meow

[thenighttcat]

Shin Split

Slept past my alarm this morning. I’ve been so, so tired these past few days, and I would have to loved to keep sleeping, but it’s a work-from-home day and I’ve got work to do.

For lunch I warmed up the potatoes and beans I cooked on Sunday in the microwave, and added a bit of kimchi for taste. I ate my lunch while watching a Cinema Therapy video on You’ve Got Mail. I've never watched the movie before. It's about a small bookshop owner who both detests and is in love with the same man - but she doesn’t know it. She detests the real-life, public version of him, who is the representative of a conglomerate  trying to drive her bookshop out of business, and is in love with his private online persona, a sweet and sensitive man with whom she corresponds (hence the movie title). At each extreme, she knows only a part of the man, and extrapolates for the parts she does not know. I guess we are all like that. We only ever know one side of people, but still we divide them into good and bad camps, ignoring the reality that people come in shades of grey.

Rushed through the rest of my work in the afternoon to finish right on time at six o’clock, so I can go for parkour practice. Ben and Solomon were at the park today. Their presence spurred me to take high swings on the lache I've been working on. I also successfully landed the big precision jump I had been working on since the start of the year, the one from the grey wall to the big black box. One time, two times, thre—

Nope.

My left foot slipped. My shin crashed into the edge. Uh-oh, I thought. UH-OH...when I actually saw the wound. It was nasty. Nastier than any wound I'd ever sustained. I know that because I could see the slimy flesh and bone quivering beneath the skin.

The boys came to my rescue. Solomon pulled out his first aid kit. Ben pulled out his phone. "SHIZZZZ!" He took a video, featuring a close-up of the wound, a close-up of my grinning face (because that's what you do when you get injured, you plaster a ridiculous grin on your face), a closeup of the reactions of the two young boys who had edged their way over to check out the buzz. Then, we all had a group photo before I limped away. A truly Kodak moment.

The clinic doctor gave me an local anaesthesia shot and palpated the wound. The thought crossed my mind that he was touching my raw flesh and bone with his fingers, and I could only imagine what I'd be feeling right that instant if it wasn't for the anaesthesia. I had to look away. I didn't want my brain to remember this. I was afraid I'd never dare to do parkour again if I remembered.

He frowned. "I can feel a little crack on the shin bone. Might be an open fracture. I hope I'm wrong, but you need to go to the hospital to get an X-ray.”

The clinic was located right at the train station so I took a train down to NUH right away (wasn’t going to take my chances at Ng Teng Foong). Walking into the A&E department, it occurred to me that a year ago, I had come to this exact same place for an infected foot—my left foot, too—and here I was again, greeted by the overly bright fluorescent lights, the beige walls and floor, the dreary patients, masked up and engrossed in their personal devices. Around me came the intermittent sounds of coughing, and beside me a middle-aged lady was talking incessantly on the phone. Sitting on the last of a row of plastic chairs with my leg stretched, I took a photo of the doctor’s note and uploaded it to Gemini to solicit for medical advice. The results were not encouraging. In the worst-case scenario of an open fracture, I could be hospitalised for a few days and put on crutches. It might be three to six months before I fully recovered. And on the way here I was still thinking if I could attempt the Lache again tomorrow.

[thenighttcat]

Sunday

Parkour jam at Macpherson wave in the afternoon. Asked Nachos about his thoughts on Ukemi, the art of falling. He told me that he prefers to prevent failures in the first place by analysing the reasons for lack of confidence in executing the move (e.g. fear, environment, lack of technical skill), and working on those reasons until the risk of bailing is reduced to an insignificant level. How people do parkour, he added, is a reflection who they are. It got me thinking about my own approach to parkour and life. I tend to zoom in on worse-case scenarios, and the fear of them being realised becomes so intense that ironically I find myself wishing for those scenarios to happen, so that I can become immune to them. It’s a pretty crazy way of thinking, I know, but that’s how my mind works.

Monday

Watched Kina Grannis' Behind the Music series. In one of the videos, she talked about how she came to write the song Lonesome. She said there are often days, weeks, perhaps even months where she is overcome by dark feelings, and this song was her way of sharing that experience. Listening to her bare her soul brought tears to my eyes. Recently I've been feeling so alone, feeling so filled with longing and loss. It’s as if everything is slipping through the gaps between my fingers. It's killing me. While nothing she said is going to help me fix myself, simply knowing that there is a kindred spirit out there makes me feel a little less alone.

Tuesday

Sat with Jesse at lunch today. Somehow the conversation veered to BTO and marriage. I said I can't get married because I have no money. Jesse said that in the past, people didn’t think that way. As long as two people liked each other, they got together and then fought to make it work. I liked that. There's a simple, old-fashioned beauty to this approach to love and marriage. It feels so much less calculativem, compared to nowadays, where there are so many wearisome considerations.

Later in the afternoon, Esther popped me five mocha-flavored balls into my palm as she said I looked sick and sleepy, and they would help me wake up. Such a kind girl. I'll really miss her when I'm gone. If only we could have been friends. If only I had the courage to be warm to people at my workplace, instead of pushing everyone away because it's just easier that way.

Nighttime. I'm wide awake. Those damn mocha balls.

Thursday

First time doing parkour this week. Lost my Lache and getting it back would be a painfully slow process. I hate the all-too-familiar feeling of pursuing a goal that is constantly out of reach.

I'm sitting in my room typing away at my laptop when a bird lands on the ledge outside my window. It has a bright yellow chest and wings with a shimmer of green at the edges. The bird tapped its beak against the glass as it stood radiant in a pool of yellow sunlight. I smiled back at the bird, and it kept my company for a while before flying away.

Company dinner at night. It's a bad idea to be vegetarian at such occasions. Everybody gave me their unwanted salad and I ended up eating a whole mountain of lettuce like a rabbit. Then my boss, feeling sorry for me, attempted to have the restaurant switch the menu for me. “He’s not technically vegetarian, he will eat anything without a brain,” he explained to a bemused waiter.

[thenighttcat]

Dec 2024: The Tze Bin Wedding

Finally. The officialisation of a solid relationship that has been a decade in the making.

I can’t help but think what different trajectories our lives have taken since we were eighteen. Over the same years we’ve begun, my two friends have poured their hearts steadily into forging a meaningful, unbreakable bond. Meanwhile, all I’ve done is filled my mind with useless romantic notions and confessed to a girl whom I did not love, and who did not love me. I feel so damn immature. I wonder...am I jealous? I don’t think so. Not quite. Maybe a little? Or more likely, it’s something else altogether that I can't put a finger to, and shall not try right now.

Beyond envy, I think I just find myself questioning my life choices, and the difference, how vastly different one person's life journey is from another's. In any case, there is no use going down these paths that lead to nowhere. Time to return to the heart of worship..

[thenighttcat]

To the nameless dude at raffles place I saw through the window the other day, eating his daobao-ed lunch at his desk

You’re always swimming. Gotta swim fast, you say, faster and faster still. When the net comes down, you’ve gotta be swimming fast to not get caught.

Can’t you just chill, I say. Lepak la…just live a little. What good is living if all you do is spend it swimming? Ain’t no use trying to run, anyway. Sooner or later, one way or another they’ll get us. So might as well be kids and have as much fun as we can before they do.

But you won’t listen. There’s no time to chill, no time to have fun, you insist. We’ve got to keep swimming, and we’ve got to swim fast.

Yup. When the net finally fell, you were swimming fast, the fastest ever, just like you said you would. And it got you all the same, just like I said it would.

So there you are now. Probably on some fancy white plate with spring onions sprinkled all over you. Having never lived, you dead dude.

[thenighttcat]

It's the fourth day of Chinese New Year and I wake up bleary-eyed to find a voice message sitting in my Telegram chats. It's from my friend Ruth. I hit the play button, and as I listen to it, my eyes are no longer bleary—no, they are widening in shock, because the words that are coming out of the phone speaker and into my ears are entirely unreal.

Ruth says she has feelings for me.

I don't believe it. But I've got to believe it, for when I replay the message, it really is her voice saying those words. It's the first time any girl has said she liked me, and I'm completely blown away. It's as if someone has just thrown a grenade at my face.

But really, I shouldn't have been too surprised. In the past year, I had been dimly aware that our friendship might be developing into something, well, a little more than friendship. The two of us often went on long walks at night, our conversations stretching on and on for hours. Those conversations… they had a depth and effortlessness that I had never experienced even with my best friends and family. I felt like I could tell Ruth anything, and she, more than anyone, was able to take it all in. It was as though I'd met my soulmate.

And I liked that. More, I cherished that rare space between friends and more-than-friends, one that evades strict definitions, along with all the baggage and commitment that burden those definitions. I'm not someone who usually likes ambiguity, but this was one ambiguity  that I didn't quite mind. But now, on the fourth day of Chinese New Year, Ruth has thrown the grenade. And that grenade has landed right inside that happy little in-between space of ours and exploded into flames, leaving me reeling in the aftermath.

As much as I want to just go back to bed and hibernate for the next ten or fifteen years, I know that's not an option. But I don't know what to do. The thing is, I don't want to lose my friend and soulmate, but at the same time, I just don't think she's, well… the one. You know, that one special, special person you fall crazy in love with? That larger-than-life character who breaks into your lame existence and whisks you up into the starry sky? That mythical creature that my twenty-nine-year-old self should really have stopped believing in a long, long time ago?

Problem is, once upon a time, I did meet someone like that. Five years ago at university, during a boat trip to the Indonesian Riau Islands. She was an adventurer and an artist. Her reality was effervescent, beautiful, a splash of colour erupting across a grey canvas. I close my eyes and I can still see her on the boat, strumming her midnight-blue guitar that she'd painted herself, singing along with the voice of an angel to the chords reverberating through the salty air. Somewhere between the sunset, the stars and the sea, my gaze began to stray with increasing frequency in her direction. Thoughts about her filled my waking hours and lived rent-free in my mind. There was no running away from it—I'd caught the love bug.

Well, nothing came of it. And yet, five years on, I often still stop and think of her. I'd like to think that makes me a hopeless romantic, someone who's full of passion and sincerity, but if I'm honest with myself, I'm pretty sure that just makes me someone who's full of bullshit. I mean, how do you love someone you don't know? Because the fact is, I knew nothing about her. We'd only ever hung out in a group and were barely even friends. I had no clue whatsoever about where she was in life, her hopes and dreams and fears, her habits and idiosyncrasies. I did not know who she was on the inside.

So what that really means is this: when I think of her, I'm not actually thinking of her. I'm thinking of an idea, a fantasy. I'm hung up on a goddess who exists exclusively in my mind. I'm the Singaporean Chinese guy version of the Little Mermaid, perched on her rock and gazing up through the ocean into the world above: wondering, wishing, dreaming. Pining.

Slumped on my bed on the fourth day of Chinese New Year, still reeling from the explosion, I weigh my options. On the one hand, I have Ruth, a soulmate who knows me and is somehow crazy enough to love me, and tell me she loves me. On the other, I have what is essentially a pipe dream.

I pick up my phone. I start typing. I tell Ruth I'm sorry, but I don't think we can be together. Maybe in another universe it would have been possible, but sorry, we don't live in another universe. We live in this universe, and in this universe I'm still this ridiculously immature guy who just can't let go of what could be for what is.

[thenighttcat]

I am lying in the doorway of a shop on Hay Street. It is the main shopping street in Perth, except it's past midnight and the place is deserted. Even though I'm wrapped in a sleeping bag, plus all the clothes in my backpack, I'm still shivering like mad. I'm bent over in a foetal position, as if assuming this posture might somehow trap and preserve the warmth in my body. It does not.

It dawns on me, in this utter state of misery, that this is not how normal people travel. You don't generally read, among the top ten things to do in Perth: Experience being homeless on Hay Street! Feel deep in your bones what it's like to be cold, destitute and hungry! But the thing is, I didn't come to the land down under to do normal touristy stuff. No, I came here to become an adult.

You see, at the age of twenty, I was a year away from being officially declared an adult by society. Yet I felt anything but one. I was just this scrawny, timid guy plagued with all sorts of anxieties and fears, not to mention a perpetual existential crisis I couldn’t shake. Consequently, I felt this strong need to prove myself, to undergo a rite of passage that would launch me into the world. An initiation of sorts, where I could measure myself and come out the other end worthy. I wanted to be able to tell myself that I was a real adult—a real man—capable of handling the real world and standing on my own two feet. I needed to know that I would survive.

So I came up with a plan. I bought a plane ticket to Perth and emailed a local bike shop to rent a mountain bicycle for a week. I was going to bike through the forest for seven days, subsisting on energy bars and filtered rainwater. It was going to be epic. On the morning of expedition day one, I show up at the bike shop all pumped up for my crazy Australian adventure. The shop attendant is this wiry guy sporting a trendy beard. He looks at me from head to toe, sizes me up, then shoots me a sceptical look. "I don't think this is a good idea," he says . I tell him, "I'm doing it anyway," and he puts his hands up and shrugs. "Fine, do what you want, but don't say I didn't warn you."

Half an hour later, I'm wheeling a mountain bike with big-ass tyres out of the shop and on my way to the start of the forest trail. All my stuff is loaded on it, and the bike is much heavier than I'd expected—slower, too. Still, as I watch the pavement rolling away beneath me, I'm thrilled. I think to myself, this is it. I'm actually, actually doing this. I'm going to make it work!

And then I grind to an abrupt halt. In front of me, the pavement disappears and I see a busy junction. Uh-oh. To get to the start of the forest trail, I'd have to cycle on the road alongside traffic, which is a problem, because I can't cycle on roads. Back at home, I cycle on park connectors, which are these broad pavements with bold white and yellow lines and plenty of signs. It's all very safe. There are no cars whizzing beside you at eighty kilometres an hour, no buses that could mow you down—easy-peasy. And so now, staring ahead at the busy junction, two words appear in my mind.

Hell no.

My epic expedition is over before it's even started. The adventure of a lifetime, put to an end not by a bear attack, or heat exhaustion, or anything epic whatsoever, but because of… traffic.

Yep, so much for becoming a real man.

I next proceed to do the most un-manly, un-adult thing. I back the bicycle into someone's garage, collapse into a heap on the floor, and burst into tears. For five or ten minutes, I have a pathetic little twenty-year-old man-child breakdown. Then, I wipe away my tears and begin the return journey of shame to the bike shop. The shop attendant's face says it all.

"Oh, back already?"

I could have punched him.

But then, as I step out of the shop, I catch myself, pull myself together. I give myself a pep talk. Look, so maybe things didn't exactly pan out the way they were supposed to. But that's how it is with travelling, amiright? You're young, you're adaptable. You can still make the best of a bad situation. Go with the flow. Be chill, be spontaneous. Have fun. Sure, the biking thing might have fallen through, but we can still go camping. That still counts, right?

Yes, I can do this. I can DO this.

Filled with new resolve, I make a plan. I scroll through Google Maps for the largest patch of green I can find near me, and Kings Park shows up. The city's botanical gardens. Cool. I head there right away. At the park, tourists amble casually around me while my eyes dart furtively around for a place to camp. I spot a pavilion below a green slope, and I settle on the carpet grass, waiting. Once it gets dark and everybody goes home, I'd go down to the pavilion, get into my sleeping bag, and weather the night. Achievement unlocked.

But then, the daylight fades and a chill seeps into the air. I begin to feel cold, scared, abandoned.

I can do this… I can do this… I can do this… I can't do this… I can't do this… I CAN'T DO THIS!

I chicken out. I return to the city and wander about the malls. When closing time rolls around, I end up loitering on the streets. A sense of desperation steals over on me, but still I refuse to check into proper accommodation. I don't want to admit defeat. I come across a homeless man lying in front of a shopfront, and realise what I need to do. I decide to draw inspiration from the pros.

So that's how I end up here, lying in the doorway of a shop on Hay Street, bent over in a foetal position in my sleeping bag. It's a brisk spring evening, but I feel like I'm surrounded by the Arctic cold. Well, I think to myself, at least this would probably make a funny story when I get home, ha-ha.

Except that I'm not laughing anymore. Nope, I'm crying, or I would have been crying if my tear ducts aren't immobilised by the cold. I'm lonely, I'm afraid, and I want to go home.

I think of the last time I was here in Perth. It was nine years ago, when I was eleven. Back then my family was with me. We went to the beach, the sun was setting, and I remember idiotically trying to chase my own shadow. We ate seafood at a restaurant, and on the car ride back to the hotel I squabbled with my sister over who got to bathe first when we got back. During the trip, we took lots of photos, went sightseeing at tourist traps and bought lame souvenirs. Basically, the stuff that families on holidays do.

Now, I'm twenty years old and my carefree childhood is long behind me. I'm an a not-yet-adult struggling to find my place in a world where I constantly feel like an outcast. I've got family and friends but none of them understand me. Nobody is able to help me or save me from myself. Though we inhabit the same world we're worlds apart, living our separate lives and fighting our own demons. Knowing this makes me feel unaccountably sad. Incomplete.

I suppose my trip to Perth did ultimately become a rite of passage, only not in the way I'd thought it would. Because being an adult isn't about being strong and prepared to face anything that might be thrown your way. Being an adult isn't about adequacy, but inadequacy. Carrying deep inside you that sense of being cold and miserable and alone in a vast, dark world, with nobody to turn to.

[thenighttcat]

7.53am

Sitting in a beat up rental car the colour of dull gold. Light rain patters on the windshield, and has prompted Jeff Cao to return from his morning ramble. I see him now, through the blurry, streaked windows, walking down the single paved road that runs through the campground, his mind stranded in thought. The boy’s always thinking.

26 June 2024

[thenighttcat]

a yogi asks me for my new years' resolution

It's less than three days to the New Year and one of the Dutch volunteers Tjaka asked me today what is something I want to let go of in 2025. He and his girlfriend Jip are yogis so they like to talk about that sort of thing. In an attempt to defer the question, I asked him the same question back. His answer: "Tension." Tension in the body that accumulated from the stress and anxiety of his troubled past. He used to get abused by his Dad as a child, he said, and he's also been to jail and all that. He also said he wanted to increase his sense of self-worth.

He asked me again, and so I said, "Control". I am a plotter, I explained, but for all my plotting and scheming and desperate trying to direct my path in life—well, none of my plans had, um, quite gone according to plan and here I am now: 28, unemployed, on a farm, doing manual labour in exchange for food and shelter (yes, I'm being dramatic, but it's funny when you put it that way).

He nodded. Said I should write it down. This whole "control" thing: what is it that I want to control, and why? Once you put it down on paper, he explained, it's off your mind. That's how you let go of it.

"Okay," I said, but I had my reservations. Sounded a bit too esoteric and new-age to me. Still, I decided, what harm is there in writing it down? Just a bit of ink and paper, which I had plenty to spare. And so that's what I'm doing now. Writing about control. And why.

As a matter of fact, I think I have an answer for that. It's nothing too complicated, really. Everybody likes to control for pretty much the same reason: we're afraid that  we don't control, our lives won't turn out well. To achieve the life I dream of, to get what I want, what I truly want, you've got to put in calculated effort. To understand who you are, your deepest desires, and then to think real hard and work real hard and think real hard again and work real hard again, to try, try, try your very, very best to reflect and plan and execute your damn plans, or else

Or else, you don't get what you want. You'd end up with a dull and drab and miserable life and that, more than anything, is what I do not want.

Hmm. And yet here I am: 28, unemployed, on a farm, doing manual labour in exchange for food and shelter. Like a piece of driftwood washed up on a deserted beach.

Yup, joke's on me.

It often feels this way. Like I'm a try-hard who nobody, including myself, likes, and my destiny is to try very hard and fail even harder. As though at birth I'd been assigned in the great play of life the role of "clown", and a sad one at that. It is a curse I know not how to lift.

[thenighttcat]

Boxing Day at Bogor

Boxing Day. I am spending the evening in Bogor, a city two hours away by bus from Jakarta. Dusk is settling over the city as I hide out at J.CO, munching donuts and gazing through the musty windows at the streets below, bristling with motorcycles.

The plan was to take a train first thing tomorrow morning to Parungkuda, a station some thirty plus kilometres down south, from which a minivan will take me straight to the farm. But that plan has fallen through—the trains are fully booked out till Sunday. Apparently, gone are the days you can just walk up to the counter and tell the attendant you want to buy a one-way ticket for the next train. Even here in the suburbs of Indonesia you now need to reserve a train ticket in advance.

On a bloody smartphone.

And so the current plan (Plan B) is to take a Grab to Parungkuda instead. But Parungkuda is quite a distance from the city centre and I don't know if any Grab rider will be willing to ferry me all the way there. If Plan B fails too, I'd be left with Plan C: walking. Thirty-plus kilometres carrying my backpack and ukulele, come sunshine or rain. Not to mention the journey would take an entire day, meaning I'd have to spend the night at Parungkuda since the minivan only departs in the morning.

I have to say, sleeping rough at a random train station in the suburbs of Indonesia—alone—does not strike me as a very bright prospect. Oh well. As Hagrid says: "No good sittin’ worryin’ abou’ it. What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does." And so I eat my donuts.

It's hard not having a proper home to return to. Sometimes I get scared. I get scared that this is the fate of the future me, the old me. Lonely, wandering. I pray through a Psalm and sing a capella some worship songs. I feel a small flame of hope, however small and feeble, and I am fanning the flames.

Tomorrow, a new beginning.

[thenighttcat]

some dark shit i wrote on, ironically, a yoga deck

Sitting on the yoga deck with the rain falling around me and the silhouettes of the mountains in the distance, enveloped by mist and clouds. A valley of terraces and fields and trees is set before me, a picture of abundance and serenity; but my heart is troubled. For a long time I have lived with a troubled heart, at times heavy, at times perplexed, at times in anguish. Lighthearted moments are sparse, and never without an ominous undertone, a wordless voice that ever haunts me, telling me (quite correctly) that the good times don’t last. Because they are only a forgetting of the problems, and that round the bend my demons are waiting to torment me again.

It’s really hard living this way. Last night, I begged God for release. There was none. The demons haunted my dreams. They were there when I woke up this morning. There is no escape, and the name of that feeling is despair. The darkest of nightmares that whisper in your ear that there are darker ones still. For darkness knows no bounds.

— 21 Jan 2025

[thenighttcat]

We accept the love we think we deserve

And for me, that’s not very much. For a long time, I’ve just been that weird scrawny kid who nobody thinks much of. Not important enough to dislike, but not important enough to like either. Bland and forgettable. In a book I recently read, it says everybody likes to feel important, and I agree. I’d like very much to be liked, esteemed and thought of fondly. Wow, this guy is funny. Wow, this guy is interesting. Wow, I love hanging out with this guy. I know, I sound like I’m still in high school, which only makes me feel that much more pathetic.

For a long time, I’ve been a nothing, a nobody. I’ve made my peace with that—I’ve made my peace with my inability to make peace with that. So why, why am I still in such turmoil?

— January 8, 2025

[thenighttcat]

I'm 28 this year. It's 2pm on a Monday afternoon. My friends are all at work and I'm here at a library, trying to write a book that no one will ever read.

I'm panicking. Breaking down.

I want to tell someone but there's no one to tell.

I'm entirely alone in this, and my mind is killing.

What the bloody shit are you doing, Daniel? What the bloody shit?

[thenighttcat]

Watching HK dramas on a Wednesday night

is therapy to me. Life as depicted in these drama feels much less complicated. The characters are what they are and their interactions are straightforward and pure. It makes me reconsider the whole idea that writers ought to develop characters that are complex, nuanced, broken even. Maybe that’s overrated.

I’ve never been in a relationship. Too many concerns, too many caught-ups, too much projecting into the future and mapping out all the infinite ways it wouldn’t work out. Most of all, the fear of rejection. Too ugly, too uninteresting, too weird, too childish, too unremarkable. It’s best to keep it cool, that way I’ll appear untouchable.

Looks like I got what I wished for.

The characters in the dramas, they really make a go for what they want. What it must be like, to dare to desire and to be unabashed of making known that same desire. To not take no for an answer but instead boldly pushing it as far as you can.

But it’s just a show, right?

And I’m far too thick-skinned.

[thenighttcat]

12.27pm

I came home from Parkour class today feeling like a kid. It had rained midway through class and my shoes, now soaked and streaked with mud, go squelch squelch squelch with every step I take. A film of sweat, grime and rain has formed over my face, making it feel both wet and oily at the same time. Three tubs of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream are stuffed in my backpack, the result of an irresistible promotion at the supermarket: two for $19.99, plus a free Mint Chocolate tub thrown in.

I’m 28 this year and I feel like an overgrown 10-year-old. Such a child. A voice in my head tells me it’s time to grow up. But is that even real?

[thenighttcat]

It’s never too late to backtrack on your choices and make better ones. 11.21

[thenighttcat]

I finally did it.

I told my boss I’m resigning.

Dropped it during our morning meeting, a casual “by the way” sort of thing on the back of a motley agenda of mundane items.

Why, he asks.

Oh, nothing much, haha…just want a change, haha… I guess.

What? No, he says. You need to stay at least two years in any job. No. Three years.

He makes it sound like it’s for my own good. And perhaps it is. Not knowing what to say, I said nothing. So now the situation is somewhat ambiguous. It’s hard to be firm when you’re unsure of your own decisions, of your own self.

In any case, I will miss him. For all the disagreements and low-key conflict we’ve had over the past two years, he’s someone I can’t help but root for. Like one of those flawed characters in a movie that you still believe in and hope will have a happy ending.

As for me, I’m back out on the open sea. I have to say, this is not how I envisioned adult life to be. Lonely, aimless, confusing. Is this what being an adult is meant to be? Damn. Nobody said it’ll be this hard.

[thenighttcat]

It’s 6.08pm on a Sunday evening and I’m waiting for Mum and Dad at Beer Uncle, a restaurant whose logo is a face with wavy beer foam hair and that has a whole wall of refrigerators filled with at least a hundred different varieties of Asian beer.

I don’t like waiting, but it’s been a packed day and I appreciate this little pocket of rest. Breathing space — as Miyazaki liked to advocate in his art. Besides, it’s not a bad place to relax. A down-to-earth establishment, an amiable owner (the beer uncle himself), a convivial atmosphere and, in the background, strains of acoustic music intermingled with the lively conversations of young people in Mandarin.

I don’t like waiting. Yet life has a way of making us learn the lessons we don’t like, and we are repeat students until we pass.

I don’t like waiting. It’s too uncertain — wondering how things would pan out, wondering what you should do, beating yourself up for whatever you have or have not done.

I don’t like waiting, because there is no deadline to waiting, no end in sight. I really don’t like waiting.