crack crack

Something hit and I had to take a distance from myself today. I saw so many jumbled emotions there, like if a firework had strings attached to each of its tiny explosions, each of its other ends tied to its source. It’s not that dramatic, but for the purpose of this entry it should be. And for the first few hours it was, until I pulled each tangled string gently and said to each of them, it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. And so on. Softly like a fluffy lapin jeune, then I could feed myself again, a variant of cold soba with miso something. Lactobacillus Acidophilus.

The differences between anger, disappointment and sadness are not that subtle, I found. There are definite lines between them, and those lines are not thin. The lines themselves, though, come in gradation of colours, like the rainbow. A liminal rainbow, so to say. I went through all my saved, colour-coded history searching for each moment of anger, each one of disappointment and each of sadness. The archive was quite dusty, but it was intact. I didn’t cry. No, I did, actually. Eventually.

One of the reasons I write is to remember. Whether or not my memory ends up subjective is a completely different problem. When I said the archive was intact, it might be objectivity: my memory is in fact inaccessible to anyone including me. What remains are just stories. Stories I believe, and I regard as what truly happened. All of us shed skins, it happens so naturally, and it’s painless.

So which ones were anger, which ones disappointment, which sadness? When I tried to classify them like Darwin did on his butterfly farms, I found myself smiling. The wind has apparently blown all the dust out of Oz and I’m finally writing again. I could see anger, I could see disappointment, I could see sadness. With you, what I knew, what I believed, what remains is solely sadness.

It’s a deeper kind of sadness, the one that’s a bit cream-ish in colour, like the very core of an atom, dissipated. I wish I could read this to you, eye to eye, with nothing in between, not even writings. Not even rainbows not even butterflies not even Darwin no matter how beautiful. But that is only the shape of years to come, when unpredictability meets with stochastic chance, the loveliest twin I’ve never known I had. So I can only thank you, for whatever grief it takes, four weeks of sorrow, forty days of silence – it is wise of us to take our time – each a breath of fresh air.

Life is a grand, complex accident happening in extreme extreme slow motion. We manoeuvre as best we can in the meanwhile, but death is eventual.

After injecting anesthetic on my arm, they started operating on it. I could feel something, but it felt like there was a thick barrier between my arm and their operating devices. This is what it feels like: like reading something written on a sheet of paper lying under hundreds of sheets of transparencies. I can see what’s written on that sheet of paper, but there’s a solid distance – the paper visible but untouchable to me.

Anger is something you tame down over time. The memory is there, but it doesn’t incite as much emotional response as when it was fresh. When my heart skips a beat, I can tell you exactly which beat is the one missing: it’s no other than the beat that belongs to him. Because genetics, my friends, is not merely physical.

The next limbo was where flight attendants and stewardesses came in flirting with each other, joking about their passports, while two brothers from some exotic European country tried to explain that they came to just meet their cousin in the airport then drive his car back to their own country. A Chinese girl who spoke no English tried to appoint me – with her pleading eyes – as her translator, and a young officer thinking he owned the whole world deliberately disconnected my phone call to Moscow, addressing me as a Du instead of a Sie.

Such an animal, me.

I looked out the glass window, stared at the blue sky and realized that I haven’t even breathed in the fresh air of Germany since I arrived, at least forty-four hours earlier. No internet. My mobile was out of battery. I tried to charge it through USB coming out from my draining laptop. I knew it wasn’t going to help. But being able to do little else, I just had to make an effort. Any effort. Even just to breath again.

This must be what a prison feels like. Locked in, serving nothing else but time. Square-ish, steel structure of their glorious modernist past. Cloudless sky. A fixed glass window between me and life. I could have screamed and no one would’ve heard me on the other side. Is ours the side where hope recedes?

The flight was delayed again. I asked for water. The officer said they didn’t have any but if I’d give him a euro he’ll get Sprudelwasser out of the vending machine. I agreed. It came in a plastic cup. Mit sprudel aber niemand weiss was sonst noch. I was thirsty, I didn’t question.

Nothing much ever happened around here. So don’t thank me. This is an interesting case. I’m happy to be of help. It brightened my day.

It’s been a year since last June. I’ve gone through a lot. I’ve learned quite a lot too. Or at least hopefully so. One of the deepest things I learned is that nothing can happen in an instance. This might sound obvious, but words are just words until you experience their meaning, real time. When you make one single footstep at a time, there can only be one leg in front of the other at one single moment. Sometimes rules are not written because they simply make sense.

Looking back, I feel grateful for my second knee injury. It was as though I was given a second chance, a second life, to retry healing again. Differently this time.

Patience is a composed form of persistence.

Our bodies are merely vehicles of the perpetuation of memories.

Proteins cease with deaths and are reborn with birth. Eternal memories are then transferred to new neurons, forming new networks of old meanings, perpetuating ancient behaviours.

I woke up from a dream where the logic was, every time I would click on a YouTube link, my left neck would twitch. There was something fair and deserving about it, and so I just played along with it until the certain moment where my waking awareness caught on. I woke up and I remembered I thought about Papa before I went to sleep, and I remembered that when I was in high school, I felt that my grandpa’s hand was on my shoulder the whole week following my dream of him.

Stories are formed in our heads both in waking and in sleeping. I would love to choose my waking logic as the logic that makes sense, but what if one day I found the light switch in my waking life, and woke up in a sleeping life feeling grateful that I was saved from the waking nonsense? This is not a scary thought. Perhaps this is what dying would feel like. Afterlife is just another place for the mind, if it does exist.

I woke up to Facebook. Charles Esche’s status, 4 hours ago, has attracted 23 likes, and Anita Toutikian has consistently commented on it, discussing with Charles. I decided to switch my light on – I won’t be trying to sleep again, because that will only reiterate that I can’t sleep. I decided to start writing and to not believe that it is my premenstrual syndrome that has kept me from being creative. Certainly I could have just tried to sleep, while wondering why I couldn’t sleep and blaming my hormones for it. That is just another option.

My dream of my grandpa went like this: we were on a beach, sitting around a table with beach umbrella. He wasn’t looking directly at me, he wasn’t talking to me. But somehow I knew he knew that I was his granddaughter. When I woke up, I chose to believe what the dream meant, until at one point I chose to believe another meaning. It was an easy choice to make, as though I knew both all along. I feel I can believe both now, as much as I feel I can believe neither. The warm feeling that I felt on my shoulder the whole week after that dream was interesting, just like how my left neck twitched: perhaps it was Papa trying to wake me up?

I woke up to my waking sense. The twitch somehow felt like what it felt when the Chinese doctor that was really an electro-acupuncturist applied some pulsating electrical current to my bursitis-ridden knee a few weeks ago. Now that I have integrated my waking memory to make sense of the world, I suspect that that is what the twitch was: my body pulsating its own electrical current. To heal itself perhaps, to think of it positively.

I woke up to the memory of attempting to freeze our 6 kilograms of strawberries. I went to the freezer and checked on them. They’re well on their way to gelidity, frigidity, frozenness, whichever word can or cannot express it truly. I remembered that before I went to sleep I thought of Mama and my attempt to prepare myself to be an adult orphan. Sometimes Papa lives through her for me, like when she said that we did have a vacuuming device for freezing food: Papa bought it just in case (like he did buy many other things because it looked technologically cool to do at the convenience of your own home). What will happen when Mama dies? Somehow, my attempt to feel this made a part of myself believe that there is a logic to having kids. Something lives on. Stories live on.

Although all stories are really what we choose them to be.

I woke up to Skype. For a moment there was a remaining for Daniel’s online status, and I felt some kind of joy. A few seconds later, the software finally came to its waking sense and said that Daniel just went offline. My left neck has stopped twitching.

An understanding of death is what I had a microscopic glimpse of
when I look at my face in the mirror and wonder whether they
will force make up onto it while I lie in my coffin. An understanding of death
is what I had a tiny glimpse of when loving you and being reminded that nothing is forever although
some things are.
An understanding of death is looking at a portrait of my late
grandfather and realising that they say
the dead don’t talk in your dream
and thinking that their speechlessness resemble old paintings.

All in all, an understanding of death is looking,
wondering,
loving,
being reminded,
looking,
realising,
thinking

and impossible.

Turbulence. Nothing new. The roughest one I’ve had so far, though. The woman sitting next to me held on tightly to her seat. She closed her eyes tightly, and mumbled something. A prayer, maybe, obviously. Or perhaps promises? Her heart beat faster, by the look of it. I thought of Kiki, her recently-developed, self-grown fear of flight and what I would tell her when we landed. Someone chuckled. There was no announcement from the pilot. A guy at the back row next to mine looked around excitedly. I could understand very well what he felt — to me it felt a bit like a fun ride on a roller coaster. I thought of how small we must have looked already from Schiphol down below. How meaningless.

Cotton-like clouds. How could they generate such violent bumps? I wondered whether that would be how my life ended — that the very plane would go down and crash. Losing its wings on the way down, perhaps. C-r-a-c-k. Then the other, c-r-a-c-k. Somehow, I was somewhat exhilarated. Kiki told me that in the process of a plane crash, an aeroplane could break in two. A usual spot would be around the wings, which, oh, right where I was sitting. How thrilling. Then it came: almost an audible thump. For a second I felt my bum flying in the air and sensed the seatbelt pulling me back down. Whoa, I exclaimed. Whoa? It didn’t seem too appropriate of a response.

The thump, however, seemed to be a thump out of the troubled zone. I looked out the window again and could only saw blue sky. The deceiving clouds were gone. Everything was suddenly calmer, like a fish out of the stormy sea taking a breath of fresh air. People mumbled their relief and a few of them giggled. The woman sitting next to me stroked her belly with the remaining last bits of her anxiety, looking lovingly at it, almost cooing. That was when I first realised she might have been pregnant.

I thought of Ola Pehrson. I met Ola during the Istanbul Biennial. We hung out with Johanna Billing and a few others, a brief introduction, a brief chat, a brief lunch and some cups of apple tea, on a brief day. He was one of the greatest person to be around, however, and I felt a nice enthusiasm growing in me to visit him in Sweden soon. I had no idea that that was never going to happen: a few short weeks after leaving Istanbul, he and his family had a car accident. A brief life. All of them, except for their youngest child, died in the accident.

I thought of my father and how he smiled in his death. What is it like on that other side? If there is an other side. I thought of that woman’s unborn baby. I thought of Dan and I thought of death. I thought of not being able to say goodbye before my death — or rather, whether it is necessary to say goodbye. After all, it’s death, and we will all have it when the time comes — it’s the only certain thing in life. If life is about experiencing after all, what difference does death make?

Living, however, is about relating as well, and that’s where death makes a difference. My plane landed smoothly in Gatwick. The next day, a stream of emails from my S-Express friends shocked me: Alexis and his girlfriend Nika were shot dead in their house in Quezon City three hours before my rough flight back to London. Until the moment I read those emails, catching up with Alexis was still a possibility lingering in the back of my mind. I didn’t even know he got together with Nika. My grieving of my father’s sudden death seemed to have clouded my knowledge of his grieving of his. That’s how long we haven’t caught up. That many things we could have updated each other with. But the news of his death wiped off the potential of ever relating again with him.

Right at this moment I could die. What would it be like for me? Immediate limbo? Or would there be a moment, or a day, or a few weeks of adjusting to the fact that time, in my body, doesn’t tick anymore? I know how it feels on our living side — to be stripped off the privilege of relating, and of experiencing life in relations with our beloved dead. That feeling of loss. This very moment, should I die, would I feel the same loss?

When you believe in free will,
doesn’t all death become suicide?