Original soundtrack · Darwin — Tanya Chua ↗
Only when I bent over the desk in that familiar posture did I understand: it had already been here.
What happens—
Birth. Bathing. Cap and sash. Taking office.
Eighteen years contract into a few damp days after rain. Only those few days remember the rain, yet they are clearer than the rain itself. Memory has long since become scattered fragments, each with its own scent. Sourness, bitterness, heat, sweetness, like white where five colors meet: what remains here is a cool clarity that might now be called indifference.
I still worry over old things and spend myself on them, but more often in search of coherence. I still write and grow flowers. What I seek has shifted from sharpness and display to substance; even my crowded writing has become rounder. Know what you like and dislike, without seeking it elsewhere. And try, as far as possible, to forgive.
Tomorrow is another day. I do not know what I will discover or whom I will meet. Perhaps this is growth: a ticket south, a life full of changes. And a self increasingly at ease.
I have received so much support and kindness from elders and peers, with occasional sadness too. I think I still long for recognition and to be cared about, and cannot quickly learn to feel deserving. That transparent barrier is still there. And I am already trying to break it.
I am grateful, secretly delighted, for everything given to me: sails traveling together, both parents flourishing, the same moon shared across a thousand miles, the ability to settle wherever I am. And the capacity to be loved.
Even if—
Parting from those we love. Meeting those we resent. Lasting regret. Wanting and not obtaining. Being unable to let go.
When the oak I cherish rejects the kapok’s great red torches and sighs, when my flowers nestle in someone else’s feelings, when what I love is attacked and what I believe in sinks into the dust.
I know there were purple grapes before the dew, and the frost on withered vines was once the soft damp mist of morning. Let the evening wind be fierce; let the geese I once knew pass overhead. Sorrow lasts more than a moment. After all, fresh green branches once grew here. There is no need to rescue them, nor any use in trying to hold them dear.
A question that has troubled me for years: how people are with one another.
Even now I am searching for a perfect answer, thinking of so many thanks and still more apologies. I would go back to any day in the past if only I could keep one person or make one thing right. But what matters is the present: be a little gentler with those who stayed, and wish those who drifted away well. I hope everyone in my memories has a world of their own.
I often think that if I had been steadier, quieter, better at preserving my unpolished self, perhaps those later things would not have happened. But aloeswood is a tree’s scar; jasmine tea steeped for a story often leaves the deepest impression.
Long sword, shall we go home? People thought him insatiable, never imagining that what he sought was someone who understood him. That is all it amounts to.
Simply this—
‘In spring, wherever there is water, dusk lingers.’
Still childish, still letting the horses run, still putting on a show of tender sorrow. I know I am Ah Q, I am Miss Sophia.
From rice blossoms to sweet osmanthus, from south to north, I have seen mountains, rivers, and lakes, and know, roughly, the shallow flavors of the human world.
I hope to stop being so busy living and dying, to read and write earnestly, to keep a heart lightly fragrant and spicy, and to have someone who can understand me against the wind. Then to contend with myself. Simply this.
