Here We Are, Still.

Have I ever told you about the solitary pleasure I get from watching planes drift across the night sky? How many people on there are wishing they were somewhere else?

Brings to mind a jar of jellybeans, bobbing along with the ocean current. So insignificant in context, yet each jellybean is blissfully oblivious, defiantly offering a different experience of taste and triggers.

Remember when I talked about the meditative calm of sitting at Burger King at the Sg. Buloh jejantas, overlooking the highway below and the cars whizzing by into the gauzy dusk? Wondering what conversations are going on inside, words blown away by the wind as each pocket of humanity speeds away.

It was the same feeling again when I glanced out the window of my hotel room. Like flickering images on a bank of tiny, grimy TV screens, a human tapestry of the mundane unfurled before me, joyous sparkle and gritty pathos all interwoven within its greying edges.

It’s like watching a series of stages, neatly partitioned off from each other in a giant studio. Real life drama.

I wished you were there with me to see it.

Such irresistible voyeurism, to stand there watching the drama of lives played out behind the windows of their apartments.

You would have understood my appreciation of these things.

You would have appreciated the time taken to stand and simply stare. At the crowds of people, the streets, the ferries, the harbour. Appreciated the contrast of indifferent squalor against urgent modernity.

You would have recognised the cocoon of solitude around me as a sign of big, useless, pointless thoughts being nonetheless thought.

I missed you.

But you were there; on each street corner that I stopped to sms or call (and now we have a RM370 bill to contend with), in every cramped diner where I tasted something I thought you’d like, in every SaSa shop I saw (one practically every block, so really. Pretty much all the time).

You took the ferry with me. You were on the planes with me.

You were never far from me.

I realised this, only on the flight back. I was watching “In Her Shoes”, starring Toni Collete (she’s right up there with the likes of Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack and Felicity Huffman, in my opinion) and Cameron Diaz. Right at the end, Cameron Diaz’s character reads a poem by e.e. cummings.

My own words are poor; this day in particular, deserves the humility of choosing to borrow from the masters.

For the past three years and for those to come. With all that I can give you.

---
I carry your heart with me
by e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
---

Psstt. Don't be anal. That's how the original was written. I had to restrain myself from adjusting the paragraphs.