Love, love, love.

Photo: Aun Aprendo by Francisco José de Goya

This year, I have been travelling. Travelling so much, for work, for more work, for leisure and pleasure. 

I’ve been reflecting a lot on my life lately, and a part of that has involved going through all the writing I’m working on. Increasingly I have felt unseen and erased; revisiting my own experiences and bearing witness to my life feels like a way of reclaiming space for myself. So here, I share with you little vignettes of me moving through the world, watching, seeking, wondering. 

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Ottawa, Canada

K told me in one of our last sessions, in the gentlest voice, that this sadness that I hold is not going to go anywhere. 

Today, on my second last day in Ottawa, as I am sitting in my hotel room biting into a Bananarama BeaverTail, with tears dripping down my cheeks, the truth of her statement hits home. Because there is a lot of sadness that comes with having gone through a disease that may or may not return, that has made an indelible mark. There is a lot of sadness that comes and goes mourning all the possible lives lived, and reckoning with the fact that some possibilities may not exist for me in the future. There is the sadness with dealing with a new body, a body that was ravaged, that was cleansed and purged, a body that often reminds you that you need to take good care of it, and even when you do, that it can fail. There is sadness in the betrayal of it, in the utter pointlessness of disease, in the knowledge that in life, little makes sense. 

And yet, it is fitting that this hits me as I sit in a hotel room, the perfect metaphor for a liminal space. A kind of holding room, if you will, a place where bodies, hearts, minds are in transit. And feelings. We must not forget the feelings. Because feelings too, are utterly liminal. You can carry the sadness of a thousand years in your bones, and find something to laugh about. You can be grieving for all the ways in which your dreams have shifted, while being excited about what you’re going to do during your holiday in June. You can be reckoning with mortality and still getting pissed off at an email. All of this is me. I am the master of dancing in the shadows of the liminal space. 

I walk around in Ottawa, and along one of the streets, I see this man, high as a kite, shivering the cold. Because it is April and it is freezing, still. Because as an entire human race, our consumption patterns are destroying the earth and impacting the climate. I digress. He is shivering in the cold, and he is curled up in the corner with his blanket. I think about going towards him and giving him a packet of food, but before I can, a car drives up and parks by the kerbside. A lady jumps out of the car with a packet of food, pats him on the shoulder, pushes it into his hands, and then she gets back into her car and drives away. He’s still high as a kite, and he’s still shivering, and he’s still lying on the street, but now he has one meal sorted. I think there’s a story here about liminality but as I try to grasp it, it flits away. 

Seeing him on the street, seeing many on the street, makes me give thanks - for having a hotel room to return to away from the cold, for having a home to fly back to in Singapore, for having the ability to be able to walk on the street and buy myself a meal and a bottle of water. I am so grateful that my lips constantly form the words of a prayer, and there is a little feeling that burgeons inside of me, it feels like love, it feels like grace, it feels like gratitude. Or maybe, it’s just my Asian body responding to the cold. I don’t know. 

I send fevered messages to P, and to S, and I write missives while they sleep at night, because I am 12 hours behind them, behind in time, can you imagine, we are all existing in the same time and space, and yet, in different locations, time is being interpreted differently. Imagine. So I am in the past, and they are in the future, and it makes me feel just a little lonely, as if just because of where my body is placed in this world, so far away from home, I am a little forgotten, a little left behind. I write missives complaining about my exhaustion because boy, am I exhausted. The lack of sleep, the blood in my nose because my nasal cavities are so dry, indulging in sugar, the brown lipstick that I apply over and over again over my chapped lips to make myself look a little more presentable at the conference, my hair that is both long and short at once, the red glasses that dwarf my face. I write my life into the little text messages on WhatsApp as if I am desperate to record, to share, to keep up phantom conversations because when I stop, what if I’m forgotten? What if that’s it? 

One night, I meet my friend, M, for dinner. My last message to P is, the street feels dodgy, unsafe. I do not check my phone for hours during the dinner; before I know it, it’s almost midnight, and my jaw is hurting from laughing and chatting with M. I turn over my phone which has been in sleep mode, and I open WhatsApp and I see message after message from P, at least four missed calls, a missed calls on FaceTime. I message P back immediately, tell him I’m okay, I’m safe, that I just lost track of time, and when I get back to the hotel, P tells me how he was scared, how he didn’t think I would fall off the radar for those many hours without checking in, how he was planning to call X and speak to Y and find ways to track my whereabouts. I apologise profusely, I know what it is like to feel that vice-like grip on your heart when you cannot get in touch with someone, the way the mind begins to expand and explore possibilities, each stranger and crueler than the last. But inside my heart, a little sapling of joy bursts out of the soil, a little voice in my ear whispering, how can you ever think you will be forgotten when you are loved thus?

And perhaps that is what I am writing about today, about the human need to be, and the human capacity to love, and the ways in which we continue to stumble in the grey, trying to make meaning out of this madness. I think, and increasingly, I believe this more and more, that if we are able to love, if we are able to give this love in this way, pure and true of heart, and learn to receive love in this way, also pure and true of heart, then perhaps, perhaps, we will all be saved. In one way or another.

Even, especially, when you’re in a dark hotel room all by yourself in a strange country, far, far away from home. 

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Kitulgala, Sri Lanka 

I am sitting by big bay windows, French style, wide open, and facing the river. This is the Klenia river, and as my driver, Mr D tells me, famous for white water rafting and other adventure spots. I am staring at the water gurgling against the rocks and thinking about the news from days ago, that Colombo, where I have just driven from, is flooding. Unprecedented rain, apparently. Houses destroyed, livelihoods impacted. More and more rain expected. 

A few days before, my mother’s worried text cautioning me to rethink my travel if the roads were not habitable. 

I have been thinking about nature more and more now. Maybe it is because I work in the sustainability space, and so, by default, generally consume more news and information about how terribly human actions are hurting the planet. Whatever it is, I am more conscious.

I am on adjuvant hormonal therapy as part of of my longer-term breast cancer treatment. This means that I am in full menopause. One of the terrible side effects of this treatment (as is the case for anyone going through menopause) is having hot flashes. Now, my body is incredibly sensitive to the external temperature; if there is a slight increase in the temperature outside, my insides light on fire. I am hot all the time, and I am burning as hot as the planet seems to be. When I am sweating and crying from the discomfort of it all, it feels like mother nature’s echoing her sorrow in my ears.

I am sitting in front of these beautiful windows in this old, colonial building. The sun is out, the sky is bright but I can see the dark clouds moving in. We are in the hills now, and nothing is certain about the weather. 

Through the windows, a giant hornet flies through. Bees and hornets are interesting creatures, aren’t they? For all the ways in which humans fear them for their stings, they are ecological warriors. Master fertilisers of plants, extremely organised and unionised as workers, and create a substance that is incredibly good for the human body. Of course we fear them. They are better at everything than we are. I watch the hornet makes it way towards me, and I am reminded of two things at once. The bee sting on my father-in-law’s cheek, before his diagnosis, the first thing that seemed to portend more to come; and the second, the bee sting in Bridgerton, which Bridgerton senior was allergic to, and died of. 

I think of bees and hornets as magical portals of the future, and as I watch this particular winged creature whizz near the chair that is across from me, I do what I always do in the face of nature - I say a little prayer of gratitude and of penance. 

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Ajloun, Jordan

We are on Day Three of our journey in Jordan. 

The land continues to astound me, Jordan of the seven hills, Jordan of the light sand and the people with bright smiles. Jordan where the azaan echoes among mosques, a choir of the heavens. Jordan of the castles and its rich tapestry of history, of the stories of the Crusaders and the Romans and the Ottomans. 

We are exploring the Ajloun Castle today. I was initially skeptical - what could possibly be so interesting about castle ruins. And yet, I find myself enthralled by the stories I read. What first began as a Byzantine monastery was then occupied by Izz Al-Din Usama, a general from Saladin’s army in the 12th century. According to Saladin's historian Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, the fortress was primarily built in order to help the authorities in Damascus control the Bedouin tribes of the Jabal 'Auf. After Usama’s death and the fall of the Karak in the 13th century, the castle was beseiged by the Mongols, before the Mongols were overthrown by the Mamuks. Thereafter in the 17th century, the Ottomans came into the picture and took ownership of the castle. I close my eyes and try to picture the castle in its different forms of construction and destruction over the years. I imagine the shouts of battle, the clanging of swords and steel, of all the different ways in which blood was shed. 

I learn that sieges last for months on end and that rulers surrender not because they are weakened, but because their people die from the prolonged lack of resources resulting in starvation, widespread dehydration and sweeping illnesses. I stare out through tiny crevices at the top of the castle and imagine myself as an archer, preparing to guard my home and my land till the bitter end. I do not need to stretch my imagination too far - after all, I studied archery for several years in school. 

I stare at the old, old walls and think about all the stories they hold. I remember that it is an honour to bear witness, to be around long enough to be able to carry the stories of yesterday. 

I take a deep breath and listen to wind whistling through the crevices, wondering about all the people who came before me, who stood in this same spot, and surveyed the land of Ajloun.

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Dublin, Ireland

In Ireland. Blue skies, wispy clouds, cool cool air. And then the sounds of a police car. Always in a city, beauty and danger side by side. 

There is an undercurrent of violence here but it doesn't feel very personal. Yet. It feels like violence carried in the bones, passed down from father to son, dulled by the dark liquid and the fog of labour. 

In the streets, immigrants everywhere. I am confused. I have always thought this to be a white country. But instead I am met with accents familiar, the down south people. 

I bought a ring with a diamond heart yesterday. It is my first diamond heart and it twinkles so prettily. When I stare at it in the light I wonder whether my own heart is iridescent. These days I feel so much, layer of emotion upon emotion, surely, all this light must be seeping, leaking from my pores. 

The other day, in a store in London, a beautiful glowing girl from Palestine told me that my energy is incredible. I laughed, delighted. Only I see my darkest moments, curled up, blue grey and self-hating. 

I keep saying this is my brat summer but actually, it is my summer of love with my friends. My friends who define what love and community mean to me. Who keep propping me up with silliness and joy on the days when all I am is a howl of sorrow. 

I am reminded again and again, how much I love love. How it underpins everything I do, even when I am filled with deep sorrow and despair at what I am forced to witness in this world, all the beheaded babies and racism and slums filled with illness and squalor, and my God, so much death, everywhere, playing on loop like a song that got stuck on repeat by mistake. 

S got a tattoo on his hand with my handwriting. 

Even now, I feel tears in my eyes, thinking about the tenderness of it all, the way words and love bind us together.

Again, my own words come back to me - I believe this more and more, that if we are able to love, if we are able to give this love in this way, pure and true of heart, and learn to receive love in this way, also pure and true of heart, then perhaps, perhaps, we will all be saved. In one way or another. 

Love, love, love.