness stops, and her self begins. Is it possible that she is just…rotten? The next few days in Tokyo were a blur; friends kept me busy. We had too many highballs one night, and I missed the last train. It was unusually warm and humid that December. 

The fun wore off on the walk home. There was just an ache. My mother was in transit to Dublin for the funeral. Friends were in other time zones. I had no one to call. I crawled into my single bed, pressed up against the wall, and cracked open the window to hear the raindrops patter on the window sill. I started to cry. The window fogged up. I called his widow. Given her predicament, she didn’t think it was strange for me to call her from Tokyo in the middle of the night, blubbering and slurring my words. 

For whatever reason, she decided at that moment to be my granny. She hushed me. She told me: he loved you, he loved you so much, he is so proud of you. We laughed at our memories of him: the way we did the gardening together, how he always wore his suspenders before nine, the plaintive testament that in eighty years, he made no enemies. 

---

My mother is stretched out on the plastic sun-lounger, one cheek pressed into a seafoam blue hotel towel. She basks in the sun like a lizard under a hot lamp. She periodically pulls me out of the water to reapply factor fifty, drawing stripes on either side of my nose in neon-colored zinc.
“What color today?” She asked in the morning, packing the pool bag while the birds sang. 

Yesterday, green. Today, pink. I swim up to the pool bar and order a strawberry slushie. My fingertips are pruned from hours in the chlorine, diving to the bottom, wriggling around, and coming up for just a few seconds at a time. It’s quiet under there. And the water is a bit colder in the deep end. Hanging out in the baby pool was like sitting in a hot bath on a hot day. Torture. The slushie is not blended well. I crunch through the ice and dab at the zinc, wiping the pink on the counter. All of a sudden the European tourists are screaming and splashing. I know why. The monitor lizard has entered the pool. He does this every day after lunch. He is clumsy and skittish on the tile in front of the water. His claws are peeled back in the pool, and with his tail as a rudder, he swishes in an elegant straight line. He gets so close that I can see his spindly tongue.

“Scared or not?” The slushie maker asks. 

“Not,” I say, looking towards my mother. She lifts her head and moves it back and forth in the briefest panic. Then she spots me with the slushie, kicking my feet at the pool bar and watching the monitor lizard go by. 

She smiles, nods, and turns her cheek to the other side. There is only one rule: don’t go in the sea. Not because I am a bad swimmer but because this stretch of the South China Sea is slicked with oil. There are no redeeming qualities about the beach in this paradise. Poisonous stonefish are in the shallows, sea lice, gasoline in the water, and plastic utensils on the shore. We stick to the perfect place, where the hotel staff takes me to feed the koi fish before breakfast, and my parents enjoy their cappuccinos and Marlboro Golds in peace.  

On some mornings, I attend circus school. It’s the worst, and I hate it. My knees get locked on the long climb up to the trapeze, and I can never unclench them in time to hang upside down on the swinging bar. I let go and drifted onto the net below, deflated. Spinning plates are worse. My hands don’t work properly. The other kids get it fast and soon spin one, two, or three plastic plates in primary colors. They zoom past me like cheery tornadoes. They all seem to know each other. Siblings or friends. I know no one and want nothing from them, so I try to flee back to the koi fish. The big koi thinks it's a treat when I dangle a toe in the water. He keeps forgetting that it’s not, and so I keep offering it to him.  The minders leave me for a while, then drag me back in. Non-participation is not an option. Especially in the weekly show. This week, we are lions and ring leaders. I want to be a ring leader. It seems easier: walking around the stage with your chest puffed up, holding a hula hoop adorned with fire-colored crepe paper for the tigers to leap through. Of course, I am not granted my wish. The boys are lions. They slather our faces in paint and affix furry halos around our heads, and we are to roar individually at the crowd and leap shirtless through the hoop. The boys are practicing, and I am already half-dead from embarrassment. They are boisterous, obnoxious, confident, and invested in their roar. The paint itches. My roar is more like a yawn. 

I beg my parents: “Please, can I just read by the pool?”
They say no, it’s good to play with others. But I am not versed in their play. Mine is quiet, small, and interior. At the bottom of the pool, I am so many different sea creatures. I don’t need to share this with others to believe it’s true. On the day of the show, we are lined up outside the hotel’s auditorium, carefully paired with our ring leaders. I am watching all the boys careen on stage before me. The music stops for their roars, which take up the whole room. The audience laughs, and the parents are charmed. Aren’t our children whom we have spent no time with so wonderful? My turn approaches, and I can feel the heat from the spotlight on my feet. My ring leader goes ahead, puffing her chest, readying her ring of fire. Something happens then. I slip out quietly without making a fuss. One minute, I am there; the next, I am gone, and my ring leader is left on stage, lionless. Outside, the sun is setting. The reflection makes the pond look like a melted paddle pop, pastel pink and yellow splotches, a whole liquid universe. There I am with my mane and my face painted, dipping my toe in the water, feeling the koi’s mouth clasp around it and release, and no one misses my feeble roar.