I turned a year older on Monday, and in celebration, sustained a pleasant level of tipsy-buzzed from afternoon til evening, fueled by a combination of Taiwan Beer, Strong Zeros, and sips of Yakult-flavoured soju. In attendance: my lovers, old friends, a new friend whom I got to spend a few weeks with before they left Singapore for good, planes overhead at Changi Beach, a lost kite snagged in the tree overhead. People came and went from our island of three picnic mats, we ate a mie goreng cake, and I waded into the water to watch the sun set. It was a rather contained sunset, with no brilliant swathes of purple clouds or golden washes of light on the ground. Instead, a pink circle, cleanly delineated like a hole punched in paper, slowly easing into the horizon.
It’s not immediately obvious (I mean, it certainly wasn’t to me) but I’m a crier, and every birthday in the past few years I’ve had a little sob about how I never thought I’d grow this old. I did that on the 100 minute bus ride home from the beach with Shawn, and then we pivoted to our usual programming of existential questions (love, life, creative practice), funny nonsense (unhinged transition between Easy On Me by Adele to Tik Tok by Ke$ha), and music (overtone singing and testing the limits of my vocal range). I also had a cry about family dinner which ended up going solidly okay. This birthday hasn’t really been cathartic in the same way that the past couple have been. XT, reading my chart, said that the last year has been a long runway of preparation for the year that’s to come.
Makes sense. I’m feeling, still, on the upward trajectory of a long arc. The taper and its accompanying relief have not yet begun, perhaps will not begin for a long time. This year the birthday comes right on the heels of a number of very intense months, personally and professionally. I’m nursing a Thai Basil plant back to health after forgetting to water it for ten days while I was recovering, holding its tiny new leaves in my thoughts and prayers. I am tender and tended, giver and receiver of both neglect and care.
I wish birthdays could be postponed but the birthdaying by the beach was restorative even if I don’t feel like I was fully Celebrating. Truthfully, I’m still a little bit in the shits, but I’m also well into the process of clawing my way out, and then also very afraid of how long this process has been and will be. The dramaturgy of trauma is non-linear in more ways than one. Matroyshka doll of rotting wood. I am recovered then recovering then back in the moment of rupture. Well and unwell cross-fade in and out of each other. I’m gravely aware of transitions and in-betweens, forced to give myself time to let each moment slink out the door, tail between its legs.
I have to tell you:
In the worst of it, I was silent. Unspeaking, and almost unwilling to be spoken to. Words, which never quite do what I want them to, were lost to me, or rather, they had lost me. Some days I spent in my room without words. The gestural languages between my loved ones and I expanded—no, not this/yes, please/I’m doing your dishes/I’ll tuck you in/please rub my back/don’t speak to me right now/it’s okay. I remember Jeffrey McDaniel’s Quiet World and think, I would be so good at this (because as a former-gifted-kid, even this is something I’d like to get an A+ in, lmao).
Being triggered reminds me in a violent, humbling way, that the inside of my brain is the realest world I have. In the aftermath, it’s a silent landscape, uncannily hushed. This eerie quiet world was, is, the only thing that is truly mine, or, as David Whyte writes, the adult aloneness that I belong to. Other realities (lived, imagined, future, hoped for, and otherwise) felt impossible to access. Plans couldn’t take root and I didn’t have a sense of anything beyond the day I was in. At the same time, I had no choice but to be utterly, relentlessly present, lest I be arrested by the past.
The absence of the ability to narrate it was horrible. I hadn’t realised how central this act was to my sense of self: to narrate, at least to myself, and then to choose what I share with others. When I’m well, or more well, I struggle a lot with quieting the internal monologue that’s constantly running in my brain but right now, even though it’s coming at the price of not-sleeping ahead of a very full day, I’m simply so glad to be narrating my interior life again.
It was only last week that I began to write again, first in my journal, and then my email and text apologies to work-things that I’d ignored, and then here, and then otherwise. You must know by now that I want to write beautifully, or at the very least, clearly. Sometimes this stops me from writing to you. But ultimately, my desire to know you and be known by you is greater than my desire for beauty, which is everywhere if I practice being easily delighted, or my desire for clarity, which I want to accept is a doomed, fruitless yearning. And right now I am just delighted to speak.
Perhaps everything there is to be said has already been said; in my silence I learn that the point is in the saying, and not in the having said. I continue to discover what a painful and precious thing it is to tend to myself, to hold the specificities of my perception (which, while deeply flawed, is all I have to go on) with delicacy and care. I am thinking about how disfiguring it is for our intimacies to exist within capitalism, and I am holding love and rage. I am, in the style of Anne Boyer, not writing, which is writing.
In the ways that I can, I am refusing, standing apart, holding the line between myself and the relentless violence of our present moment. In the bloody marrow of things, I choose, again and again, to live, even if it must be, for the time being, in a quiet place.
I am tired of the new, and sick of the future.
Time is a strange loop and we’re just slip sliding through.
Yours in love, rage, and laughter.