:: creme truffles::

I don't know if he's mine anymore

::Godiva truffles::

I don't feel like writing. I don't feel like feeling. I feel severed from the rest of the world, as though I have died a murky grey death and all that lingers is a ghost of emptiness.

::triple-layer truffle::

It's beem a while. I'm pen-weary. Writing is so final sometimes - or is it just my own fatalism kicking in more than it's necessary? I've always had the same dilemma with keeping a journal - I had always been unable to keep neutral entries, finding satisfaction only in the most intense of emtions. I had to be devastingly miserable, or unreasonably happy; days of paper-plain neutrality I found useless to keep track.

Today? I'm a blank. I woke up sick, my throat burning with the alien pain of an infection. My head felt brick-heavy, and my eyes were glazed. The doctor's verdict was very close to my self-dianogsis: swollen tonsils, a nasty infection, congested nasal passages. I was given five different types of drugs; nothing modern medicine can't cure, unless it's - oh look here's the cryptic gore spilling out of my soul - cancer.

Quiet office. Me, my cranberry muffin, and a grey, listless sky.

::truffles::

I needed to get away. Abandon all the emotional baggages, if only for a while. So when Stella suggested a girls' night in, I jumped to say yes.

***

Stella. Stylish, single - well, sort of - and always ready for a laugh. She lives with a roommate at the Bayshore, so staying in for her is a scenario right out of any Hollywood movie involving a single chick with cash to spare. We were to have her private manicurist to come and fix up our nails; it was a bit of treat, really, to have someone cutting dead skin off your digits while you sip a very good glass of white and snacked off Italian Christmas cookies. We gossiped and giggled and propped our feet up on her posh coffee table.

I had to hand it to Stella; while getting a full-fledged manicure and manicure she managed to whip up a little Italian feast. We had veal and sauteed vegetables for starters, and a very good pasta for the entre. For dessert, well, we ching-chinged to a bottle of dessert wine, which we promptly finished, in between sifting through her photographs and bitching about life.

It was a good escape, a brief chasm in which I leaped into with little ease, but much determination.

***

Birte drove us to Ikea today during lunch, and I happily carted back bits and pieces of useless knick-knacks to the office. My fav buys: a plant in a funky purple pot (with a very stylish water-spray to go with it, might I add), and a cutesy little table lamp for the office. The best part: I don't have to pay a single cent. It's all claimable under 'personal office stationary'. Yes. I'm cheap. No prize for guessing what we had for lunch - yes, the very famous Swedish meatballs. Escape. Ignorance. I wish.

::those really cheap ones with the wafer biscuit::

Happy New Year. Or so the saying goes. Greetings have become so routine they roll off your tongue with little meaning or comprehension. Merry Christmas, happy new year. Welcome to Hallmark Kingdom.

***

2004. I'll be twenty-two in a couple of weeks. Birthdays have lost their significance for me long ago; I spent a very quiet and private 21st, refusing offers of parties and barbeques and potlucks, choosing instead to spend it like any other birthday, with the proverbial chocolate etoil cake (have been my birthday tradition since I was ten) and my grandmother's signature dishes. With Sam I had another 'celebration' - though I hesitate to call it that - and with the girls I had another. I couldn't see the importance of a birthday celebration; morbid as I am I consider it another step to an inevitable death. So. I'll be 22, just as I had scribble in it my journal years and years before: I'll be 12, 15, 18, 21. I hope it brings with it added wisdom and the necessary strength, humour and good-nature to see me through until I'm 23. At least.

***

My aunt is coming back from America next week. Sad and final as it may sound, I know - and we all know - it's her last visit to come home to the family as she has left it 13 years before, to the complete family unit, to her father still sitting in his favourite sofa.

We all have to grow up. Peter Pan was wrong: there is no Never Land.

::whiskey chocolates::

The year is grinding to a halt. I don't feel like working. I've got the financial provisionals to tie up, I've got a briefing document to clean up for the agency, I've got about a million phone calls to make, and I don't feel like working.

Had a really big lunch. This, despite nothing tastes the way they used to. Wilson drove us to Katong for laksa and rojak - nice escape from the 13,534th plate of poh piah or hae mee from the hawker place across the road. I ate everything. I am mechanical in dealing with my grief - I wake and dress and eat and talk with the autopilot running on full gear. I don't want to give in to my emotions, not yet; I need to be strong.

Going with Sam to my grandparents' for dinner - his first visit to my childhood home. It feels right; I regret not arranging this earlier, I regret only thinking of all these things after he's fallen ill, I regret I didn't try harder before, and took petty comfort in my childish assurance that those you love can live forever.

How wrong I was. They don't. Love can't keep Death at bay. It only makes parting harder. I had been so caught up in the siren song of my own life, my own priorities, my own demands, I neglect those who care most about me. How absurd and how pathetic.

I resolve to love everyone a little bit more. You never know when regret becomes the only residue of your love.

::peppermint creme::

We never really start to live until we believe we’re going to die. I mean, I know I’m going to die. I know I’m not immortal; one day this pallid human flesh will be withered by time and it will wear out like a cheap plastic toy. But we live most of the time as if we are sleepwalking between consciousness and subconsiouness; the golden hours of youth we spend buried in books, the salad years of adulthood are harvested in work and responsibilities, and by the time we are old enough to know better, we’re too old to do anything.

So we live and breathe like clockwood mice wound on a rusty spring, not really seeing, not really comprehending, not really engaging or attaching ourselves to anyone or anything. Sure, we have our own pockets of beliefs: from which we dig out pennies of comfort in religion, in the nape of a lover’s neck, in the first word of your child. But beyond pseudo-morality and quasi-romantic notions of life, we see tragically little. We busy ourselves with the frivolous demands of life – we fret about bills and housing and being able to afford an education; we lament government policies and curse at pop culture; we half-heartedly believe in the good of men and wait gleefully for a shoddy bit of gossip, and so we live. It’s socially necessary and politically correct, but morally empty and spiritually corrupt. Not spiritually in terms of being doctrinally-sound –I don’t buy that – but spiritually just by connecting better with our surroundings, by being slightly more human than it is required – read the bible to death if you will, but do you bother to find out the name of the lady emptying your office trash-bin every morning?

I am suddenly confronted with death, with its lingering shadow and menacing power, with its inevitability and its necessity. What do I do? No one has taught me how to deal with death, and no one will. It's one of life's most cryptic lessons, and yet we have to confront this with the limited knowledge we have.

Well. If this is the way it has to be, I will go down a fighter.