8. 

I have never felt this naked in my life, nor this raw. My body feels like an open wound with a divet where a scab had formed over but was ripped off too soon. The layers of epidermis and their torn edges visible and white, and ugly. It’s not a pleasant sensation. 

It’s a grim moment when you realise that you’re not normal, that whatever you’re feeling is not just product of some intense but temporary grief that everyone experiences. I’m that friend with mental health issues, which I suppose doesn’t surprise me, it’s just that I haven’t had to consider my demons in relation to my wider social circle because I have so far kept somewhat of a lid on it. 

It’s worse when you realise that people do know, that they’ve managed a glimpse of the demons you carry in the most spectacularly awkward, cringe-inducing way. I have to remind myself that others don’t see me in the same way I do myself, that I put every aspect of myself under microscopic scrutiny the way that no one else does to me, that I shouldn’t trust my own judgment on this one. 

7.

I don’t know what it is about a Monday morning that brings into focus one’s mortality. Maybe because for once I don’t have anything to distract myself with; it took me a three-day weekend to fully catch up on sleep, clear off enough of my to-do list, and get in sufficient contact with the outside world. Now that my bottom ranks of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs have been met, I have no reason to put off the real work - assessing in unwavering terms what I want to do with my life, and how I might get there. I have put this off for long enough, I thought I would finally have the headspace to do it after graduation but I’ve been sidetracked by needing to master the juggling act that is adulthood, walking the fine line of having financial security, eating well, caring for my mental health, getting enough rest, all of the things I had suspended in the name of architecture school. 

I think I am there now. The first step to self-actualisation. 

Pulling together a portfolio is confronting every single time, what more an aspirational one. I am essentially trying to identify the gaps in the person I want to become. I suppose there are one of two ways I can react to the exercise: become keenly aware of my lack of experience and knowledge and lose hope in the face of the seemingly insurmountable task of becoming New and Improved Pei, or realise I have already taken the first step towards self-improvement and to have faith that a million decisions I have made hitherto, both miniscule and significant, have set me up to become the person I want to be. 

6.

Again and again, I am carried forward in waves, great yawning dips and giant crests. Am I moving forward, or is it my imagination? I am the little orange buoy in the middle of nowhere, bobbing, drowning, except are you drowning if you are never fully underwater? Is it drowning if you are repeatedly dunked into searing saltwater, dragged out, nose dripping, eyes burning, and pulled back underwater against your will, in perpetuity? Are you drowning if you get to catch your breath in between but you are stuck in the same cycle and every time the pull comes you are a little less shocked and the surprise lasts a little less and the anger at yourself and everyone else has a bit more space in your head? 

I might be stretching the metaphor a tad here. 

Today was really challenging in a way that took me by surprise but if I’m honest, a little less so than before. That is to say, just as challenging but not as surprising. 

I think I’ve hit upon the thing that has had me flailing for so long. After all this time, after all of the soul-searching I have done with countless therapists (well, three) and after the strategies I have developed to counter negative thought patterns, I still land back here—I long for the approval of others. I always have. Parents, teachers, colleagues, strangers on the tram, women who stop and ask where my shoes are from. Legitimately, the only thing that causes me pain is the thought that others may not think very highly of me, that they may not like me very much, that they simply tolerate me. How bizarre when you put it that way. As if anyone had the authority to assign value to my personhood, my likes and dislikes, my thoughts and emotions. There isn’t anyone with such an authority but for the fact that I hand it to them disguised, so they may be extra callous with it. 

Again and again, I hand out cushion pins so they may stick me with them and I cry when it hurts too much. This is madness. 

So much of my life and the choices I have made thus far begin to make sense in this framework; why I was always the teacher’s pet and got good grades, I didn’t give a flying fuck about half of the eleven subjects I took in high school but I wanted to make my parents proud; my aspirations of subsistence farming in the mountains, in my own design-build cabin, stemmed not from a hippie back-to-the-land ideology but a desire to escape the need for approval from people around me; my love for bushwalking is an intimation of that, where I once explained it as ‘an activity I do just for me’. I like to think of myself as non-conforming but I might be the most amenable (if somewhat unsuccessful) conformist I know. I keep trying in all the ways that don’t matter, watching hawk-eyed for passing approval, and missing, in all of that anticipation, life itself. 

It is so subtle a shift in thinking, from ‘you care too much about what people think’ (that was certainly a point everyone tried to hammer home...) to ‘I allow other people to affect my opinion of myself’. Implicit in the latter statement is that I’m in control and I have the ability to rescind that permission, which is an incredibly empowering thought. I realise overcoming years of habitual people-pleasing and approval-seeking behaviour isn’t as simple as a single epiphany, recovery is never so tidy. I couldn’t have gotten to this point in the first place without the many tearful, messy conversations with practically every person in my life and some of them have proved useful. But it’s a new era, the next three quarters of my century calls for a new plan of action.

Watch me rescind, bitches. 

5.

I have spent a really long time numbing myself, not with alcohol or drugs, nothing so obvious, but with endless work, returning home too late and too tired to channel any energy towards an ambition instead I plonk myself in front of endless sitcoms, endless hours of droll entertainment followed by endless social activity, endless gigs, endless little hobbies to keep myself from thinking about the state of the world and my own life. I am the truly commonplace. 

I feel so small, not in the usual ways you might imagine, not that I don’t know how to handle myself in a social setting (although that too sometimes) but that I cannot finish a book I purportedly enjoy, or that I cannot seem to complete a painting, or even begin any of the endeavours I speak of. Yet I have no trouble completing season after season of Frasier at this point. It will be far too abrupt a change if I were to entirely stop watching TV right this minute, but something has to change. 

That is the problem isn’t it? That I haven’t finished a single thing - I have lost all confidence in my ability to do that. Short stories helped somewhat but I know deep down that I have become a different person. It’s been a really long time since I even finished a magazine. Edan has read 4 books in the time since I started Beckett. I will finish Beckett, and I will write about it.

.

I started this post a long time ago, months now, and it’s just one more item in a long list of things I could not finish. I don’t know myself anymore. Did I thrive in school, despite the sick, masochistic environment I was working and breathing in because I completed drawing after drawing, subject after subject? There were definite milestones I could hit, and items I could check off. Now, life looks like a Beckett book unravelled, the sentences running onto each other in one long train of unbroken thought and breath and it never finishes. I have to stop. The trips out into the mountains had helped temporarily but it’s like scratching at a giant sedimentary rock with a metal spoon; you get satisfactory chunks out but then you look up from the little hole you’re carving out and realise the dent you’ve made is barely noticeable. I’m afraid of how powerless I have become in my own life. I am swept up in little waves and tragedies, some fires to put out at work, a friend’s breakup, a promotion, some news from home, I no longer know the role I play and the change I effect. 

Maybe I can take comfort in putting up this post tonight. Maybe tomorrow I can chip away a little bit more at my book (this is the book I am reading, not writing, lest anyone is confused). Maybe next week is when I finish it, and in this way I would’ve done one thing this year that I am proud of. 

4. 

It’s like I will never learn what is good for me. Reading on my commute, reading before bed, reading voraciously. Going to bed at 10pm on a weeknight and not thinking about work. Exercise, feeling the pain in every part of my body the next day. Being dwarfed by tall trees. Cooking healthy meals. Eating regularly. Good friends; people who can hold me when I inevitably have a bad day. Painting, writing, creating something from a set of tools. Meaningful conversation, as well as conversations about the most rubbish things. Unconditional acceptance.

Surely it’s possible to practice architecture and do all of those things? I’m trying to work out the changes I need to make to keep myself going, I’m trying to own up. I’m not even aiming to be living the best life I possibly can. I just want to not sink further. There’s a long list of people and things that are good for me, the trouble is finding the energy and the will to carry them out. 

.

I’ve thought about writing to people today, reaching out, telling them how I feel but on second thought it seemed so... unorthodox. Nobody really directly tells anybody how they feel anymore, do they? And what would I say when reaching out? “I’m desperately unhappy and I’m not sure what’s causing me to feel this way but I think it’s me.” You can only have that conversation so many times before it begins to sound like dialogue from a bad movie. 

It’s too much to ask friends to hear me whine about the same thing over and over again. I don’t even think I have the capacity to articulate quite the pain I’m faced with. Is it a romantic loss? An erosion of identity? Do I feel disconnected and adrift and a lack of meaning and purpose? I’ve given up on talking therapy, I now rely on small acts of kindness from people around me instead.

Todd, when he offered to catch up for a drink any time I need to talk. Rob, who tells me he loves me and reminds me I can tell him anything. Jaxon, who gave me a much needed hug at the right time without saying a word. Maia and Annie for thinking of me and sending a brief message on the weekend. Mel, who offered to find ways to make my work environment more supportive for me. Jaime, who is truly a saint, patient and lovely and good for me. Edan, who grounds me and is my forever safety net. 

I do struggle to be good to myself but for all of the people who care about me, which is a more extended list than above, I will try harder to do so. 

.

It was a strange moment coming across a draft that read as if I could’ve written it yesterday, but it was from a little over 2 years ago. Has this been going on my entire life? This funk I’m in. It was strangely absent from my writing (or rather my writing was absent...) since the time I met Edan, up until when we ended things. I have traditionally written to ease emotional pain but also as a form of recording the moment. Whenever I am in the throes of heartbreak or devastation, I never ever remember having felt anything quite like it. Every emotion is new to me, every time. It keeps life interesting, for one, but it means I learn very slowly. I’m quick to draw conclusions and deductions in other areas of my life but impossibly myopic when it comes to recognising patterns in my own life choices. Writing is more valuable to me than catharsis. It marks a moment in time, for posterity and self-reflection, and simply to have a thought given a timestamp, undeniably anchored in a time and place, in the millennia that I enact my life.

3.

I may not be totally out of the woods yet but I have been in worse shape. Maybe the writing worked. I went through a spell of writing, fervently, pages after pages of a letter that I will probably never send. Maybe it was the running. I’ve been commuting to work on my feet, and most weeks I get in about 20 kilometres of running, which coming from someone who once could not jog 5 minutes without her trachea closing on her, is a decent effort. 

Maybe it’s now having the freedom to go places where I didn’t before, and being able to plan more than a month into the future. Or maybe it’s just allowing myself time. I haven’t worked out the exact formulae yet but I imagine it plots something like a dampening sine graph with peaks and valleys where I bounce between extended social interaction and a dearth of activity during which the closest I come to another living person is the shadow of my housemate and the remnants of her lunch. Over time, the peaks become less peaky, and the drops become less sheer and then perhaps by that point I instinctively know the formulae, and don’t have to reverse-engineer it like a maniac. 

I really am feeling much better about life - I’m excited about things to come even. Being able to plot and plan means I can be myself, but even with the most detailed short-term life plan and small, doable steps to achieve these goals I set out for myself, something is amiss. We all know who that something is. 

2. 

So my plan to write every day hasn’t gone quite as planned - curse those weekday nights with friends! Maybe I will cut myself some slack there, select social interactions may just be better for the soul than writing. Wednesday night was absolute perfection, cringe-inducing phone call and all. So what is the matter?

I think I might be depressed. How unoriginal. Everyone is falling depressed. Surely not me too, I said to myself several months ago. There used to be bad days and good ones, enough of the latter that I can tell when I was having a mildly bad day. Now every day feels like one long bad day. Even on moderately good days I know the moderately shit day isn’t far away. I was so sure that I could combat whatever this was. I had always been prone to melancholy as a teenager, I got by for so many years, didn’t I? But increasingly I don’t think I have the capacity to pull myself out of this sinkhole. My heart broke a little for the person that I was one year ago—I was so happy then. I can at least find comfort in that I definitely have the capacity to be happy, I just need a bit of help getting back there. 

This will be tedious and introspective, so look away while I autopsy myself. How did I get from here to where I am today? 

The last six months of knowing you, seeing the world anew through your lenses, learning to navigate each other’s habits and biases, were the easiest and lightest time I remember of my life.

Every day, without my trying, I find new reasons to be grateful - for the people I work with, the friends I am currently in touch with, and the ones who so willingly reconnect.

That was me one year ago. I do remember snippets of myself from that time and the difference is devastating. It has been so long since I felt that way about myself or the people around me. I am perpetually angry at everyone, for moving on with their lives, for the privilege I perceive them to possess, for choosing to be happy. I was so generous with my empathy, everyone deserved to be thought of in the best possible light. I can see why I was adored. But the contrast between then and now is almost embarrassing.

It helps to remind myself this isn’t me. I am twenty-five this year dammit, I haven’t forgotten how to type without looking at the keyboard, I don’t have early onset dementia, and my memory bank isn’t full yet. I can still learn, I can type like a fucking robot if I tried, I can be articulate, and I do want to learn, there is so much I still want to learn.

We write our own stories.

Habit formulation

1.

Once again, I return after a long hiatus. This time, I come back a different person (don’t I always?). Truly, reading over the words I had written in the last three years, they were that of a stranger, they belonged not to Pei but perhaps to an articulate Pei I once knew. 

Was it architecture school? Was it the workplace? Was it living in a foreign culture, among foreign foliage, cooking foreign foods, dating foreign men? Something in me has finally snapped—the rope has frayed all the way through and the final thread has given way. I am no person. Consequently, I have no love. 

My love for architecture is dead, as is my love for food, for people, for travel. I remember a time in my life when I was passionate for all of the above, something in me died somewhere along the way and I’m still dealing with the bloody aftermath and the problem of the carcass. Where do I stash it? Which dress can hide this bleeding, oozing gash on me? I have been here before I swear it; granted I was not a vegetarian those times so maybe I binge-ate my way out then. Now that my body is no longer able to sustain potato-chips-as-dinner decisions, I have made the rather wise call of renewing my relationship with writing. Maybe I will find my love this way. 

Today is day one of three hundred and fifty four.

Today

Today I shed tears reading My tongue is divided into two by Quique Avilés. I shed tears for myself, and my sister, both so far from home that we speak to each other not in our mother tongue but in perfect English. I shed tears for my sister for she majored in English but now live in Francophone Montréal and struggles to be conversant in French. I shed tears for her stories of feeling left out in social settings as I do for myself. I shed tears for the conversations comparing English proficiency tests for visa purposes, for having spoken the language all my life yet still stutter my way through exchanges, for books like Shogun and the people who still don’t get it. 

MCH

I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you,

I am doing far better than I have ever post-breakup, there are moments during the day when I feel distinctly joyous, and outside of those moments are various degrees of contentedness, mild anxiety and loneliness, anger (which I have largely worked through), disappointment, and longing. So much longing. The point is, I am not in an abyss of abject sadness. Every day, without my trying, I find new reasons to be grateful - for the people I work with, the friends I am currently in touch with, and the ones who so willingly reconnect. I am occasionally assaulted by insecurity about my abilities and skills in various aspects of my life but the days in which I am secure are numerous enough that the average of them all sit comfortably above the healthy line. 

There is nothing I would change about my life today, except one thing. I wish you were here, not there. This I say with no pretence and all earnestness. The last six months of knowing you, seeing the world anew through your lenses, learning to navigate each other’s habits and biases, were the easiest and lightest time I remember of my life. I do have a propensity to take life too seriously and you have a penchant for the exact opposite. We might be a match made in heaven. 

I cannot delve too deep into my cauldron of feelings tonight. As much as I am high functioning today, I am afraid of what I might find at the bottom. 

I miss you.

Sweet and Sour

There is nothing quite like the crunch of deep fried battered pork, glazed in a sweet, sticky sauce, mildly tangy from the pineapple swimming in it. The richness of the dish is offset by the bed of plain jasmine rice it rests on. The sauce seeps—still warm—into the cracks, staining it red.

I have had sweet and sour pork 372 times in my lifetime, in every variety: substituted with fish, chicken or mock meat, too dry, too soggy, without rice, without capsicum, cooked by my mother, or by a faceless chef in a restaurant, or as part of a mixed rice platter, sidled up next to garlic potatoes and green beans steamed in soy sauce, or in a styrofoam takeaway container lined with a clear plastic sheet.

The styrofoam containers made a regular appearance in our home, which is not a comment on my parents’ cooking in any way. As I came to learn from friends I had over for dinner, they were inordinately good cooks, and not all mothers made four or five dishes every night. I was one of the lucky ones.

My father operated a restaurant and catering business, and would regularly bring home dinner to ease my mother’s load. We are a family conspicuously lacking in displays of affection but every other day, my father brought home love in the form of precariously stacked styrofoam containers swaying gaily at his side. Between the takeaways and my mother’s cooking, we somehow managed to get by without hugs and kisses, without ‘I love you’s and head patting. Food became our language. We debated the best roast duck during meals and discussed the next hot pot between meals; we talked about the new stuffed tofu place and our verdict, exchanged steamed fish recipes, made entreaties and promises and appreciative noises.

.

I laid awake one night waiting on a reply from my sister. My message to her, a month between this and the last: why did you become vegetarian? A recent conversation with a friend had stirred doubt in my loosely held beliefs about vegetarianism and my personal relationship with my food sources.

A ping. It was not my sister but a high school acquaintance.

J: Hey Pei She, are you still in touch with Zhi Min?

Me: Hey, yeah I am. What’s up?

J: She passed away yesterday

J: She was hit by a van while cycling to the hospital

J: I remember she told me she was in contact with you

J: So I thought you might want to know

.

Even through the fuzzy pixels on my phone I could see their faces fall. I had just broken the news to them that I am set on vegetarianism. My declaration was met with protests. At first I assumed they were being typical parents, obstinate to change, in disbelief that I had the necessary self-discipline, they knew after all, the love affair I had with food.

I rallied, and they eventually fell silent. I was quietly smug in my ability to quell their protests, and talked glibly of mushrooms and eggplants. It was only much later, while watching a 10-minute sequence of a full Chinese dinner lovingly and expertly prepared by a father in a Taiwanese film, that I recognised my parents’ sorrow.

Death of a friend. Death of a daughter. Death of a culture. Death of animals. I cannot offer you an explanation of how these are all connected but I can offer you my sister’s words:

There were many reasons, you find them as you go along. The biggest push was just what I could remove from my life and find that I don’t miss with the passing of time.

At this point, I still miss sweet and sour pork—not the taste of meat but the taste of home.

Dear Dick,

You were the person I aspired to be for most of my life. You and in recent years, Aalto, Scarpa, Shinohara, Goff, Naito, Ito, de Chirico, Barragan, Baker, Aravena, Kafka, Vonnegut, Kaufman. Hadid, did you say? I’m not a fan of her aesthetics. Sejima, do I hear? Her work is infuriatingly ambiguous.

I grew up with two older sisters, my mother, and a grandmother but my childhood hero was my dad, until he started drinking and the fighting at home became too loud and too incessant to block out. Still, I adored him during the moments he was sober. He was stoic and unaffectionate, commanding but just, and always picked me up from school. My mother in contrast, was an angry person and we were all subjected to her churning current of emotions. Her hands, unlike what I’ve been told mother’s hands should be like, were rough and unpleasant to touch.

Dear Dick,

I wanted the world to see me like they do you. I wanted to be seen for my hardness, not be told that I might not make it in architecture by my childhood hero because I am female and soft and perhaps I should consider quantity surveying?

I wanted to sit the way you do, one arm slung over the back of the seat, one leg crossed over the other knee, the way you were taught to sit by your father and the men around you. Instead I find myself learning to take up less room on the train, legs crossed and arms folded. Sometimes I forget myself and sit with my legs apart. I was promptly corrected—can you sit like a lady? This was my male, gay friend. I stopped speaking to him after that.

Dear Dick,

I love you but now I aspire to be Kahlo, Rucker, Lorde, Lahiri, Kraus, my mother, my sisters, my grandmother.

My mother the endless giver, whose hands are rough from serving her children, who is defiant and never feels the need to hide her emotions. My sisters who inhabit a world of their own making, one gave birth to a person and another went halfway around the world in search of herself. My grandmother who is bordering on a hundred and remembers no one but her caretaker, living in a world of her own rules.  

Dear Dick,

I love you but I’m tired of living in world with rules you made up.

I now put my legs up while wearing a skirt. I am unashamed of my desires, especially for you. I cry freely and tell everyone how I feel about them, without irony. I refuse to cover up my scars. I bleed and I talk about it. I am soft. I am hard. I am myself and I am all of us who love you.

No one, now, nowhere

Imagine this: it is a cold, rainy evening. You are walking up Swanston Street after exiting Melbourne Central Station, dripping umbrella in hand, or hands stuffed deep in the pockets of your coat, head down. In front of Hungry Jack’s, the ground is slick with rain and neon light. You weave your way through the backpacks and the occasional litter, eyes scanning the ground for -

How do we write about the absence of something, while making it the very thing we are talking about? How do we write about something being absent without erasing it from the narrative we wish to convey? Nathan Gray spoke about harnessing the power of imagination during his lecture-presentation, but I am wary of this power we wield.

You weave your way through the backpacks and the occasional litter, eyes vigilant. The stream of nine-to-fivers on the sidewalk at this time is slow-moving but constant, and you are going upstream. Further down, past the modest Japanese restaurant on your left, there is a scaffold that spans several shopfronts, composed of blue steel and ply. It wraps around the sidewalk and out of it pours the unceasing stream of pedestrians.

As the mass bore down and past, you notice an irregularity, a glitch in the matrix. The northern end of Hungry Jack’s wall is given a wide berth, creating a semi-circular void encased by a fast food advertisement and an equally transient human partition.

Something about the sight is familiar to you, as though you have taken that same automatic sidestep a hundred times before walking down Swanston Street. You close in on that aberration expecting an answer but there was not any as such. A small can of Diet Coke lies on its side where the wall meets the ground but nothing else, nothing that warrants the elbowroom the length of a person.

Bemused, you move on to purchase two sushi rolls before going on your way, aberration and glitches soon forgotten.

What actually happened was this: I was walking up Swanston Street after exiting Melbourne Central Station, dripping umbrella in hand, head down. I weaved my way through the backpacks and the occasional litter, eyes vigilant. As I approached the modest Japanese restaurant on my left, I noticed the familiar berth that is given to the northern end of Hungry Jack’s wall – a semi-circle encased by an ad and a human wall, roughly the length of a person. I closed in on the void and forced myself to not avert my eyes. My stomach clenched in protest—it is the same either way, guilt if I don’t look, remorse if I do. I took an automatic sidestep that I have had to do a hundred times before walking down Swanston Street, careful not to drip water on the unmade bed. I walked on to purchase two sushi rolls before going on my way, head full of aberrations and glitches.

To borrow Nathan’s permutations for imagining art and its possibilities, this is someone, now, somewhere. Dare we imagine a future in which there is no one, nowhere who is homeless? In the final part of Nathan’s lecture, he challenged us to imagine a different future, the end of capitalism. It is a beatific sentiment but I worry it is lacking. It is not enough to simply write homelessness out of stories set in socialist states, nor to imagine perfect wealth division in a world without nations. It begins with imagination, now we need to fill in the gap between that and reality: how do we get to no one, now, nowhere?

Other Homes

“Can you please speak normally?” my sister demands via Skype, the accusatory tone not diluted by the twenty thousand kilometres between us.

“Your accent is so strong!” my friends exclaim on my visits to Malaysia.

“Where are you from?” my Uber drivers ask, driving home the point that I am, in effect, other.

I had never felt more foreign than when I first moved to Melbourne, as would be the case for anyone leaving one familiar culture behind for another. Five years later, as I acclimatise to one environment, I find myself losing grip on the other; trapped in a cycle of becoming and unbecoming otherness.

My aforementioned sister—trained in education studies, English linguistics, and speaks four languages, yet still has a strange propensity for status quo bias—tells me that language is how our thought, ideas, knowledge and identity are expressed, while it is through accent, which is an accessory of language, that we find affiliation and empathy. Accent is cultural identity, she says. The relationship between language, identity, culture, and its periphery constructs are complex to say the least, one that if represented in an entity relationship diagram I imagine would look like a game of cat’s cradle. 

Julien Leyre’s lecture at The Ballarat Art Academy, in which he spoke of his exploration of personal and collective narrative using language as a vehicle, was particularly moving. His advocacy of bridging cultural differences left me deeply impressed, as did his sensitivity in approach. While his work is important to reconciling differences between cultures, I wonder if he realises that on some level it is also reconciling an internal conflict within some of us.

Bilingualism or multilingualism, while alluded to throughout the lecture, was not remarked upon directly by Julien, despite it being a prerequisite condition to all of the projects he presented. I suspect that as a Malaysian citizen, our experience of multilingualism deviates from large swathes of the population: most of us acquire two to three languages from infancy and maintain a level of fluency into adulthood through vernacular school systems. It becomes a new form of language – multilingualism not only expands the ways in which we express our identities but also constructs them.

It is only through interacting with native English and Mandarin speakers (for I lay no claim to either) that the cultural influence of multilingualism becomes apparent. No longer am I limited by the concise Chinese language that relies heavily on context as I turn to an expansive English vocabulary with 25 verbs for ways of walking. While I take on the English language tendency to employ abstract nouns, I retain still an intrinsic understanding of hierarchy within familial relations which feature prominently in Mandarin. In this context, the Marco Polo Project which is meant to encourage cross-cultural learning can be construed as self-discovery.

There is something beautiful in this patchwork of cultures and affinities, as in the realigning of personal values, which are to a degree constructed within us through language once assembled through larger cultural ideals. That being said, the patchwork is rather prone to unravelling and is not nearly as hardwearing as monolinguistic cultures. In the same way that I am fluent in both languages but not a native speaker of either, some days I catch myself feeling homesick, only to realise Malaysia is as much home as Melbourne is. Both are homes but I am other in both.

In memory of a friend

The screen goes dark in my hand. I let out an involuntary sigh and mentally pinch the bridge of my nose to better cope with the journey. Trams that run along Swanston Street are woefully inadequate at transporting rush hour commuters. Without a phone to form a barrier between myself and the people squashed up against me, I’m forced to confront my immediate reality.

When I finally deposit myself—coat and baggage—on the familiar white benches of Design Hub lecture theatre, Jan has already launched into his introduction of Natasha Johns-Messenger, an artist I’m not familiar with. Not paying him any mind, I try to twist out a stiffness in my back but was immediately stopped by an alarming tautness in my side. That’s right, the adhesive film over my day-old tattoo is a delicate device, sending stress signals any time I try to rotate more than 5 degrees in either direction.

Natasha is now speaking over a video documenting an exhibit of hers at ACCA from several years ago. A man silhouetted by a warm, diffused light at the end of a corridor walks towards the camera. A memory stirs. The video cuts to two men walking up to each other, and stopping. It takes me a second to realise they are the same person. He is walking up to a mirror cleverly positioned at an angle, creating an illusion of two corridors at right angles. I scrabble through my memory for that same jolt I know I have felt before.

That’s it, Sitelines at Heide Museum from exactly one year ago. I marvel for a moment how my memory of her name has faded but my body instantly recognises her work. . I peer at a list of little known phobias on my phone, whiling away time at the tram stop. One jumps out at me. Mnemophobia is a debilitating fear of memory loss, and with good reason, for what else is memory loss but a gradual erosion of our identity? I believe that the true sum of our lives is a collection of moments and memories, ones we remember and ones remembered by those after us. Everything lives for as long as somebody, or something remembers. In that way, the human life is ephemeral, a quality that Natasha has chosen to embrace but one I have attempted to rebel against.

The duality of a tattoo is an intriguing one. It is both a permanent and an impermanent construct, depending on the focal length of the lens with which we view it. In the words of Natasha, ‘in five billion years, the Sun will implode and everything will cease to exist, so relax.’ In that percept, absolutely nothing is permanent but the ink on my body feels pretty bloody so. It’s my version of solid ephemeral. . In bed, I scroll past an article about an accident in Edinburgh, a video of a baby elephant emerging from water, a photo of felled palm trees, cats, pranks, tanks. So it goes. It feels restrictive to lie only on my back or on my right but my left is still too tender. Tired of the drivel, I navigate to an archived conversation on Whatsapp, the last two messages still unread. I venture to send another.

I’m having trouble going to sleep

The messages remain unread. The screen goes dark in my hand.

Search for self

If you had asked me five years ago what the one unchanging thing about myself is, I would have said writing. My love for words. My tumultuous relationship with self-expression. Books. My inability to give a short answer to anything. Fast forward to five years later, I am a shell of who I used to be. My sentences are disconnected and my sense of self is disparate at best. I struggle to formulate ideas; my words fail me, my vocabulary disintegrating. 

When was the last time I felt like myself? Would I even recognise myself in the mirror? Perhaps I have changed so drastically in the recent years that my conception of self no longer aligns with my actual self.

Can a person actually lose oneself? Are we not always ‘someone’? Have I simply misplaced myself or will I need to rebuild myself from the ground up? Which is the more daunting? Where do I begin looking? 

I am suddenly struck by incredible uncertainty. 

Is my tireless search for companionship symptomatic of a deeper problem - one of a loss of identity masked by a desire for emotional connection? When did this begin to happen? 

I am full of questions tonight and so far from answers. 

As you were

I have nary a desire to write at this moment which I suppose must be a good sign, for I expel words at a faster rate than a plant does oxygen at high noon when I am in emotional turmoil. With something of a jolt I realised I am better today than I have been in several months. If this moment can be frozen indefinitely, I may seriously consider abandoning all moments to-be and settle with this one. 

Like someone I know once said: I am content with being content. No longer do I seek happiness; it is a fool’s errand to chase one degree in a broad continuum of emotions. I am content with the median where I am neatly perched at this time.

Everything is as it should be.