As Much As I Want To

I really can't help it.

“There is a delivery for you on the shelves in the loading bay.
Friday 1st September 2006 @ 11:11.”

A note on my desk on Friday morning. A specific time, a moment in time, one moment in your world. An exact moment, just 60 seconds of it, can make you stop in your track and remember everything all over again.

And it was just the night before that I dreamt about the person again after a long time. Blame it on the big bowl of ice-cream I had before bed but the documentary on SBS on human trafficking was just so intense so what do you do but simply give in to the temptation of having such a wonderful comfort food?

The dream was all too bizzare. Toa Payoh Lorong 8 is right across from Lorimer Street and the person now lives in a dingy HDB flat in Toa Payoh and so do I who is the direct neighbour with an equally squalid flat and I was having a ciggie out in the common corridor one night when I saw the person with another guy and came a line 'you don't have to do this JT' which I don't quite understand at all but before I could say anything they had already returned to the flat and blanking me out right there. Both of them looked very much older and haggard while I was in my army fatigue and I still remember I actually looked down at my tag that says 'Alan Tang'. It was so real and so vivid that I actually woke up with a jump and couldn't get back to sleep for about ten minutes.

It was all too strange and tiring even and I woke up feeling I haven't slept at all. I opened my eyes way past eight, still inhabited by the dream while carrying a sense of hollowness, and felt the dank sensation around me, the nowhere feeling, and I knew it would be another diffcult day ahead of me.

Still I made it through, the first day of spring it was. The change of a season with the passing of a spring shower too. A walk down Brunswick Street with music in my head and hands in my pocket as always on that very warm afternoon. A street I have walked up and down countless times, in different seasons, in different moods and with different company, but I still enjoy it most when I am walking alone. The sense of familiarity is great, and the juxtaposition of squalor and glamour makes it a street like no other. I suppose this is the one street that will matter to me if I do leave Melbourne someday.

Another weekend, bringing upon the chance to have yet another fleeting encounter in the physical sense with another human being. Another two in fact, this time. They are becoming as insignificant and meaningless and as redundant as success is to me now, but we still want them. I am a man with needs after all. I walked away feeling lesser, as such encounters never amount to anything in the end, and they are not suppose to anyway. I am well aware of that. I am still playing by instincts, I always do, and I always know I do. All it takes is just one meeting, and you know it, I know it. I might get myself burned badly one day by trusting my heart so much, maybe I already have. After all, it took just one line from that person the first time we met and my world has been turned topsy-turvy ever since.

I don't know any better anymore if it is better or worse to work this way. It is good in a sense that I do know momentary gratifications will never be enough to replace what is missing inside of me and that what I felt for the person was as true as it is lasting and it was never just a silly infatuation. There is not such a thing, at least not anymore, as using one person or another or more even to flush that one person whom matters to me out of my memory. It is never like that, and should never be like that. It just doesn't feel the same, and I know it. My five senses will never lie, maybe six even. So yes, even after all these months, I am not even gonna begin to lie to myself that I could use convenient substitutes to make myself feel better. It won't work.

It is unfair to others, and I would not want to muck anyone over the same way I have been mucked over. Or maybe I had done it before already, but I am trying not to recall. I've treated people badly at times in relationships and maybe what's happening now is some kind of payback for all those past lives.

And yes, it is bad, real bad, in a way that it all means I am still caught up as much as I am hung up as much as I am feeling the miss and the misery. There are too many what if's and expectations and silly little fantasies and wishful thinking. Only I know this, really.

Going halfway 'round the globe to move away from this spot I have been standing in is not something I have to do, it is something I am doing, because I am still alive and breathing and I, by all means, should still be responsible for my own well-being as much as I should continue to live my life.