‘Don’t you think that you have too much on? You should learn how to relax more’
The man in the street
‘Smile, love: it just might never happen’ he smirks at me. I stay tight-lipped.
The Duolingo owl
‘I miss you’ he chirps Each Friday, like an old ex who won’t get the hint
—-
20 April 2021
Prompt: Take the unsolicited advice about your work.
I turned this on its head a bit, and asked Kat for a prompt – she suggested I try haikus. So I took some solicited feedback and created 3 haikus based on unsolicited feedback I’ve received. Please note, I call these ‘haiku’ only in the loosest (and probably bastardised) sense, focusing on the 5-7-5 format only, and referring to syllables rather than the Japanese ‘on’.
Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be on the stage. What she was on stage for didn’t really matter so much: acting, singing, dancing… she would have taken anything. But dancing was what she really loved. Being overlooked for the fifth time for the part of Mary in the school nativity helped cement the understanding that dancing, not acting, was her calling.
The school week was punctuated by ballet lessons, rock and roll ra-ra skirts and jazz shoes. Kick ball changes and pas de bourrée. Being told to smile more in disco, but less in street. The weekly wait in the corridors for the class ahead to tumble out, and the annual dance show where you’d watch awestruck at the older kids’ performance. To this day I mentally go through the motions when I hear Meatloaf’s ‘Dead Ringer for Love’.
On the special occasions that I would be taken to see a West End show, I would spend more time watching the chorus and choreography than the leading roles. I longed to be able to have that talent, that stamina; I imagined being in their places. They seemed to me like the real celebrities.
Back at home, I was always imploring family, friends, my grandparents’ next door neighbours to watch my latest theatrical spectacle. They were variety style performances featuring high-octane dance routines, rambling monologues and the contents of the fancy dress box. Sometimes I forced my best male friend, Sam, to dress up as a girl against his will. Of course I always gave myself the lead role. My sister usually got to be a small and quiet woodland creature.
I don’t know at what point I knew that performing wasn’t really a viable path for me. It always hung in the air even if it was not said out loud. The classes were clearly extra-curricular, not an investment into my future. My dance GCSE was probably only given the green light because the school forced us to do a performing art GCSE, thank God.
The funny thing is that, even now, I always felt like it was first my own enlightened understanding guiding me; a little voice in my head saying ‘yes, this is fun, but not the basis for a fulfilling career’. Now of course I know that it must have been somewhat doled out to me as a life lesson along the way. A life of passionate struggle? Better to choose the safe security blanket. Better to train as a lawyer or a doctor or work in a bank like Dad.
I put my foot down at those, but felt that marketing was a good compromise. A mix of creativity and commercial acumen. The potential to create change, as well as cash. But I definitely felt like something was quelled and quietened in me when I stopped performing.
Then again, though I’ve ostensibly ‘stopped performing’, the reality is it’s still something I do every day: this time, in a different arena. Many days have I felt myself almost physically step into a part. If I wear a blazer, heels and a watch, I’m playing the role of Marketing Director. Fake it until you make it etc. etc. After all, if a Board presentation isn’t a performance then I don’t know what is. Other days, I notice myself performing in other, smaller ways. Hiding my true feelings. Sitting on the sidelines, observing. Feeling scared to speak up.
Sometimes when I watch back the old video recordings of me dancing around the living room, I feel quite sad. It’s not just the carefree look on my face as I spin my sister round and round the room. It’s realising that, however over the top I was back then, I was completely justified in it. In that moment I am accepted, I am acceptable – and even loved for it.
It’s only now that I come to see the irony of the situation: despite the razzmatazz, I was never really performing back then – I was just being myself.
19 April 2021
The assignment is to find the irony in your ownstory. This is about you or what you want to be you or whatever you want to do.Start with “Once upon a time there was a girl…” – your story ends with you in the last photo andwho she is now.
‘Fuck. Again!? Is she fucking kidding me. She cannot be doing this to me again’. I realise I’m pacing around the hallway and decide to do something useful and get a drink whilst I think about what to do next. I stick the tap on and wait for it to run cold, my fingers wavering anxiously in the interim. This stupid tap, always running warm when I want cold.
Finally, cold enough, I think, rolling my eyes. I take a big gulp and some dribbles down my chin and into my cleavage. Yes, it’s definitely fucking cold enough now. I laugh in spite of myself. In spite of Marie and her stupid fucking scumbag boyfriend and his stupid fucking propensity towards hard drugs.
I grab my phone and think about calling Steven for, oh, a millisecond. I know what he’ll say. He went to get her last time. He had to deal with it last time. With the seemingly neverending litany of shit you have to deal with with a nineteen year old, headstrong, determined girl. Woman, now.
I felt the tears start to come. They always start in the space at the bridge of my nose, an early warning system before the tsunami. Deep breathing. Deep breathing, Deborah. Breathe in – two – three – four. Breathe out – two – three – four – oh fuck this.
I sob whilst setting the timer on my phone. 120 seconds of sobbing is allowed before I have to get it together and fix this crap. But that’s OK. 120 seconds is enough time to get really self-indulgent about it.
I hear myself let out a low wail and I slide down onto the floor into a squat. And sob. My whole body moves and my face feels so hot and clammy that my fingers slide up to my hairline. I move my head downwards to rest into my hands, so I have enough support to really get into it. I cry and cry and cry and cry, until I quickly check the timer – 45 seconds left. OK – time to wrap it up, Debs. I give myself permission for one last low self-pitying moan before I stand up again, and shake myself back into reality.
I grab the glass and have another gulp. My face still feels so burning hot so I dip my fingers in the water and pat my face with it. The obnoxious timer goes off and I hit the button to stop it.
OK. Time to go. Let’s get this show on the road. I steel myself – not for the excuses, but for the inevitable silence that I’ll have to try and fill, or at least break. Why does she do this? Does she not understand just how lucky she is?
Keys, wallet, jacket. OK. Fuck.
The daughter:
Fuck. Again. She’s going to kill me. I can’t believe this has happened. Why have I let this happen again?
I rolled my eyes at how much of a drama queen I was sounding, even to myself. I know why it’s happened again. Because I did it again. It was fun. It was just a few pills. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know why she gets so insane about it.
She’s going to be so mad and make it into such a big deal when it’s not. She’s going to talk to me the whole journey back home. Back to that house.
I stood up and walked around the small holding cell. The sound made the police officer walk over and stick his head in to check I wasn’t about to hang myself or something. He wasn’t one I’d seen before, maybe he was new. When he saw that I wasn’t about to top myself he walked back to the desk, as quietly as he’d come by.
I heard sobs coming from the cell one door down from me and rolled my eyes again. Yes, I was a fuck up, but I prided myself on my silence. Composure was how my drama teacher referred to it, back when I could go to drama lessons because Dad was paying. That made it sound more like something I could put on my CV at least.
Composure was definitely not how Mum saw it. Obstinate was one adjective she used a lot. Or ‘sheer bloody-mindedness’. I checked the clock. That’s definitely what I’ll be getting called in – oh I don’t know – 10 minutes when she gets here and we’re in the car.
Just thinking about the car journey home makes me want to puke. What do you say to someone who is still reliving a time that doesn’t exist any more. It’s like interacting with a Stegosaurus. Always with the man-hating, feminazi slogans. ‘You can do anything with your life – do you know just how lucky you are’. Yeh, I do. I mean, wasn’t the whole point of feminisim to be able to fucking choose?
I feel my anger start to rise. I just don’t fucking get what the problem is. It’s just FUN. It’s something that everyone does, all the time. Maybe she should take some so she’d lighten up. So she’d feel something. She’s such a robot. She didn’t even give a shit when Dad left. No wonder she spends all this time asking me why why why why. It’s like living in a fucking dictatorship.
I realise I’m shaking and I have to start deep-breathing. The way she always taught me, I guess that’s one benefit of being completely unfeeling. Breathe in – two – three – four. Breathe out – two – three – four.
After all, no one respects a hysterical woman, she would always say. Even when Dad was screaming at her, towering over her. Pushing her.
Breathe in – two – three – four. Breathe out – two – three – four.
I mean, yeh, she’d get angry, but she would never cry. Never let them see you break, she’d say. She never once broke. She never gave in.
Breathe in – two – three – four. Breathe out – two – three – four.
‘Carver’, the deep voice shouts. That’s me.
16 April 2021
Prompt:
You’re sixty years old. You have an ex-husband and your nineteen-year-old has been arrested again for ________. You just came home from work when the phone rings and you discover this news. (I have not specified gender).The first half-hour, you’re the mother, write from her point of view whatever shethinks/feels/does upon getting this news.
The next half-hour: you’re the nineteen-year-old. What are they going through waiting for their mother (or father) to come and bail them out?
‘I have no idea what I’m doing’, I thought to myself as the gong rang out to signal the start of our 6am sunrise meditation.
I had half closed my eyes, assuming that meditation was best done with them shut, but I still did my best to peer around and see how everyone else was doing.
It was like me to get competitive even in a silent retreat – miles away from civilisation and with all our electronic devices and other exciting worldly goods safely locked away from our tech-addicted clutches. It made me twitch slightly.
I was pretty sure I was the only one in there who had never done a meditation before, let alone a 2 week silent retreat. This was the whole point of coming here though, I reminded myself. Breathe. Let go. Focus on me for a change. Nothing like throwing yourself in at the deep end.
The problem was that everytime I closed my eyes, I saw Jason screwing his PA in our bed again. In what was our bed. He had always prided himself on being so different and yet, in the end, he was as seedy and low-rent as they come.
To make myself feel better, I of course started back on the best self-care tricks I knew of. Escape to another country, in this case Bali. And of course, some outrageous flirting. I had already been making eyes at the hot, brooding figure who I’d spotted across the vegan buffet on the first day. Though to be honest it seems everyone appears somewhat brooding when you can’t talk.
You’d think that the lack of chat coupled with the vast quantity of lentils served each day would encourage you to look inwards rather than around the room for what’s on offer. In reality though, it just served to give you ample time each day to fantasise about what you’d do with them with 10 minutes alone.
I opened my eyes a tiny bit more just to spy on hot Jesus and felt myself blush in spite of myself. Is this what they meant about picking up on people’s energy, or was I just a giant perv? I think they make documentaries about people like me, going to retreats to ‘heal myself’ – aka: get laid.
13 April 2021
Prompt: Remake yesterday’s work
For today’s post, I took the words suggested by my friends as a stimulus for yesterday’s piece and inverted them. I took the opposites (more or less) of ruminate, traverse, breath, and took those 3 new words as my starting point instead.
It was hotter than ever, despite the rain. Unusually, the air con had broken, and the fake leather felt hot on my bare legs as I took my seat. The usual spot.
The rain would stop soon, I thought. It was just the typical 6pm sprinkling. A beautiful sunset was promised.
Ruminating on the changeable climate always made me think of a story a colleague had told me when I’d first moved to Singapore and wondered – out loud – how the weather forecast could show thunderstorms every single day.
‘Oh’ he laughed, surprised. ‘Don’t bother following that. The weather changes so quickly here there’s no point. It’s true that there will generally be a storm at least once a day, but who knows when. After you’ve been here long enough you’ll sense when it’s coming. You’ll feel it in the air. Smell it, even’.
I marvelled at his meteorological mysticism. In the same way that people said to be a New Yorker you had to be there at least 10 years, I looked forward to the day that I too would be able to look out the window, pause and say, enigmatically: ‘it’s about to rain’. That’s how I’d know Singapore was really home.
He wasn’t wrong about the ‘who knows when’ though. I couldn’t believe it when the same colleague told me that to check the weather you need to go to the National Environment Agency’s weather page. Well, I could believe that. I couldn’t believe that the only forecast on offer wasn’t really a forecast at all.
‘So it shows the weather at Changi right now?’ I would ask, perplexed.
‘Yes, that’s it. You can see the weather log from there and it’s updated every few minutes’.
I thought I was missing something. ‘But if I wanted to know the weather right now, I’d just look out the window?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s just how it is!’
Since then, a 4 day forecast has been added, but I would hazard a bet that Singaporeans barely use it. They have their sixth sense.
I never quite got to the point where I knew, for sure, that rain was coming. I got close. Too often, I got caught out. But whilst it may take a while to learn when the heavens will open, you quickly learn the rules around rain.
Always, always, ALWAYS have an umbrella in your handbag. Be prepared to end up with a whole shoe cupboard of 7-11 ones regardless.
Charles & Keith shoes are good value, but highly dangerous when wet. The same goes for slippers. If in doubt, take off your shoes to finish the walk home – you’re walking on the cleanest pavements after all. Yes I speak from experience.
If it rains in the morning, everyone will be at least 30 minutes late to work. The office will be like a ghost town. You will wonder if there’s a public holiday that you forgot about.
On days where you’ve been caught in the rain before entering your (freezing cold, air-conned office) you’llfind yourself staring out the window, teeth chattering, searching for the Marina Bay Sands, obscured by rain, and feel momentarily like you’re in a colder country. Many take a jumper in their bag along with the brolly, despite it being 32 degrees outside.
If you need to go the airport and it starts raining, immediately add 30-60 min onto your journey time: 30 min to find a cab and 30 extra minutes to get through the inevitable traffic. If it’s the Friday before a public holiday add another 30 minutes. This once happened to me and we made to the gate with 5 minutes to go. The lady on the check in desk warned me to never be this late again. Gulp.
There are worse places you can get stuck in during a heavy thunderstorm than Maxwell Food Centre. I once spent 3 hours there.
Sharing your umbrella with an aunty or uncle crossing the road will bring you good karma.
There will be entire days and nights where you wonder, will it ever stop raining? It will. For a while, anyway.
I was jolted from my thoughts as the bus lurched forwards to stop at Clarke Quay central. The window pane in front of me was cloudy from my breath on the window. I drew the outline heart with my fingers then filled it in. The drops of rain were still on the other side, but the shower had stopped.
We lurched again as the bus set off, and I waited for the inevitable pay off. The reason I always took this same seat. Over the bridge we went and there it was: that beautiful sunset, turning my heart pink and purple and red and orange.
12 April 2021
Prompt: Collaborate with someone else today.
Thanks to Danielle who came up with the idea that she and two other friends would give me words to use as inspiration for today’s piece. The words given as inspiration were: Ruminate – Traverse – Breath.
Thank you Danielle for ‘Ruminate’, Kat for ‘traverse’ and Ashley for ‘breath’ ❤
‘Do you ever think about what it would be like to get a do-over? Just one 24 hour period in your life that you could choose to do something differently?’
‘Of course’, Maggie replied, leaning over to absent-mindedly pick a piece of fluff off one of my new cushions. ‘I’d take back that Pizza Express I mainlined last Friday, set me on the road to ruin the entire weekend’.
I rolled my eyes, a little bit exasperated. ‘Come on, Mags, I was thinking more like… something that changed the course of your life, or could have. Huge, melodramatic regrets!’
She sat silently pondering, then sighed. ‘It’s a tough one. I tend to subscribe to the idea that everything worked out for a reason. What’s the point in thinking how it might have gone? It didn’t. End of!’ She sat back, smiling brightly.
I picked up a vague whiff of smugness and, to hide my annoyance that she wasn’t taking this in the spirit in which I’d hoped for, moved from the sofa towards the worktop to grab the wine. She immediately read between the lines.
‘Why, what’s yours?’
I stayed silent, the only sound was the comforting glug-glug of the wine as I topped up our glasses.
‘Oh come on, Gwyneth – don’t be like that. Give me your ‘Sliding Doors’ moment!’
I stayed silent, but couldn’t help but smile. I handed her her glass and sat back down on the sofa, grabbing one of the new cushions I was so keen to show off. I felt a sudden rush of clashing feelings, each fighting to be loudest. My stomach lurched, the way it does when the tube driver suddenly slams on the brakes in the middle of a tunnel. Was I really going to say this?
I took a sip, then absent-mindedly traced around the foot of the glass with my finger, trying to calm myself down and appear like this was no big deal. If I waited any longer it really would become a Big Deal. And it wasn’t that big a deal, just a thought that I had flash up sometimes, usually when washing the dishes or at 2am on the way to the loo.
‘Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t married Rob’. I said it as straight as I could, but my voice was small and I was fixating on the contents of my wine glass like I’d never seen it before.
Maggie hadn’t been expecting that. I think she was still thinking about the question as an opportunity to tell a funny story or witty joke, and not as the prelude to a confession. Her eyes widened, and I saw the flash of a surprised smile, her slightly laughing eyes, before she pulled herself together again and her face switched to concerned surprise. A frisson of judgment, shock, and even pleasure. She always did wear her heart on her sleeve.
‘Are you kidding? I thought you had got past that years ago’. She looked around the room and hugged herself tighter, as if maybe Rob was actually hiding behind the sofa and not playing football like he did every Saturday.
‘I mean, it’s not like I sit around thinking about it all day every day’ – at least not right now, I finished in my head. ‘But you know, sometimes I wonder about what life would look like if I had driven off with you that day. Do you remember that Elsie wouldn’t stop falling over on her way down the aisle. I wondered if that was an omen and all’.
‘Well I did tell you not to bother with a flowergirl’, Maggie replied archly. ‘It’s very American’. She was trying to lighten the mood.
‘Seriously though Jules. What’s started all this up again? You guys have seemed so happy lately’.
I sighed. ‘I know. We are. Maybe that’s part of it. Sometimes, more recently, I just think about those 24 hours, freaking out, you mapping out the escape plan, seriously staking out the logistics… Being so close to actually doing it. I think that’s the last time I felt like an adventure was within touching distance. Don’t people say that your wedding day is the start of the next big adventure? I feel more and more like that moment was my last chance for one’.
‘Jules. Come on. The reality is we would have flown to Mexico, shit would have hit the fan and you’d have spent the next days, weeks, months – years even, dealing with the fallout of a decision that, deep down, you didn’t want to make. It wouldn’t have been fun, it would have been agony, even with a margarita in hand. It wouldn’t have been an adventure, just a delaying of the inevitable’. She reached out to pat my leg, but I batted her hand away lightly with the cushion I was using as a shield.
‘Isn’t that what I’m doing now? Haven’t I just been delaying the inevitable for 8 years? I’m so sick of doing the same thing every morning, every weekend, every year. Even this bloody wine is the same one we buy every week, whether it’s on offer or not’ I gestured wildly in the direction of the bottle, risking the contents of my glass.
‘Babe, just try a new wine; don’t get a bloody divorce because you’re sick of this, yes, pretty middling Sauvignon Blanc’.
I smiled, despite everything. ‘OK, I’m being dramatic’.
‘Yes, you are. Seriously – no wonder you don’t think you can have an adventure if a lack of grape varieties in your wine is one of your biggest marital problems’.
I ignored her and took a sip, wincing at the taste – and the thought of it all. We had left it out the fridge since the first glass, and it had taken on a sickly, too-sweet taste that belied its cheapness. Warm, cloying, and average: the perfect metaphor for mine and Rob’s marriage.
11 April 2021
Prompt: You get ONE do-over. ONE 24-hour period of during your life. It could have been when you were ten years old and you only remember the feeling of the day. DON’T GET STUCK on facts. Make it up or write what you remember.
Living in SIN 