The ice age

Early on I accepted this year as an ice-age. The good version of me, quieter and more energetically sensitive, is frozen for now.

I spent most of this year afraid of the page. What’s more confrontational than getting it down? Moments where I pushed through were brief and fleeting: I could make a vignette, and sketch the edges of a dream, but anything that required discovery was a no-go. Early on I accepted this year as an ice-age. The good version of me, quieter and more energetically sensitive, is frozen for now. I wondered at random intervals—under a flimsy top sheet at the Hilton O’Hare, on a night bus in London during the unraveling of a friendship—when the good version of me would thaw out and rejoin the world.

I. 

There I was: broad-backed, a bit too pale, with what my aunt calls “a famine pouch,” floating on my back in the Irish Sea. I am one of those people who always look straight into the sun. Perhaps that’s why my sight has deteriorated so fast. The tide takes me out a bit further than normal, I can’t see the shoreline—my glasses are folded neatly with my clothes on the granite shelf before the steps into the sea. 

Sandycove, Dun Laoghaire

What was I thinking there? I wish I knew. I keep trawling through my notes app where the chaotic sentence fragments live, trying to work it out. From this time, there are moments captured: “You’re like an old penny, you’re here every night.” I don’t know who said that. “Tom walks in with a huge jar of tomato feed from the garden shop called BIG TOM.” I don’t know why I thought this was important enough to take down. In the next entry, I found some leading questions: 

• What opportunities does this open up? 

• What could be considered good about this?

Then a list of things I guess I wanted to convince myself of: you are funny, creative, resourceful, brave, kind, honest, helpful, and unique. Then a list of my talents: I am honest, I am a good writer, and I don’t give up easily. These reminders were collected like special stones, imbued with a mystical gift from the ever-elusive good version of me. Maybe I was hoping if I read them enough they would become true. If they are true, then how do I explain the ice age? 

A memory thaws now, of this list and why it was created in the first place. A date with a too-tall man in Dublin. He knew me from the internet. I was on my back foot but I didn’t feel like it at the time. No, I thought it was wonderful. More glasses of wine than I would typically have. Then an interlude on a black staircase behind a closed shop. The ping-pong of a good conversation. He was a poet. Not a good one, but I didn’t say that. By all accounts, the date went well. 

Then he dodged me for days. I kept trying to grab onto him: growing frantic over text, paying more and more attention to the blue ticks and the last-seen. Eventually, I had it. I asked him outright: Are you interested? And he said, politely, that he wasn’t. I was in Supervalu with my Dad buying sausages and candles for my grandmother’s 90th birthday party. It was like being hit by a train. A completely irrational response, but I’m thawing now; being truthful. In a poem (one of the few things I got down this year) I wrote: 

I am on display in this pub, playing my best set. The gangly boy 
with a limp is unsure.

He lurches forward on cobblestones,
shoulders by his ears. Papa would say:
He travels like a Marabou Stork.

“If it can’t be written in five minutes,”
he says with some confidence
“Then I won’t write at all.”

That is no way to kill a beautiful thing.
Outside, a blue night: it gloams,
it glitters, it glistens.

Later, he shares a poem and it’s a sad,
half-dream. Paced not unlike his gait:
abrupt, neurotic, almost right.  

I remember writing this and thinking: he will pay. He will regret the day he left me on read to lounge about the Irish sea on a gorgeous summer’s day, listening to Oceanic Feelings, then texting me about it — half-heartedly —later, while I pulled the heavy satin curtains closed and struggled to breathe. To make him pay I called him a bad writer in the poem. To be honest I started writing the poem just to call him a bad writer, hoping he would see it and know it to be true. I called him a bad writer here too. Right before I showed you the poem.  Do I mean it? When I scroll through his poetry account, this smug, terrible smile appears. ‘Bad’ is subjective. Some people will, no doubt, say that my poetry is bad. 

And yet. 

• What opportunities does this open up?

• What could be considered good about this? 

I smile.

II.

From a notes app entry on July 7th, 2023:

At night you dream of your Massapequa chiefs hoodie hanging on the rack of some thrift store being thumbed through by a bored teenager, all your clothes packed in boxes and collecting dust and no one knows where they came from

Maybe I was thinking about a legacy: do I want one and if yes how can I make one who will care and does it matter? I stole that hoodie from a friend in high school that I’m not close to anymore, but it remains important to me. Everywhere I go, it comes too.  A few days later I wrote: dear God, make me into someone wonderful. This time, no memory thaws: I can’t remember why I would ask God to make me into someone wonderful. I said the words miracle and blessing more than ever this year. 

In the same entry, I wrote: I’m angry, but I’m willing not to be. Dear God, please show me what it is I’m not seeing. Now, the dream edges sharpen: I know what I didn’t see. 

III.

“Spiritual relationships are not always quiet and peaceful.” — Marianne Williamson

For two days I clung to A Return to Love like it had answers for me. I played it over and over in my headphones walking down the street to the gym, where I tried to sweat out the badness. At the end of 2022, I remember feeling that the thoughts in my head were like the Shibuya crossing. Rushing everywhere all at once. I couldn’t come up with a coherent thought to save my life. The timeline had come apart at the seams; there was no continuity. There was no such thing as a reaction. Only action. 

The thing about tethers and constants is they are made up. It’s true. Every thread you tie to another heart may splinter and break. In the blink of an eye, much easier than expected. I tried to explain this to Oksana, my Ukrainian therapist. She works in somatic healing. I thought it was nonsense at first but then I remembered how separated my hands felt from my heart. Sometimes I lay on the floor, staring up at the peeling paint on the ceiling, watching the fan twirl. “What do you want for her?” Oksana asked and the tears came. 

I want the ordinary things you want for someone you love: everything good, all the happiness, nights that end with a happy full feeling, Sunday mornings that last forever, small moments of pleasure like when the bus comes early or you find some extra cash in your pocket, the heavy weight of being loved.  

“And for yourself, what do you want?” 

The same. 

“Is it possible that you can have everything good and all the happiness without each other?” 

I wanted to scream. Of course not, we are a package deal and we always have been, and everyone knows that. She is the first person I want to call with good/bad/boring/funny news even though I can hardly ever get her on the phone and she’s never given me so much as a birthday card. Despite everything and all of it, she is (or, she was) my center. 

I tell Oksana all of this. 

“Shared history is not enough.” The sunk cost fallacy was the last string. I regret how hard I severed it: I release you of all obligations to me, I told her. Half-hoping she would fight back and insist she was tied to me forever. Instead, and I should’ve expected this, she said nothing. 

When people ask, with some surprise and a touch of sadness: what happened? I am momentarily speechless. The man of many words, stumped. I can’t explain it even now. Eventually, I waffle on to whoever will listen for a couple of weeks about drawing boundaries and reciprocal relationships. Just parroting whatever therapized nonsense people use to explain the unexplainable: tethers and constants are made up. You won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t have anything forever. 

The view from Oksana’s place

Another friend who is prone to self-mythologizing asked: what did you learn from this? The wordless feeling returns. I struggle to explain it even now. What I learned is there was no lesson. This loss blew a crater in me. Eventually, it won’t smoulder, but that chunk is gone. And I don’t know what to make of it. 

IV

In March, I wrote (long-hand):

He says “where are you from?” and you shake your head, one filling threatening to come loose in your left jaw. That is the wrong question, you inform him. What you want to know is what I am of, not where I am from. So you, tell him. 

I am of the tall grass in the lalang fields, where tin trucks throttle by and stir up the kind of dust that only collects in desperate places. I am of the fire ants in knee-high socks, that ravaged wobbly knees and made small children cry. 

Do you know the jungle fowl by the ESSO station on Telok Blangah Rd? Well, I am of that too, that gormless prehistoric wandering. In the simplest terms, I am the sand dredged up from the sea and compacted in bags that ground the biggest, hugest, most magnificent glass temples that god never dreamed of. 

When you go to Mr Prata and order roti-boom and a milo dinosaur, there I am, dissolving at the edge of your stirring spoon in the milk. What should come as no surprise is that I am of the raft of otters that catapults through the storm drains in Hort Park on Tuesday morning. Don’t ask why we come on Tuesday, we just do. 

You may not believe this, but it's true: I was born of the rubber, tire, and metal on every wheel on the 747 and the A380 that meets the tarmac in Changi Airport. So there is no confusion and we are on the same line of the same page, the highest ground strike lightning in the world has everything to do with me when you see those pictures of the sky, pink and sapphic and gaping — there I am. 

You will not find me on fire at the incineration plant. Oh no, I am the rat that crawls through the smallest crevices and lives in the walls. 

Why did I stop there? I have no idea where I was going with that, or what sparked it. Some lines make me wince and cringe, others make me well up, and some I will never use again except for right here. This is part of the thawing I most dislike: showing my work. There is a part of me that aches to remove that last line. It doesn’t make sense, it’s certainly not flattering — I haven’t grounded you in the Tuas incineration plant, it only makes sense to me. Or, it only made sense to me. I don’t understand it now. But there it is. 

V.

One door closes, et al. In July, another friend came home. I don’t mean physically (though she did that too) but she returned from a yearslong abduction with a rotten man. I came to visit her in Morocco and her light was low wattage: there she was, this madame of the Riad — joking with the staff in French, introducing me to Valentino the tortoise, sketching out plans for our trip to the oasis & dinner in the desert under the stars, secretly miserable inside. 

We went to a Madrasa that morning. It was hot. I wore a blue singlet that matched the tiles in the water feature. Back at the Riad, we took refuge from the relentless noonday sun and lounged in our twin beds. All of a sudden an outburst, a cry held in for the longest time, released to me. 

I held her for a while. I felt no compulsion to say I told you so. Only: I know it hurts terribly, but you are back in the land of the living, and I can’t wait to see you—who was (is) so good at living—do it again, fully, soon. A few days later we are in the oasis and there is no internet in our room and nothing to do after a long day of nothing to do by the pool, in the desert jungle, at the table with a bunch of cats.

 

Skoura, Morocco

She scratches my head, I’m falling asleep. Will you read our favourite poem? I ask, and she does: 

We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.

In my dream, I was the good version of myself: listening closely in seminars, and taking the walk from Bronxville to campus so I had a few moments to smoke and think and talk with myself. A book burning a hole in my backpack, voracious fingers unable to resist stopping just five minutes on the bench outside Dumpling & Noodle for a few more pages. 

VI. 

I tried to write about E a lot this year. When it all came apart, again, my brain felt like Shibuya crossing. Once I had him and then I didn’t. No reaction, just the action of our no longer speaking. What I liked most about having him was the pining. I yearned for us on the bus, daydreaming about trips to New Orleans & early nights watching Citizen Kane. I liked this more than actually talking to him. 

Sometimes when he spoke I would tune out, and he could go on forever like that. Talking through me. But our trade was solid: he had my attention, I had his image. Someone told me to write a Modern Love column about how we met. I tried, but whatever was vomited onto the page felt like some AI version of my voice, trying to reflect. Poems got a bit closer, but I could never finish them because I could never figure out what I felt 

Here’s what I couldn’t finish:

You sputter through the pedestrians.
I follow your blue, red, and yellow
backpack, swerving the human swarm. 

I lag behind, you don’t notice. On our way
to buy tuna steaks, I leave shards of my old heart
on boarded-up mailboxes.

Did you know it holds ten gallons?  You tell me
about the backpack. Your blonde eyelashes
flutter like baby's breath in the freezer fog. 

My dear friend is getting married. I am not there.
Instead, we sit in some church to hear the organ.
I sulk in an oak pew. You take my hand.

You’re telling me something about the organ.
How it’s really a wind instrument. I pray
with my eyes closed, you don’t notice. 

At Tompkins Park; you take my hand, again.
I don’t know what to do with it. We forge
through the fright of being seen. 

Spring is turning to summer. The air is thick,
like cotton, gauzy almost. When I feel so much, 
I say so little. You say. Or, you don’t say. 

Later, I stretch my legs in your lap and hear
the rain pitapat, like fingertips, on the sill. 
You turn off the black-and-white movie.

In the shower, you hum what the organ 
hummed. I am swallowed by a vision, 
this emotional muscle memory. 

The water is running cold. You climb out
of the shower. Today was like a pool day,
it hollowed out at the end. 

Back in New York this November, I reached out to see him again. “I need closure,” I told a disapproving friend. He offers to cook for me and so I go to his place, where I lay a year and a half ago on his sofa riddled with Covid, crying onto his chest, having weird fever sex in the fluorescent glow of the white ceiling light. 

I look at him while he cooks and talks. He gesticulated wildly like nothing ever happened — like he didn’t just stop speaking to me one day. No moment has passed, here in this doldrum timewarp where we are doing what we did the first time: talking through each other. We have sex and it’s good, but I get bored. Later, I am folded on his couch again. I ask if I can lay my head on his stomach and he says yes. He strokes my hair for a second then puts on a movie I don’t want to watch. 

“This seems boring,” I tell him, eyes closing with the jet lag. He shrugs and says plainly, not with insistence, that it’s a great movie. Some war epic about China. I feel no compulsion to suggest another title. Whatever tie we had is broken. He was not bad, cruel, or neglectful. We just don’t fit. He doesn’t invite me to spend the night but as I am standing in the foyer with my boots, coat, and scarf on, his eyes get a bit hungry and he talks a mile a minute. 

It’s too hot in his apartment. The heater has one setting that can’t be adjusted and he lives above a laundromat. He stands there in his shorts and t-shirt, talking animatedly about his father’s trip to the wilderness, and his second year of sobriety. The mohair on my scarf scratches like mad against my neck, getting worse with the heat. It was as if he had saved all this information for someone — not necessarily me — and was grateful to let it out. I fidget awkwardly, then eventually, interrupt: “I gotta go.” 

We say it was nice to catch up, and it was. There is no mention of a next time. I choose to walk back from his place, some thirty blocks away from my hotel, and live a whole year. Every season with all the feelings — joy to be free, devastated by the deflation of having a question answered. I also remember everything I love and hate about New York, pounding the pavement with music blaring in my ears, catching sight of myself in brief reflections on the 24-hour pizza spots and shuttered storefronts. 

Church grounds in Chelsea, New York

Here I can be anyone, here I can be no one, here I am someone. 

VIII. 

There was a contributing factor to the ice age I had forgotten about until I met the page again. A poem I wrote about a family member was published. I handled the process of this poem entering the world completely wrong; upsetting my loved ones. I am hesitant to write about it (since writing about family in the first place was frictional to begin with) but it was my first brush with a consequence for writing about others. 

During a seminar in my first year of grad school, my professor (the nepo baby of a prolific American short story writer who wrote a revealing memoir) said there was good reason to wait until all the people you want to write about are dead before you start. I found this to be sage advice. But how do you handle the living people who remember them? 

We are all custodians of each other’s legacy. How we speak about those who are no longer here impacts the way they are remembered. I wasn’t ready (or trying) to bear the weight of that. But I feel responsible for hurting my loved ones. I am being vague because the last thing I want is to hurt them more. This next part is not their fault, but it is true: I felt pressure—after I was told in no uncertain terms that someone thought I did the wrong thing by publishing this poem—to consider the power of words. More specifically, their power to dismantle. 

This relates to the poem I wrote about the ‘bad poet’ who rejected me. How am I using my words? If they are weapons, do I pick worthy targets? Part of what exists here on the page is not me at all, it’s an abstraction, a liminal space where another me takes over. What role, exactly, the ‘good me’ that I am trying to dethaw, has in this process is no longer clear. 

Writing is a vocation, not a virtue. 

IX. 

To cobble together some timeline for the ice age, and to give action reaction, I went through my notes from this year. Looking at the evidence, I suppose my opening statement was not true. I spent most of this year avoiding the page. This was the first year I had no fixed project to work towards. And yet, this may have been the first year where everything I wrote was just for the sake of it. Below is a thought from Seoul, in March. I couldn’t eat anything there because South Korea loves meat, and the pollution stung my eyes, but I was happy and cold and bundled up in a black fleece:

There is a certain kind of rain that is magic. Transcontinental, it’s the velocity that makes it wonderful – strong enough to mingle with the tarmac and make that smell, to form ravines in potholes and drown the soil, the kind that blows horizontal like a sheet flapping in the wind. This wave and burst of energy and life; a reset, a do-over, a cleansing. In Ireland, there is seldom this kind of rain. No, not the magical storybook kind: there is only the kind of rain that makes you want to kill yourself. There’s no better way to put it. It’s the sort of rain that doesn’t register as such, at first, so you are tricked into a gradual soaking. It gives off the kind of wetness that seeps into your bones, making the soul damp. It’s bucketing down, is how Maura would describe this rain, even when it was so faint, so light it was hardly a whisper, a grease on the surface of your skin. You know what she meant though: that cumulative, hostile slog. It never feels like an event or an occasion. In New York City, the whole place grinds to a halt to accommodate the torrent. And still! People move through it. In Ireland the rain is like the Democratic Unionists Party, so predictable it’s a bore. You wonder where it all goes. Is there a secret Atlantis beneath Ireland summoning this much water? The reward comes out in the summer when the sun is shining, and you understand the meaning of God’s green earth. 

In reading this back, I kept trying to work out where it came from. This question has been asked a lot, here, in the thawing process and perhaps this is the greatest mystery, misery & joy of writing: inspiration arrives mysteriously. This excerpt formed my first sustained work of fiction—unfinished, but lengthy—so close to my experience first, so far from it now as it panned out. What I was comparing here are the homes that won’t take me on. Not Irish enough, not Singaporean at all, and weaker still to call myself a New Yorker. This is the central tension of who I am, the pulse of my life, a question that will never be resolved. 

In that same entry, a big space down, at 1:20 PM I wrote: 

I am a shard of glass I am the frangipani I am the motor inside of a plane flying low over the nicoll highway bridge I am golden mile complex I am the clawed arm of a crane over the ocean I am a deep network of interconnected tunnels I am the filmy sun through a thick cloud I am the mosquitoes biting your arm I am the scaffolding I am the water that looks blue and shiny but is slicked with oil I am a man made beach I am one of one hundred cars parked on reclaimed land I am the tin container that says wan hai on the side I am the word terminal I am chili padi I am everywhere and of nothing and everything, I am like you 

aren’t I?