fishmongeringstudies

[fishmongeringstudies]

#40092: woxer won’t stop texting me in all caps about its incredibly bad black friday sale and it’s starting to stress me out but i want new underwear eventually, just not right now, so i can’t unsubscribe yet

Do you remember those big red bags they gave us in freshman year? They had square bases reinforced with a layer of cardboard and fabric so we could put our takeout boxes inside and not worry about them sliding open. Everything was takeout-only that year. In the fall everyone sat in big circles on the grass outside and when I arrived in the spring I would take my food home in that big red bag, my hands shoved all the way down my pockets. It snowed hard that winter. I have photos on my old phone of Mertz field turned completely white, of pockets of water in the grass that had frozen over. The brick flooring of the patio behind Willets stayed frozen for so long, you had to pick up your feet when you walked on it or you’d fall over.

The Saturday of Thanksgiving break I looked up on my way to get dinner and saw a clear blue sky. It was cold that evening, three degrees Celcius and steadily falling. Maybe the cold had scared all the clouds away. The sky yawned wide across the domed world to the other side of campus, where it was slowly turning pink. The air was still.

When I got back I watched Dan and Phil from Youtube play a horror game about really liking golf in the first floor lounge and picked at my rice. I read the last four chapters of Kakukaku Shikajika and felt my eyes water like they did every year when I read Kakukaku Shikajika. I did a handstand.

Do you remember when campus was a ghost town without ghosts and you had gotten off at the wrong stop? Looking at Google Maps on your phone you thought to yourself, this must be the wrong place. You rubbed dust from your eyes.

From year to year to year I learned to associate quiet with nothingness. We’re the ones that got here when the fire was still burning, after all. It makes sense that we didn’t know how to be people to each other, let alone ourselves. Burning and freezing and burning and freezing in each other’s dingles in Willets with too much furniture and not enough of anything else.

That winter I spilled chicken pot pie in that old red bag and forgot to clean it up. By the time I found it by sheer smell alone it was molding hard and would cost too much effort to save. So I threw it away with all the other things I didn’t need anymore.

#a fish mongering study for you ( slinks back into the bogs) #i have to poop right now actually so i can’t write you guys a bunch of funky little tags #which i enjoy. because tumblr gives you all these options for how you want to be heard #but um. let’s see #every break since i started college has made me miserable bc of various associations with the covid years #but this break was GOOD motherfcukas #i dat down and read and saw so many stories #the grand budapest hotel. fire of love documentary INSANE. rereading jaywalkers by ao3 user batman. watched dan and phil’s horror week #and like it’s nice #stories are nice #i love love love hearing people talk about things that matter to them #you too #ok gotta shit now love you bye

[fishmongeringstudies]

sad pelvis story (it’ll get better after you give up!)

the remarkable thing about pelvic bone separation is that according to the internet and every medical health professional I have spoken to so far it only really happens to pregnant people, so if you look up care and recovery options the only thing they’ll say is: it’ll get better after you give birth! Well Then, I say, shaking webMD lookalike number seventeen by the collar of their stupid starched shirt, shaking them so hard their neck snaps off and they die right there in my goddamn arms, what about the rest of us? What if there isn’t a baby splitting your pelvis in half like a chainsaw? What then?

it’s hard to talk about my pelvis without talking about the evil secondary school dance club and the eight-year-long mental health crisis and the remarkable PAP-endorsed notion of pushing through and overcoming and fucking annihilating adversity. They’re all tied up in each other, like headphone cords in a backpack, or five gymnasts in a game of Twister, or a DND fantasy-themed orgy. It’s not, as I was cautioned against yesterday, that I went and based all my personal worth and value as a person on dance. In fact, one might argue that that would be an easier string to untangle. You’d just have to cut it in half and yank the two ends apart and then boom— no more Liya; an endless world of possibility.

the problem is I picked happiness. So I’d still be a person if you took the dance away from me, you see, I’d just be miserable.

circles in the water. Shark circles. Finger circles, finger rings, rings of people trapping me in the middle of the circus, muttering to themselves about fire.

yesterday I went to dance class (my most recent mistake) and we flung objects around like sweaters and broomsticks and yoga blocks and then it ended and my pelvis went YAHOOBA and while I was lying on the floor contemplating the inherent fragility of man my professor came over and said you have to stop dancing for at least a week and I cried and my friend wandered back in and was like are you okay and I cried a little more and in the evening I called my girlfriend and cried again, cried into my cereal, cried into my nice Fruit Of The Loom (1871) shirt, cried in the bathroom with the cracked-open window. I cried to every single person who asked me if I was okay and then I did it all over again. What else is there to say? Take this lump in my throat and cook it. Throw it in the fire.

one time last semester a friend and I were hanging out in the weed dorm (my Humble Abode in sophomore year) and after we finished trading life updates she was like (a little incredulously, with feeling) damn bro, you are Doing Well. I tried to explain that the fact of my wellness was less a given and more of a series of lucky coincidences that had subsequently gotten tired and sat down for long enough for me to achieve personhood for the first time in my life and I don’t think she really believed me. I don’t think anyone really believed me when I said I was a clown in a fursuit at a furry convention doing cowboy moves and that if someone took off my cowboy hat I would immediately dissolve into a pile of fur, that I was grotesquely aware of how easily all of the good things could slip out of my grasp and that was why I was on anxiety medication, but maybe now they will. Which is a terrible thing. When one dons a clown suit your greatest nightmare is falling. Because falling means the end of the dream. And the end of the dream means no one will want to look at you anymore.

rest is good for you (even for a clown!). Given the fact that we live in a society, which involves, you know, capitalism, complete dissolving of work life balance, et cetera, rest almost has a patina of subversion to it, a sense of you’ve done something that you weren’t supposed to, a quiet roar of fury. Unfortunately, this means nothing to the Singaporean work ethic. In fact the Singapore education system is so uniquely constructed that at every juncture in the road anyone who isn’t thriving at full capacity gets quietly yoinked and is never spoken about ever again.

which, like, injury and mental health aren’t remotely the same thing. But they sure can affect each other and make out vigorously and fuck each other in the ass. My broken pelvis has fucked me in the ass. Like an earthworm hanging out. With itself. At six a.m. in the morning.

a list of absurd things:

one— cows have an ambiguous number of udders. They definitely have multiple nipples and my friend and I thought about it and generally agreed that each nipple probably leads to a separate store of milk but is there one udder or are there four? Six? Nineteen? People have boobs. But cows aren’t people. We spent five minutes looking at photos of cow boobs and concluded, quite gravely, that there are some things in the world we will simply never understand.

two— among the activities not recommended for people whose pelvic bones have separated are the remarkably high-exertion activities “sitting” and “standing”. I was so stunned by this discovery in my English class surrounded by people who were also not answering the poor discussion leaders’ questions that I almost fell out of my chair. Which would have been better for me than sitting in it, apparently. Which would have been ridiculous. I can’t slide around my college campus like a fucking worm. I know I said I was a fucking worm earlier and I was going to fuck another worm but this is different. This is going up to a dung beetle and asking it to sing, to dance, to do calculus. This would kill a worm. If I were a worm, I’d be dead.

three— I emailed my school’s international student center telling them how fucked up everything was and they were like you should consider taking medical leave. All right, Karen, so tell me: if I leave, where the fuck am I supposed to go? There is no place on this continent that even vaguely resembles home and I can’t just buy a thousand dollar ticket back to Singapore out of the fucking blue because I’m not rich, I’m not well-adjusted and well-supported and happily connected to my large family of rich doctors and lawyers, I’m a college student and a dancer and an ex-depressed person who needs to not go back into that dark, airless hole, I’m scared to death of what the next five weeks will look like, I’m fucking

miserable. Didn’t go to dance this morning and I was miserable. Skipped taiko this evening and I was miserable. Sat in the new dining hall and chewed on cherry tomatoes and I was miserable, miserable, miserable. Crying’s off the agenda now because I’m tired but it fucking sucks, you know? Being injured is embarrassing (my most recent problematic thought). Not being able to do the things that spark joy in my life is embarrassing. Like I finally found a way to make myself not want to eject my body into outer space and now my pelvic bones have fucking separated. Google keeps screaming at me about pregnancy and my dance friends keep on going to their dance classes and I just sit here with my sad angry bones and my angry lonely heart, hurting and hurting and hurting, and I write. I write about how pelvic bone separation occurs in between 1 in 300 and 1 in 300,000 vaginal deliveries. I write about how I am not part of this statistic. I write about what it’s like to love yourself in a way that finally makes sense to you, and then have that wrenched away.

I write my sad pelvis story, because I can’t go over there and tell you about it. I write an email to my professor. I write a hundred apologies.

I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.

10.27.22

[fishmongeringstudies]

tender fucking faith

one: a tennis tournament is taking place at the tennis courts across from my dorm and boys have been screaming and yelling in their hoarse little man-voices on and off since ten o’clock in the morning so it’s hard to say what’s making things worse: the cold or the possibility of contracting covid or the backing track of sweaty gross hollering, the groaning, the grunts. It could be all three. It probably is. These things have a multiplier effect when you stack them together, you see. It’s not five plus five, it’s five times five times a hundred.

two: it’s hard to explain the situation when everything happens so fast you barely have time to blink before you’re sent running for the hills. So, all right, I got really sick. Then my friend tested positive for covid and suddenly I was a designated close contact (thanks J! I love you, you’re a motherfucking clown) so I was sick but also at risk of contracting covid, two things which looked extremely related at a glance but were actually completely separate issues. I have a cold— I shouldn’t kiss anyone on the mouth. I’ve had close contact with a covid carrier— I shouldn’t see another living soul for five days. See how one is just slightly worse than the other but put together they feed off of each other, two snakes in a pot full of venom, two snakes biting each other’s tongues off? See how quickly things fell apart?

three: but on Wednesday my dance instructor emails me to ask how I’m doing and when I tell her about the cold and the covid and the anthill fear has built in my lungs she says I’ve got you and I feel five again. Five and tucked under the ridiculously thin blanket I loved when I was a kid, dipping my hand into a big bag of pretzels while Pingu dances angrily in our tiny box-shaped tv. On Monday my therapist asks me how my family used to treat me when I got sick as a kid and I shrug and say they just sort of kept me alive. It rarely got bad enough for me to want someone to hold my hand. By the time I wanted someone to hold my hand I had already built too many gardens around myself, so that by the time they cut through the shrubbery to the center of my universe I would have long since stopped coughing. Being sick has always meant being alone. Being sick in a pandemic means being a public safety hazard as well as alone, which has a multiplier effect on loneliness, which makes you want to rip all your skin off and die. But my dance instructor has got me. Surely this means something. My dance instructor is waiting for me to come back to the studio.

four: it’s just four days, my friend said to me over the phone on Monday. I think he meant for it to be comforting but we had a bet about who would start dating first and I won so he’s not going to understand this fear until he lands himself in the same stinking shithole in a few months, years, whatever. Eventually he’ll understand why I saw four days and instead of thinking lucky I thought despair is the heart of every story and mine is no exception. Then I thought I’m going to write so many poems about this and they’re all going to be horribly and disgustingly melodramatic. I accepted this fate. I wrote my poems. I locked the door.

five: love is one of those things you never know what to do with until it finds you. One moment you’re doing the dishes in the kitchen you don’t own and the next moment you’re still doing the dishes, still in that kitchen you dreamed up when you were seven, but the plates are shinier, somehow. The ceiling light has stopped flickering. You were going to be fine regardless but now you think you might be invincible. You could climb the Eiffel tower like this, cut-open, dazed, happy. You could do anything.

six: three things I was given over the course of my four-day self isolation.

a pack of Swiss Miss instant hot chocolate. I showed up for dance class on Tuesday to no fanfare and the realization that this was a mistake and, after announcing that to everyone at the end of class, a classmate blinked at me and asked, “do you have cold medicine?” I said no and she said okay I’ll bring you something, go back to your room, don’t fall asleep. I’ll see you soon. She came back with NyQuil and vitamin c supplements and Swiss Miss. I have a lot of hot chocolate, so just let me know if you need more, she said, then smiled, leaving me flabbergasted in the doorway, and left.

Pepero. “You sounded miserable,” my friend explained when I asked why she went out of her way. “Also I didn’t go out of my way. I was going to get garlic for my mom anyway. She makes me go grocery shopping at H-Mart all the time.” The urge to make myself as small as possible is built into me with this kind of bleak, quiet violence, the kind of nervousness that makes even toddlers cringe. But just this once I let my friend bring me Pepero and I say thank you and she smiles and says, “if you need anything else, just let me know.” And something in me gives, something in me falls away.

Beef low mein, a fruit cup, a parfait, chicken noodle soup. I ask her to get a parfait, and if there aren't any parfaits, then noodles are fine. Instead she gets me everything. When I push the door open to the courtyard she is standing there in her nice blue sweatshirt and skinny jeans and holding two paper bags full of all the things I did not ask her to bring me. She has brought them anyway. Her nice blue sweatshirt looks soft and comfy and her hair is down and her curls are falling into her face the way they always do when it rains and the air gets a little more humid than usual and I want to kiss her so badly it’s a physical ache between my ribs but instead I take the paper bags, I take the fistful of tender fucking faith she’s offered me, and I walk inside.

seven: on Sunday I write a poem which opens with the following lines: ‘April begins / like this: / I am not allowed / to hold your hand / until Thursday.’ It is the kind of sappy and overblown and dramatic that would have turned me away from any written work on any day before March. It is ridiculous and soft and sweet. It is the truth.

after many harrowing hours the tennis tournament is finally beginning to wrap up (I think). Soon the boys will leave with their tennis rackets and their balls and go back home to their shitty dorm rooms and their girlfriends, their protein shakes, their whatever. And I will walk out of this building. Tomorrow I will make the short trek to the dining hall and I will sit at one of the big round tables by the windows and I will make a hot mess of my grapefruit with my butter knife and my fork. The dining hall will be mostly empty save for a few rows of athletes, stragglers, students blinking owlishly over the tops of their laptops. There will be no construction going on for once. It will be quiet.

and when she arrives I will reach up and pull her towards me, and kiss her gently on the mouth, and tell her how much I’ve missed her.

04.06.22

[fishmongeringstudies]

#00: at the beginning of the long daunting trek up the horrible mountain that you do not want to climb

on the large and shapeless assumption that we move forward while putting things into the ground, hopes, dreams, little morals that we shape from dust and bits of pipe cleaner that remind us strangely of ourselves, then I am obligated to ask myself as this cold, wet semester begins anew, on a metaphysical level that transcends whatever horseshit-filled cave Plato has built for Western civilization: what did you bury last autumn? Was it peace? Simplicity of the heart? Something important? Do you miss it? Do you want it back? What would you do to get it back?

we process, necessarily, in retrospect. Only looking over your shoulder can you comprehend the extent to which you have escaped the red castle, after all— a castle only looks like a castle when you’re outside, taking a photo, posing for a photo, thinking about photos and how they immortalize, memorialize, turn people into dead peacocks. For instance: a ribbon of time. Four months is everything when you are trudging through each day with your face in the ground but nothing when it is over. Look, now it is over. Does it feel like you conquered the steel giant? Were you as monumental as you wanted to be? Did you find what you were looking for?

I ask questions not for the answers but for the spaces that the questions create where answers might one day emerge. Most likely when I am taking a shower and listening to whatever funny little song has been stuck in my head all day. Out of the blue something will emerge, a wisp of a memory landing on the tip of my tongue for half a second before it is whisked away by the amber moon. I ask questions not to get anywhere, movement happens to you, not with your permission, but to find a place on the ground to start. A circle in the sand. Fingers weeping stardust. Some iteration of history finds you, no matter how far you wander away from the beginning of the world. History remembers. Like a fool.

but back to the original point. Burial ceremonies. As a writer I am cursed to bury everything that I write, sort of like how bakers create things by burning them— into the oven, out of the bright red dusk. But last semester I tried very hard, conversely, to resurface. At the start of September something died, a dream of happiness that I think most lonely people in the world have had before, but I refused to let it stay dead. I yanked it back out, rotting flesh and teeth and all, and I was like: dance. Walk around. Do stuff. Pretend you have a heart in you so I can keep going, so I can keep writing this farcical play, so I can keep crying, keep my dignity, keep this wound festering.

metaphor: bad. The idea: I was in love and it was vastly, horrifically, pathetically. It was all of these things.

can you bury love? Does love end? I mean naturally, without the knife and the fight and the long solemn scream that swallows all light in the world. Can it?

this semester I am trying to end love. This is a bad sentence without context and a worse one with it. Without context it is cheesy and pretentious and sad. With context it is cheesy and pretentious and sad and now foolish, like a horse that has decided to stop neighing. What other sound will you make? asked God. The horse shrugged. Maybe I will stop making sounds altogether.

but any living thing must scream eventually. Winter stretches out before me like a fruit roll-up that’s been left in the cupboard for too many years, dried up, grown mold, grown miserable. Then spring will step in, and that will be— well, whatever it will be. The only thing I can attest to at this present moment, sitting in the music library with my fan at my left elbow and a stack of poems to critique under my arms, is this: I am not sad. I am so not sad it feels a little insane, like maybe I should be sadder…? But no. No sadness. Not now. Life is bigger than the dead rabbit, the dead thing, the dead. We keep living.

I will post this without reading through it and making edits, au naturale, like a Frenchperson, hon hon, baguette. And when the sun comes crashing down on my head again in two to seven weeks, I will come back to this silly little post and I will cry about it. Hopefully you don’t. Hopefully you just think this is a little weird, quirky, birdlike— too fast, too unmetered. Like a runner with a broken neck. Just hurtling now. Just hurtling.

01.31.22

[fishmongeringstudies]

intermission end: 25 newtons

for the past few weeks this campus hasn't felt real in the same way that a coffee painting made on a napkin shifts with each stream of light that passes through. We've been afflicted with a type of slow onset apathy, starting first with the fun things in life (parties, illegal tree climbing, trips into the city), spreading to the routines we've painstakingly built up over the course of the semester, and ending, finally, with the institute of education as a whole. The logical result: a desire to leave. Yearning with a geographical tilt. Five degrees off the axis of the earth and going fast.

but the interesting thing about a college campus full of students who don't want to be here anymore is that it stops being a college campus altogether. College in America, after all, requires a fundamental suspension of disbelief. We enact the sacred routines of adulthood like high school students playing Juliet, making our flower crowns out of tissue and washing our hands in the creek beside the snack bar. We are acting. We are telling each other the same story a thousand times over. And at the end of each day, when we tuck ourselves into beds that lie across from other beds (a roommate, the first suggestion of cohabitation we are forced to reckon with) that lie across from other beds in other rooms, in buildings full of beds, buildings built to contain disaster, the hope is this: that we have successfully convinced ourselves of our wisdom.

so when we stop believing that we are wise and begin to yearn for our cats and our dogs and our poisonous rattlesnakes, the illusion shatters. It takes a piss on our shoes. It realizes we knew it was a dream all along and, embarrassed, retreats into the bathroom to redo its makeup and cry in the sink, et cetera. What I'm saying is this campus has felt weightless like a shadow passed over a sheet of glass for three weeks, and now it's gone. It's just gone. The old church building is bones with glitter on them. The big field in front of the administrative building is the hide of a prehistoric animal. The coffee bar I spent every weekday morning sitting in for thirteen weeks, drinking a chai latte with a shot of vanilla and regarding my work with derision, that was uninhabitable from ten am to one pm due to the sheer mass of people that would gather in its armpit, is just a big glass rectangle now. A big empty glass rectangle. No absent muttering in the too-cold bathroom now. No Airpods jammed in the armchairs. No you, no me.

we've been afflicted with a slow onset apathy and we kept the sun out of our eyes for long enough by the force of sheer willpower but it's finally hit us, all at once. College was good for three months and now we're tired. We're going to take a good long nap. We're going to leave the site of the dream behind, like hitting pause on a video game, Mario frozen in mid-air with his mustache bouncing heroically off his upper lip, his eyes sparkling, and then in four weeks we'll be back again, talking in loud voices about how good it is to be at college, how college is the place to be when you're young and you have a dream about collecting all the leaves in the world and eating them, and it'll be like this quiet winter dying never happened at all.

12.18.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

intermission: second-year sadness

November 20th, 2020, I am told, was the last day students were allowed to remain on campus last fall. The justification for this ridiculous, premature dismissal was that it was the first year of the pandemic, and now that we are well into the second I am able to say that it fits comfortably within the literary canon of sorrow we've found ourselves locked in, by which I mean: all right, we were all scared shitless, we all wanted to keep living. But suppose you were one of those students who, having been here for barely ten weeks, was asked, abruptly, to leave; suppose you were a freshman. Freshman fall turned summer camp. Your suitcase as heavy on the flight back as it was on the one over. Every dorm room vacated after two and a half months. Everything thrown away. Suppose your first memory of college was walking along a narrow plank and not knowing when you would be dropped into the sea.

winter break, I am told, was a hoarse, dry-mouthed affair. The dining hall opened at stuttering, inconsistent hours throughout December so people often ran hungry and cold and confused, and the number of students who had fought and fought and stayed was so few to begin with, what had been a ghost town of a campus to begin with lost its ghosts to a deep-seated sorrow and sunk into the snow. According to my friends who were here before I was, last fall was a murder and winter was a haunting and then spring came for all of us, smiling and smiling with a mouth full of flowers, but we were still lying on the ground, waiting for someone to rescue us from our loneliness. Spring stood in front of the boneless hope that had sustained us for the last six months and it cringed so hard its teeth fell out. And we still didn't get up.

the freshmen class this year is the biggest we've had in ages. I'm unclear on the details but I know one of the reasons this has happened is because of all the should-have-been-sophomores who made the smart choice in the face of a terrifying and untouchable enemy and deferred their enrollment for a year. Then there are all the gaps, the semesters and years taken off to mourn and sort bookshelves in quaint second-hand bookstores and cry into loaves of sourdough bread. The question is no longer which class year are you from but rather what do you remember? Have you ever stepped into the building they keep the philosophy department and its creepy blank-eyed statue of a man who looks vaguely Chinese but I have never taken a proper look at out of fear and respect and fear chained in? Have you ever held a plate in the dining hall?

I bumped into a friend due to graduate at the end of the fall in the library the other day. He injured his knee while playing tennis and is now waiting around for the surgery that will put it back together, working on his thesis and puttering around in his studio in the hours in between. He's been here for a while. He remembers freshman orientation, his shitfaced roommate bringing someone back to their room without asking, what the library looked like during finals season. When I see him around campus, which isn't often, it's hard to keep track of people now when there are more than five in my line of sight, another unexpected side-effect of the pandemic, he looks at home. Like he knows what he's doing, even if he doesn't know what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. He has a reference point for college life that isn't made of smoke and mirrors, and I imagine that to him this, all this, is nothing more than a returning. Some kind of coming home. Like walking into your old bedroom and finding your collection of empty coke bottles right where you left it fourteen years ago, beside the Peter Pan poster with the pasta sauce stain and your favorite stuffed camel.

and just like that, another November. This year Thanksgiving break will end with all of us back where we started, in our too-small dorm rooms with our shitty roommates and our unswept floors and the bathrooms bursting with the sound of people we don't know throwing up at four twenty-seven in the morning and missing the sink. It's not the same old song because it's the first time we've ever sung it. We're not very good at singing and we're not sure where we're going. But the ground is firm and tough beneath our feet and the air is cold and sharp.

standing on the top of the hill with our second-year sadness and our suitcases, our throats scratchy with sun, we are overcome, for a moment, with the urge to start running.

11.24.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

notes on learning a new tongue

the established vocabulary of love confuses me. It's too familiar. I know what it means to put your head on someone's shoulder, to hold their hand, to lie an inch apart on someone else's bed, your eyes half-open, the skin on your arms tingling. This is easy to understand and easy to explain. A literature paper on love: love is the green thread between two bodies. Or so they say. Or so I'm told.

having read too much and too widely I can no longer distinguish between the things I want and the things I am told I should want. Consider love as a doctor's recommendation. Love as the eye doctor you visit on a Sunday morning, bleary-eyed and miserable. The doctor asks you how you feel about bodies and you say I read in a book once that a body is the answer to the question of god. That worship is a form of want. That want is a form of caring.

what do I care about? I care about you. But the established vocabulary of love doesn't mean anything here. I don't think either of us knows how to use any of it. There's a word for the way you scrunch up your mouth when you're thinking and a word for the seaglass of your eyes but they aren't anything like the words I've been told I should use to talk about someone precious to me. You're precious to me, though. I want a word for this.

parents weekend is this weekend. Your parents are coming. My friend suggests offhandedly that I should hunt them down and greet them. What is the word for this? What language should I use to say hi?

this, my friend says bluntly and with all the kindness in the world, looks like friendship to me. I know what he means but his language is the language of lovers and stories and clean binaries, either you love me or not, so answer me this: do you love me? There isn't a word for this either in your language. Neither is there one in mine.

what is want without the language with which to write it down? What is the significance of the undescribed smile? If I sit here with you, under this silver awning, if we sit next to each other under a midnight streetlight, if we keep talking about the things that keep us aloft, if we stay adrift in the deep blue sea, will we one day arrive at a new sense of wordlessness? Maybe I should stop going to the eye doctor. Maybe it is enough for me to ask you what you are thinking about when you grasp your chin with your hand. Maybe the word I am looking for is your name.

10.22.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

sixty two: we are going to the musuem

tomorrow we are going to the meuseum. (stay tuned for more)

07.24.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

sixty one: side b (how to maintain a reasonable standard of personal hygiene without setting the house on fire)

i know what you're thinking: these are getting short, aren't they? luckily, today's is going to continue that trend by being even shorter than the ones that have come before because i got lost in the mall while looking for the hair salon and had to call them to ask for directions which was not only very embarrassing but also meant i spent twenty minutes wandering in and out of the mall until i had baked every inch of my skin to a crisp, like an apple crisp, only not made of apple. so i'm tired. we can talk tomorrow. recently i've been thinking to myself- maybe i should bring back my weekly newsletter. it's easier to talk about a week than a single day spent at the hairdresser's, or so i say, but in truth it's hard to do anything for a long period of time. time is fake, after all. so it's extra hard to perceive it, since you have to put in the effort to imagine it's there. anyway my sister bought me milk coffee and it's lovely, it's not the rainy season anymore so it's just hot, i think i'm going to read a book someday, or maybe write one, go figure. what day of the week is it today? it could be anyone. you could be anything you want, if you'd just let her go.

07.23.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

sixty: VERTIGO

another day in the land of eternal summer, another day spent visiting places i wrote about from the other side of the globe, has anyone told you how weird it is to come home? it's like putting on a pair of shoes you haven't worn in ages and finding that in spite of the five centimeters you've grown since you last wore them they still fit perfectly. and yet walking around in them feels weird, like you're either too tall or too short, you can't decide, like you're wearing someone else's shoes- they're yours, though, so what's the deal, huh? you are still made of more or less the same skin and fiber. you are still, for all intents and purposes, the person you were when you left. but in some ways that can never be redeemed, you aren't. suddenly there are a hundred different versions of you, one for each one that stays behind, five more for whoever takes the plunge to the next level; let's say we're deep-sea divers and this is the big expedition. go big or go home. we aren't going home. we're going to find the biggest catch in the world and it's going to make us famous, and all of our grandkids will talk about how we fished the sun out of the sea. where were we? oh yeah, my shoes. i fucking love those van gogh shoes.

lately i've been thinking i can code switch after all. good for me. it means i know the code to begin with. so i can get inside the secret clubroom in the natural sciences building. so i haven't forgotten everything.

07.22.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty nine: give us this day our daily bread

someone's dad worked at one of the hospitals in novena so sometimes, after a paper at the third language center or when we could afford to lose a little time commuting or taking selfies in the public bathroom, we would study there. there were tables set up beside a large floor to ceiling window which looked out over the sprawling expanse of office buildings below for the staff to take their breaks at; beside it was a water dispenser with a red lever and a blue lever, a counter with a microwave, and a sink. we didn't touch anything on the counter but if we got thirsty someone would go over to the water dispenser, and refill all our waterbottles in one shot. it was more convenient that way. when you're taking the british gce 'a' level exams in five weeks life is no longer about the abstract things like purpose and love and acceptance- it's an optimization game. how fast can i shower, how fast can i run to the bathroom, how fast can i wake up in the morning without wanting to cave my eyeballs into my skull? but still we had to eat. once, we met after each taking a set of morning papers and then crossed the street to the bagel place that i had introduced everyone to at the start of the year. there was still so much to do (the amount never seemed to change, even up until the very end, when we were standing outside the examination hall with our highlighters and our cheat sheets) and we were all tired from sitting and screaming all morning, so we silently decided, as all year six students do in october, that we had no time for leisure. but when we got to the store and found seats, put down our backpacks full of stones, and stopped to listen to the music that was blasting from the speakers (they played a different genre of music each day; that day it was rap), we wanted to ask the question no one wanted to hear, and found that our shoulders were too heavy to lift in a shrug. so we sat and ate and talked for an hour, an entire, precious hour, stolen from the long afternoon of note-flipping, touch-typing, heart-skimming, and the music was so loud we had to shout a little to hear each other and afterwards we went back to the staff lounge on the thirteenth floor of that hospital and studied until the sun set, taking all the light in the world with it, but that day we got bagels. and for a moment, we thought only of the sweetness on our tongues.

07.21.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty nine: another long day at the beach spent eating ice kachang under a plastic umbrella and fiddling with my phone while, a little distance away, my cousin builds a castle out of plastic wrappers and washed-out bottle caps

today i took the mrt for the first time in five months. this is our word for the train, or the subway, or whatever you call your choice of long metal worm for sitting in and going places. i can no longer recognize the path the bus takes from plaza singapura; or maybe it was just too dark. the sky was a shade of magenta swirled with pink this evening, like a raspberry ripple ice cream sandwich cut out of a block of ice cream taken from a fridge embedded in the body of a tricycle, and it waved at us from between condominium buildings and above stretches of thick dark forest as the bus stumbled out of the city, past interpol ('i wonder what they do at interpol,' my friend mused. 'i don't know, but all the hollywood movies i've seen have definitely ruined my perception of the place,' i replied.), and back to familiar lands. a series of incidents have led to a sudden spike in covid cases these past three days. part of me wants to throw my laptop out a window and scream at the hole it leaves behind, I LITERALLY JUST GOT HOME; the other part of me is worried sick. we're lucky here. america is lucky too. i have traveled from one blessed land to another without tasting ashes under the tongue. but the road ahead is covered in a kind of gray smog that creeps into your throat and causes chest convulsions and nose irritation and whatnot; i'm scared within inches of my life. what do i tell all the people i wanted to meet; what do i tell singapore, who has waited patiently for me to come out of my room for two weeks, and before that, half a year? get well soon. that's what i'll tell this earth. hurry up and get well.

07.20.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty eight: tomato eggs (~25 minutes)

so, like, i'm guessing if you want to make tomato eggs, which for the record sound much cooler in chinese than in english where they just sound extremely underwhelming, like if you combined a roasted tomato with some scrambled eggs in a bowl and called it a day, which is not how tomato eggs are made, which is what i am currently trying to explore, i suppose you'd want to start with the tomatoes because they take that much longer to cook, that is, a ridiculously long time for something so soft that someone with no martial arts training or first person shooter online multiplayer mode experience could crush it with their bare fist, so you cut the tomato into slices, let's say six slices because that's one less than seven and seven is my primary school best friend's lucky number, and you can either peel the skin off or keep it on, my grandma likes to peel the skins off but one time i went to a restaurant and they kept all the skins on and it was a religious revelation, which isn't to say that my grandma's cooking isn't a religious revelation, just that the religions are different, or maybe they're the same religion but different sects, like one is more about style than substance and the other is more about substance than style and their respective founding families have been embroiled in an interpersonal conflict of astronomical heights since the eighteenth century, so let's say my grandma's the coolest person in the world, it therefore follows that her cooking is also really fucking cool, that's why tomato eggs are so cool, even if their name in english is so lame it makes me want to rewrite the entire english language just so that 'tomato eggs' sounds less like 'i am waiting for you to punch me on the playground signed, jake', once the tomatoes have softened you want to add the eggs to the pan, maybe some salt and maybe some water but most importantly, you can't forget the sugar, which is what really unites the tomato and the egg, my grandma called me last night to ask me what i wanted to eat on saturday, scramble the eggs viciously with a pair of chopsticks, i haven't seen her in five months, soy sauce is probably involved in this recipe somewhere and if it isn't then i will involve it myself, she prefers to leave voice recordings rather than texts because the keyboard on her phone is kind of hard to look at, i'm not actually sure how you combine the tomatoes with the eggs and i've never made tomato eggs before, just eggs and tomatoes separately like the twenty year old fool i am, who only knows how to put words into the mouths of other people, who doesn't know how to make any of their favorite foods, who would rather write an artistic impression of cooking tomato eggs than ask their grandmother how she makes them Like That, Like That as in Good, as in everything my family touches is a little sacred, like we've just learned to speak a new language and every sentence is the newest thing in the world

-so maybe this saturday after lunch i'll sit down on the peeling leather sofa and i'll ask her how she does it. and she'll tell me about this whole other religion.

07.19.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty seven:

07.18.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty six: home (an extended encore)

the doorknobs at home are round. i'd forgotten; the door to my hotel room had a handle that you pressed down on to open; my summer dorm's as well, and now every time i'm faced with a door my brain takes a moment to register the correct action to my hand- push, pull? press, turn? how do we proceed from here? home again. the old skin feels different now that you've worn a raincoat before, stood in a spring shower and tasted bitter salt, mandarin peels. you're not the person you were when you left. there's a lot you're not afraid of anymore. at the same time, there's a lot you're afraid of for the first time. little fawn; new shoes. same old socks.

the pikachu at the foot of my bed has been rotated sideways and stuffed into the gap between my wardrobe and the wall. he stares at me as i type this, while the wardrobe that wouldn't close in february and still won't close in july gapes at me, an old pokemon poster bluetacked to one half of a set of doors, a knitting needle sticking out of the box above.

this room- this youth- this growing up-

am i still young? while explaining to my mother how all my adult friends would offer to pay the bill when we went out for some reason i realized that i was also an adult. but i am a younger adult, i insisted, covering my mistake flawlessly. so maybe there is a distinction, which is to say, maybe i am still young. i am certainly trying to be.

i find myself using the calendar app for the first time in months; the weeks ahead are peppered with dates, coffee breaks, walks along the singapore river. how many faces can i see before i leave? how many ways can i tell you i care, i remember, i was thinking about you on the lawn in winter, spring, summer? i am old enough. i want to try harder.

it's getting late though (ten forty-eight). it feels like my first day back though technically fourteen days have elapsed since i first stepped foot on singaporean soil again; i'm full of yearning, though i'm not sure for what. it's always like that, just that as i've gotten older, i've found myself more willing to acknowledge its presence. in spite of all my embittered sixteen year old self's protests, i do, in fact, want things. that's all right.

less solitude. more eyes. hands, palms, wrists, distances closed with the squeeze of a fist. the season of sand and salt and laughter that bounces off windows, walls, slices of the sun.

now this. this is summer.

07.17.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty five: yet another leaving song

when the sun goes down the city lights outside overlap with the reflection of my room on the glass such that a column of warmly-lit balconies intersects at a perpendicular angle to the light fixture built into the top of the closet and the clean white of the sheets on this king-sized bed lies where the river would be, if it weren't so dark. it means there's always something to look at, even if it's just another star blinking at me in the distance. like even the city wants me to get to know it better, wants to go on a first date, wants to be remembered.

this morning i left my room for the first time in two weeks. a lady with a leather handbag who is staying on the other side of the hallway and i were led out of our rooms, through a set of gray double doors, and into a service elevator, after which we were deposited in a room with unpainted walls at the end of which was a square of light so bright it almost burnt the last twelve days right out of me. it was the bare skin of the city, the rough, blemished surface, the acne. warm damp air and the smell of flowers and car exhaust. oh yeah, i remembered abruptly. i'm in singapore.

i think we should add mandatory and well-enforced pandemic-era quarantines in five star hotels to the official list of liminal spaces because for the last twelve days i have felt like a suspension bridge built between two countries which know nothing about each other. as pennsylvania fades away to nothing, so does singapore remain a blank space in a notebook that i have written in before. to travel is to go from one place to another. when this path is interrupted by a waypoint, when you have to stop for gas and find yourself held up for three years, you are no longer leaving from. you are simply arriving.

so tomorrow, i arrive. out of this too-bright well-lit hotel room with five buttons on the bedside panel for various lighting implements, and into the life i led before spring. tomorrow i find myself at home, with only a blur of emotion where my memories of the months before should be. hotel logic tells me i should be more wistful. i find myself memorizing the layout of the mini-fridge, what buttons control what lights, the shape of the bathroom counter. within the knowable reaches of my memory staying in a hotel is always associated with the feeling of 'one more day'. but i can barely tell the days apart from each other anymore. how do i begin to distinguish places?

tomorrow home. tonight the last night in this too-big bed with the five pillows, three of which are square-shaped and humongous and two of which are like the ones i'm used to but softer, broader. i'm thinking of the people who brought me my meals every day, who passed through the hallways like a distant kindness to pick up trash, dirty towels, other signs of life. i'm thinking of what it takes to make an operation like this succeed, to keep hundreds of people locked up in hotels rooms for weeks and make sure they keep it together long enough to make it home afterwards. they gave me a room key when i first got here. i never used it.

of all the absurd moments this year has encompassed, from the horrible nine p.m. bus stop confession to the unplanned sleepover, the walk through the woods, the blocked numbers, 'two weeks in the same room' is easily the most memorable. something about this place has dislocated me from my life in america, even more so than the act of simply going home. i am a bone outside of a body, a skin without a skeleton, the aftermath of existence, curious, yearning. i am absurd. in this king-sized world with one floor-to-ceiling window and a mini-fridge that hums like a middle aged man, i am the only thing that matters.

but soon change. tomorrow home. i never see anyone in the balconies outside my window. strange. if i had a balcony i would sit on it every day for hours.

it's all right. i'll just sit here. i'll miss the softness of this bed when i'm gone. sort of like how you miss a person, except i was the person too. i hope whoever stays in this room next doesn't overfill the hot water kettle; it froths up when you do so and spills water everywhere.

07.16.21

[fishmongeringstudies]

fifty four: three dreams about walking away

last night i tried to go to a bakery that had opened up recently with a turquoise-colored theme and really tall cupcakes but on my way there i met a friend i hadn't seen in a while and got so caught up talking to them that i went right home without even passing by the storefront. remembering the matter of the cupcakes, i took the train all the way back there only to realize that i had gone to the wrong station the first time, so had i gone there in search of a face or was it pure coincidence that she appeared there, standing by the gantry in a pink sweater and laughing at me? i forgot to get the cupcakes again. standing in my dorm room hours later, the sun a fist of gold on the wall behind me, i realized this. i had wanted to give them to my mother and my sister, but somehow i had ended up at school- my brain tried to comprehend distance, and failed.

there might have been another scene as well, separate from the ones surrounding the cupcakes, in which i was walking someone's dog around the neighborhood i grew up in when i saw an acquaintance from school crossing the street with a really tall guy. i don't mean, like a hundred eighty centimeters tall or eight feet tall, i mean this guy was a hundred eighty feet tall, so tall he looked like one of those bendy pencils that were trendy when i was in primary school that you basically couldn't write with at all, i mean it looked like she was standing next to a skyscraper. the sun was setting again (every scene in this dream is gold) and the streets were bronze and yellowish-green, our shadows long and willful, the tall man's shadow cutting the city in half like a knife. i don't want them to see me, i thought, then turned a corner and skittered away.

in the last scene i'm in a food court like the one i used to eat lunch with my family in on the top floor of the shopping mall in jurong, except the tables and chairs are arranged like rows in an exam hall, packed so tightly together there's barely any space for you to walk from one end of the room to the other. all the furniture is blue. cornflower blue. the floor is blue too, as well as the ceiling, and the exit sign hanging above the entrance. at first i think i'm the only one here. i should be looking for the bakery, but i've forgotten all about it. i only remember the bakery when i've gotten on the train that's headed home, the way you only realize what you really wanted when it's no longer within reach. i'm distracted by the tables and chairs, the stern emptiness of it all.

in the last scene i think i'm the only one in the empty food court until someone calls out to me from several rows away. he's sitting in one of the blue chairs, his feet kicked up on the blue table in front of him. he might be smoking a cigarette or eating a lollipop, i don't recall, but i know he looks busy. like he's just passing by, though i'm the one standing and he's the one reclining in a room full of mirrors.

he yawns.

'what're you looking for?'

in that moment i know without a doubt that i will never reach the bakery before this dream ends. so i give up on the cupcakes, and i give up on my old life, and i take a seat.

07.15.21