'So I thought I'd say Hello'

I like this feeling when drunk, where you're sorta swaying side to side in your head, lucid yet reckless, lightly deciding between saying I  L O V E  Y O U  to anyone and shouting F U C K  Y O U to everyone. You probably end up doing both, as I've done a couple of times, before collapsing in someone else's arms. 

My last two nights in the UK, and so been morose the past one week. Isn't it a cliche to just go, 'how time flies, yes it does.' When it's not just empty, abstract, 'time', but a few months of the prime of your life. And here I am, retrieving my footsteps I had made four months ago. The stopover in Korea, the airport at Sydney. 

A year ago, I was morose and was dying to leave Singapore. A year on, I'm morose and dreading my departure. Life's such a sickening bitch. :) 

I had meant to write about the snow. I first saw it in Oslo. Already-fallen snow. It came from nowhere, and had long stopped before I arrived. But everywhere was snow, snow, and snow was everywhere. Rooftops and sheds and letterboxes were caked with thick, creamy layers of snow. They were so soft and icy that when you scrunched a handful of snow in your hands you felt nothing for a few seconds. Skiied for the first time, up in the plateau where everywhere was white and light and the sun was just a few metres from yourself. When you held up your hand you could almost touch its face. But it wasn't that easy to get near it, for it's your first time on skiis, and you were like a child, learning how to walk, barefeet on soft snow.

And then snow fall. It was back in England, and I was in my room. Then a peculiar sound from outside the window, and then I turned, and there were white swirls everywhere. The sky was blindingly white, so the red walls and roofs of the houses opposite lent the backdrop for the snow, and it simply fell from nowwhere, in such abundance, such lightness, falling with such purpose, as if homing in on their rightful place on the ground. Nothing, absolutely nothing could be more romantic than to be lying on your bed and watching the snow fall outside, with someone by your side.

"Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel." 

-- The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

Funny, I'd read the novel so many times, I can locate any line almost randomly flipping the pages, but I don't really remember having read this line. And how true it is.

Why must it be that one day life is orderly and you are content, and someone comes along and your old world disappears? After more than a few nights that new world too disappears too. 

When you write Love a little long note to say goodbye and why, Love replies with just a line. A FUCKING LINE. And then the days roll into weeks, weeks into months, and months into something like discarded memories. 

And then a few days before the months and memories turn into a year, Love sends u an email: I wouldn't blame you if you'd rather not, it says. 

When Love has no right to blame you in the first place. 

Love never changes. It's always all about Love. Never about you. 

Do I love Love still? Honestly, I don't think so. 

Sometimes you remember that you had been hurt. Time is a great deadener. But so is the heart itself. So you remember a hurt that you now cannot make sense of. And therefore the hurt is stripped of pain.

But you do remember how it once hurt. Even though, again, the hurt is stripped of pain.

And when u see Love's name in your inbox, it's a wound opened afresh. 

But you can't remember why there's a wound in the first place, even though the wound there hurts you a little still. But it's a hurt that has no more pain. 

That Love's become an empty signifier, a lifeless sceptre. 

It's not hate. Just regret. Regret that you'd ever found and loved this Love.