September 14, 2005
Trouvaille
A few days late in posting (guess who's had their head in the sand?), but this is my latest contribution to Yulzine: Duality.
Posted by sniffles at 12:32 PM | Comments (3)« August 2005 | [dandruff::main] | October 2005 »
A few days late in posting (guess who's had their head in the sand?), but this is my latest contribution to Yulzine: Duality.
Posted by sniffles at 12:32 PM | Comments (3)Her things are piled in her room like a lopsided mountain, a few stray items still left unaccounted for in the room out the front, in scornful neglect that someone else still lives here and considers it home.
It unsettles me. Shadows have shapes and light steals in unknown passages between shapes of things. It amazes me that one's existence can be reduced to mere objects; the resolute rectangles that make up a box and the secret treasures it contains. Bags, baskets, boxes ... and more boxes. It seems she has not yet worked out what to keep and what to discard. But that, is something one learns with time. For now, her possessions seem to sound a long, low echo of her existence in the absence of her real self.
Once, someone had asked why I bothered shipping things halfway around the world, when I could have left it all behind and began afresh.
I don't remember having given a straight answer, but I tend to think those who believe in beginning afresh are living a kind of lie. One makes one's journey from beginning to end, and what shapes us, what imprints us, cannot be so easily shed as things can be. The absence of things merely equates to an absence of physical reminders.
I am happy with my life, happy with small reminders that have found themselves in my possession; they remind me of who I was and where I have been, and I keep these with me that I can count my blessings. Memory, after all, is tumultuous and temporary.
~~~~~
The intensity of work over the last few months has taken a toll on my health, and the survival instinct goes towards preserving the things that preserves oneself.
I'd spent recent weeks, during free moments, re-moulding the sanctuary that is my home, continuously hunting down missing pieces of the puzzle and arranging these to fit. All other projects that I'd embarked upon came to a sudden and complete halt. For the home is where the heart is, and the heart needs to feel at home before heart can be expended into the zest of one's work so as to be able to create something independent of whence it has come — that it could live and breathe on its own. Work without heart is as good as trash.
~~~~~
The willow at the edge of the park is already yellowing. Surely it can't be autumn yet, but some trees are more sensitive than others. I think of my lovely, fragile, tropical greens at home and wonder if the winter would be too harsh for them.
Posted by sniffles at 07:54 PM | Comments (5)"Mum, tell me, why don't they just send the clothes stuck in the EU to help the victims of Katrina?"
Posted by sniffles at 08:41 PM | Comments (3)