Humans are nouns. Humans are adjectives. Humans are their ethnicity. Their job. Birth date. Their family background. Humans are merely tiny bits of information piling up.
I’ve always known that one day, when my body blends into ashes and soil, nothing but maggots whispering into my ears, my life would still be sentences – with everything sharing its space with my name coming in past tense.
My Mum and Dad love me. I know they do, in the same way their hearts bleed warmth for my late grandparents and their stares linger fondness for my dead uncle: they get on with the funeral preparation, write an obituary, and contact the local newspaper, before they even let the heavy lead ball of shock settling in the pit of their stomach, loss carving something out of their beings. I was survived by my parents, yadda yadda yadda, I was a devoted Buddhist, yadda yadda, I enjoy biking and exploring. Not a single thing they wrote would be lying; yet, my existence is not a jigsaw, it is a canvas. There’s an ache inside me, echoing the fact that all I’ll ever leave on Earth would be these words. These inked shapes in print. Years of laughter and tears would be shortened into one prose, days of dream and nights of terror going to waste. How about the day I come to life? My first step? Every second standing between birth and death? Leaving me wondering, And what will people see through my very last moment?
MY NAVY BLUE SNEAKERS
I’d smell cigarettes and cheap perfume, before any of my other senses. I’d feel cold touches against my neck to seek the beats beneath layers of muscles. I’d hear whistles, the quiet ones that often get drowned by the wind, from the faceless middle-aged. “Pretty fancy thing”, they probably mumbled in their heads, eyes glinting with recognition at the European brand logo, only to frown at something so worn out that it looked more like a rag wrapping around the feet than a plastic sole, shredded by all the bumpy roads and gravelly hills in every twist and turn of the area.
I’d wonder if they ever come close to guessing how much those sneakers cost, to knowing how mine was one of a few pairs in town because Dad wasted no second to spoil his bestest Prince another blinding crown, another dazzling armour, another vigorous carriage for me to desperately run from home the moment dusk arrived.
The damnation of the carriage was nevermore a rebellious act, but an adventure.
At dusk, I met C. Letting C’s slender torso guide me around. Wandering. Losing ourselves in the shades of the forest and the embrace of the mouldy green. Mumbling about everything and nothing at all.
I was always behind C, pupils trailing the way nature combed the other’s soft but messy dark hair, glistening as if C was a siren that bore the moon’s tears upon her farewell kiss with the sun, bangs long enough to veil C’s stares, though somehow I always knew when the other looked for me, looked at me, and looked through me, wrapping my reflection in those beautiful eyes, in silk and fire. It was those eyes that lit tiny sparks of hope and curiosity in me, calling me back to the woods every time dusk fell. Wishing C would name the silk and fire the way I store them in my memory. Affection.
C’s presence itself was all over the place, sometimes equivalent to dust, sometimes held no difference to the mist that filled the environment. Why can’t C be always under my touch? Why can’t C stop slipping through my fingers? Why can’t I bring C to my family functions and friends’ gatherings and show my loved ones this was the person who breathed air into my lungs?
Even when light was lost and instinct guided our paths, I never failed to spot our shadows lying on the ground, the shapes of our backs at no time touching despite how much I tilted my head, trying to trick my vision with inconvenient angles. How could something belonging to myself and a figure I adored so much be this ugly and bothersome?
Would the yearning ringing in me ever quiet down? Before I die, would I ever get to remove the gap between us, stitching our shadows together by a brushing of fingers?
RAW SALMON SALAD (WITH A WHOLE LOT OF ONIONS)
Best case scenario, a forensic pathologist was going through my stomach when they found the goo. They’d immediately realise it was my last meal, drenched in my Mum’s signature sauce, with too much spice and vinegar for anyone that didn’t grow up eating her food everyday. Anyone but me. Little would the pathologist know that the salad was Mum’s love that I always tried to carry with me, so thoughtful and kind. Under her gentle gaze, the moment the corners of my lips turned a little bit downwards, weighed by exams, a fight at work, or a shadow in the forest that I had yet to tell her about, Mum would fill the centre of the mahogany dinner table with her raw salmon salad, not caring it had already been the seventeenth time this month the dish showed up, not batting an eye at Dad’s grumbles, tongue numb and desensitised to the umami taste, only because I mentioned it once in her arms, sleepily sighed into her chest that I loved it – I love her cooking, I love the way she chopped the pinkish protein into little chewy cubes, I love that in spite of all of our differences, we were the only ones in my extended family that loved onions, I love the unnecessarily large amount of spice and vinegar (and cried at the thought of never being able to replicate the sauce when I finally moved out of town for college), I love the way she loved, rarely saying out the feelings bubbling inside her, but never forgetting to do all these things – to ingrain my favourite dish in her memory and to feed it to me while I was blue.
To be loved is to be changed. Beautiful things get ruined all the time. And the forensic pathologist could stare at the goo for minutes and hours, but they would never find it in its original form – the graceful and precious gemstone-shaped tenderness Mum always had for me.
NOVEL
I would love to think of myself as a wise young man, but I am no scholar. I would rather trace knowledge through any form of media, but books, which explained the shocked face and widened eyes when people around me caught me with a book, a children’s literature one at that, blasting on the cover was the lengthy title and spreading inside were the words that shaped C’s world since childhood. Eager to see the colours that paint life from the other’s eyes, at least outside the borders of the forest, I devoted myself to the soft pages, finding flowers blooming inside any moment I giggled, imagining a tiny C with tiny hands and tiny glasses leaning against a tree trunk reading or occasionally staring at an invisible C-shaped torso sitting next to me, laughing along.
When I told C about everyone’s confused look, the reddish hue of joy and excitement left the other’s face right away, replaced with a frown.
“You promised that you would never talk about me to someone else.” said C so quietly I almost missed it had I not paid attention.
“It was nothing,” I hurriedly explained. “I only said a friend told me to read–”
“Which friend?” C walked away. “They would look into your circle and find no one, so they would start looking outside and see me. See this.”
“Would that be so bad?” I ran fingers through my hair, bile rising up my throat. “Would the idea that people I hold so close to my heart finding you be so atrocious?”
“It is,” C glared at me with no silk, burning me with its intensity, voice cracking. “Don’t act foolish. You know why it is.”
“Still, I am tired,” I diverted my eyes. “Being with you is hard, especially with the knowledge that daylight would only add to your glow, with the thought that my Dad would love you and your enchanting stories so much, with the image of you enjoying Mum’s salmon salad and braised ribs because you said you miss home-cooked meals. I am tired, C–”
“Stop calling my whole name,” C spoke, wiping wetted cheeks carelessly. “Do you think I’m so heartless that I don’t want that? You dominate my dreams, but we could never be in each other’s reality. The world is cruel and unfair, I know, and we’re helpless against it.” C choked. “I’m sorry that I met you.”
“No,” I shook my head at the awaiting doom, searching for any hint of lying on C’s face, panic rising. “It’s not that–”
“You only deserve happiness, and I’m sorry being with me can’t give you that,” On the ground, our shadows started being further and further from each other. “To me, you are now only a shadow left in memory. To you, I am now nothing but a sound you once whispered. It’s alright now.”
The forest engulfed C as soon as C ended the conversation. C was mist, leaving no trace for me to chase after.
DIRT-STAINED PANTS
Dusk came and found me near the lake, crying violently into my arms. C left and took all the air along, leaving my throat constricting, the cold sinking in my flesh as if I was pushed into the water in front.
Suddenly, warmth came to me, followed by the sea salt fragrance that I knew only one person possessed. Under the pale moonlight, Dad hugged me until my cries turned into sobs and until my sobs turned into quiet tears. Through thick layers of our clothes, I could still feel his heart beating in worries and curiosity, but he remained silent and patient.
I wanted to say something, to return for his calming presence, but all words went airy on the tip of my tongue. I couldn’t tell him why my insides were torn apart, pieces of myself falling all over the place, because how could I dare talk to him about C and taint the image of his bestest Prince? He never once did anything to make me doubt that his love knew no bounds, but he would never be able to comprehend what C and I shared, the memories we had together now locked inside the woods.
I held onto his shirt, feeling his hand running down my back, hearing his soothing words until acceptance washed over.
For the first time in ages, I stepped back into home before daylight even reached the doorstep.
RIPPED OUT SHIRT BUTTONS
It was on top of my chest, where my heart lied, its presence weak as if it was never there. Yet, I know it would always swell for anyone that had once passed my life, staying red for C to find if the other ever desired to seek for the old days, its edges round, unchanged since they was created, to let my parents find consolation in the fact that their child had had fulfilling years – learned to get torn apart and heal, learned to love and unlove, learned to be greedy and get acquainted with letting go, learned to leave the people he loved a fragment of him through everything I carried with me until my very last moment, giving them the choice to paint their own corner in the canvas of my existence.
