today i sthe fucking ugliest day of my life

i'll tell my kids,

prolonged holiday is the worst.

not a holiday exactly, any long pause between two sets of routines will kill you gradually. anything exceeding 5 months. it's the worst, fucking ugly worst that you can't look directly into its eyes.

when you have such pause, look for jobs. any job, no matter how unlucrative it sounds. it's much better than staying in your house cleaning up and doing fucking chores, which are supposedly easy, but not when you have one mom who tells you ever single thing you already know.

mom hates me, mom hates me






today i broke the lamp and the string of a ceiling fan in the guest room

4/20

revisions make me sick.




there's always a new crack each time you try to go through
like a pie that could never have its crust golden rust.

jars.

when you finish the bell jar you don't get immediately depressed. depression is not contagious. although indeed, it's the book about breakdown and depression and suicide.

the bell jar is like death

beautiful and absorbing, full of curious and unconfirmed ideas

and like death, it doesn't take effect until you let go for a few moments, thinking you're fine, you don't have depression in your blood, you're never an overachiever, you're just a regular girl trying to read as many good books as possible, so. this book won't affect you irl because your life is perfectly n o r m a l







the next day

you're not depressed. you just feel less like eating/sleeping/reading

you feel

sick.

each thread of oyster noodle each bite of xxl shilin crispy chicken each lick of blackcurrant yogurt each vein of mayonnaise dipped salmon skin that has climbed down your sloppy throat, makes a gentle churning in your tummy. its ugly, inaudible noise only you can hear races up fast to your nerves, furious. each dendrite each neuron each synapse is now occupied by the silent buzz, and you try to keep its volume down until you feel like puking, puking, puking, only puking, the table and the chair and the grilled pavement are the perfect places for you to puke.

the last time you puked, you had a diarrhoea. five years ago. you bowed and drowned your head in the toilet bowl. you made screeching sound, you woke the neighbouring colony of ants up, you grunted and wrestled your torso around. you could still taste the moss green liquid that reeked of celery and tofu and chicken skin. it was horrible.


your vision is getting blur, but of course it's because you have to change the prescription.

you think this must be some sort of bad suggestion you're giving off yourself.

you're never sick, Amanda. everytime you thought you had a fever the thermometer always said otherwise. and so you stop making faint presumption, you're never that kind of intuitive girl who can feel spirits or look into the future or read your friends' palms engagingly






the next day

you have your favourite dish, sesame rice balls with beancurd gravy. you barely taste it at all, but it's still good because of its warmth and silky texture

you also have your pancake, caramel custard filled, with both sides dark brown toasted. your brother wants a bite. you hand it off. his plump, healthy hand opens up and reaches out for the pancake in your hand. his hand brushes against yours, making an awkward gesture afterward. as though he just had an electric shock. and you know pancake is never known for being capable of such thing.

he says

you're sick.

my mom presses the back of her right hand on your forehead immediately and tells you to get a panadol. soon you feel a blanket of warmth covering your body, every inch of it, permeating into your arteries and veins and flows along with the haemoglobin in your blood, going around in relentless cycles.

and you think that it feels good to be finally sick, because fever always means warmth, humanlike.

warmth is like air, you don't need one unless you're getting any.





you're not depressed. you just feel less like eating/sleeping/reading.

i wonder which is worse



mutual hatred or one-sided love?

as i traced the outline of my mom's face with my imaginary hand--its delicate wrinkles, its invisible wisdom lines and the cushiony meat underneath--i burst out into the hardest, purest tears i've ever had in years

each of them made a perfect sphere like a pearl when falling down, splashing one by one on the cold surface of the linoleum floor as i mopped it over and over again

and i really do not know, whether it's truth or lie i've been keepin inside







mom, this is so hard

death and the penguin

my goal has always been the most banal: to make my parents proud.


today i saw the feasibility of me actually making my dad and mom proud of me is close to zero


today my mom asked me what vodka is, and she took a long, erratic way to get to the point and finally asked me, "have you been drinking?"

from this point onwards i knew nothing i tried to say would ever make sense to her, everything i was putting forward would sound sinfully dogmatic, unequivocally wrong and irrelevant to her, just like other poor excuses that plead to be set free. i rarely if ever try to give dubious excuse to my parents, for what i do almost always align pretty neatly with our moral/religion standards. i strove for better grades, i never skipped school, i didn't do nonsense and i obeyed all the school rules. i participated actively in an organisation of foreign students, i continuously make friends with a lot of people and know enough of the limits of each friendship i've been keeping.

i knew this moment would come, a matter serious enough for her to show a streak of disappointment in her voice. it was very obvious there. the voice staggered while finding its way out. it was swaying uncomfortably here and there, each time it almost tumbled down or burst out. it was all mean things that i had expected to come out of her throat, an absolute truth she had been clinging to. she of course believed that logic is inferior, limited and invalid when trying to explain our religion.

moreover i've never been good at spoonfeeding people about what i think through a verbal approach, everything seems out of place/order and i will wonder myself, "what the heck am i talking about?" while sipping at my tea. people who are close to me know well what i think of alcohol, what i use it for, what used to be my perspective and what has changed it

but it's all pointless in the eyes of my mom and dad

not to mention that what i love to do, things i slightly excel at: writing and designing have never meant anything to my parents

i think, when it's clear that your only goal in the world (ie making my parents proud in my case) can never be accomplished, what's the use of carrying on

i might as well die right now

and finally see what truth is lying there, beneath the sheer curtain of perceptible life.

have i been wrong, or have my parents been wrong, or will the atheists win, or will the truth of afterlife branch and shape according to what each individual believes, or is there any other alternative answer to all this?

how could you know, really, if you've never tasted a dip of this curious thing called death.

oh

you just can't tell