wireless souls for sale

i sold off my 3 year-old thinkpad to a secondhand shop this afternoon. it's as if a dear friend had died, and it's all a little saddening. i bought it while in uni and it wrote my thesis (where would footnotes be without this humble gadget?); and then and after, the myriad of trials and computations i've subjected it to, it has come to be closer than a friend (it even talks to and smiles at my friends).

but a macbook has come along (though i'd intended to get an Xseries thinkpad), and while i'm still getting used to host of new functions and meanderings, i'm beginning to like it. it's such a loaded concession, an acquired taste of sorts on the one hand, and i-don't-actually-know-why-i-like-it-but-i-seem-to-do on the other. i hope i'll continue to like it, and most importantly, i hope there'll be no problem!

i don't understand technology. it's meant to convenience our lives, it's meant to relieve us of our daily and physical drudgeries by making everything smaller, quicker, easier, and cheaper. yet, we spend more time with it solving and resolving problems - much of which created by itself no less, we spend more money buying the various electronica and spend even more money upgrading and buying even more of them. we amass these cheaper and faster gadgets more and more, at faster and faster rates, and end up with lesser money and even lesser time. handwritten letters, arguably personal histories and amateur artworks are near-extinct, even though everyone i know delights immensely and ineffably in receiving such scrolls. now our emails live as long as we remember our passwords - that is, not very long.

sometime ago i contemplated cutting myself off from this frenzied, technological conspiracy - cancel my phone and internet lines, use no more computers, and just get by with pen and paper. perhaps one day...

and till then, i fear for the things i love - poring through the morning papers, it's sounds like the sounds of rustling leaves; books thick with creamy pages and pages of wonderful prose and another world; letters lovingly-crafted, folded and sealed, received two weeks late and kept forever. what would the world be like when a heartbreak is nothing more but a harddisk crash, reformattable, disposable?
__

Across the gate, your face. You can't come any further. I have to go through. The latch is light. Yes, open it. It was not difficult.

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

- Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods.

love letter for myself

early december night, and cars and people no longer haunt the streets. the streets glint with after-rain, the dark wraps round me like an overcoat. i walk through the quiet and the cold, past one streetlamp after another, midsky aureoles of orange glow through my restless gaze, reluming the darkness in-between. i feel tender. silence rises and falls, footpaces slow, heartbeats soften, i feel all tender. has it been a year already. innocent nights like this tarry between endless possibilities and one rejection. has it been a year already. that one rejection breaks into a million coloured pieces, the pieces pierce and sear, the night broken. what is one year amidst eternal time, when one time, it all will end? i walk on. in such light, what is the cold when you can watch the rain fall? i walk on. what are teardrops when there are books of laughter?

i walk on my wound.

what is one love when you can love another stranger.