Some of the shop-houses have since been converted into modern shops, advertising "antiques", but a careful eye could pick out that antiques make up for less than a small percentage of the items on display — many more objects have been imported from Thailand or Indonesia, where the labour is cheap.
When in our history did it happen that our shops need to be full of things? Was it meant to convey a successful business? Wouldn't it have just shown many things remained unsold? Was there a point in the psyche of selling and buying where we realised no one would ever walk into an empty shop?
These shops are far from empty; they are overwhelmingly full of trivial, useless things with little physical value. One assumes the value of things is what the acquirer places upon it at the time of purchase, and that value bears no relationship to the price one actually pays.
We walk down Heren Street, where the old nyonya houses are mostly derelict, looking cold, old and empty. Any similarity to Herenstraat in Amsterdam has probably never existed. Occasionally, a tired, old face would peer out from within an open window, staring into the no-longer human space they might soon inhibit.
This street has the weight of ghosts. The scent of a violent past still lingered. I took his arm and steered him towards Jonker street, where the soft lights from the waking night market has begun to keep darkness at bay.
Where are the young people? Have they left this ancient town for sprawling skyscrapers? All the ones we have met were either travellers or visitors from other towns, intent on spending their money stuffing themselves with famed, local food.
One gets the feeling that only ghosts live here now.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>So it was deep into the madrugada that we walked, in this city whose streets were neatly divided into rectangles, and whose buildings followed suit for the lack of creativity; at best they turned at a slight angle to introduce an isosceles triangle at their entrances. It was quiet, the late night taxis have evaporated, and all signs of life were tucked away where people preferred to dance in close quarters to one another, drowned out by loud music, sweat and beer-tinged breath.
Our destinations were known entities of finite distances, but I was entirely conscious that your destiny was not mine, how we differed not in speed but in velocity, and that our paths were diverging at the rate of an unknown constant, faithful only to the beat of time.
It was deep into the madrugada that I sought peace from the night's demons, as its shadows stayed still, held back by fearless streetlamps. The taxi we finally hailed rolled to a silent stop at a red traffic light, even though there were no other cars in sight.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Aware that thoughts once uttered are irreversible things, our words crowded up against one another while time eroded us from the inside out. What power we have, slicing open our own histories with sharp blades of rhetoric, making incisions over where memories have long healed over.
The streets were not familiar. For one thing, they were far too wide. The featureless buildings that defined them were too tall, too cold, too everything. To compensate for the lack of scale and perspective, they lined the middle of the streets with lifeless trees strangled by speckled lights. If it were not for the road signs that glared large and green, we would have been lost getting here.
There wasn't time for all the stories needed to be told. The traveller knows that magic belongs only to moments frozen in a time and a place, that new memories are reborn by means of hastily scribbled words in a notebook, or a photograph captured like a butterfly in mid-flight.
When I returned to my room, I went to bed with the same song in my head as the one that crept into my consciousness in waking moments too many hours ago, long before I became who I now am.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Even as your shadow cast longer than mine on the autumn pavement, I wasn't reassured. This is a city I have never loved. But we talked like old friends, joked like old friends. It sometimes feels as if our existence were determined by dice. A pair of sixes and it would be 6 hours together. Or perhaps it had to do with who held the full house?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>An immeasurable spell of seconds ticking in a day, defined only by arbitrary footsteps walking down a side-street, where the unmarked doors remain soundlessly closed, their mysteries well-locked on the other side.
I stare out of my window and watch the clouds make shadow patterns on the leaves of the chestnut tree outside.
On sunny days, the concrete city soaks up all the warmth, storing the heat deep within its cracks, in case winter comes early this year.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>When friends travelled, and asked if there were things I wanted, I'd usually asked for a wayward token like a seashell from a beach they visited, or perhaps a particularly unusual stone, or a leaf from a tree. The souvenir that comes back often bears the imprint of the one who has acquired it, their soul's pattern reflected in what they deem worthy to keep.
Or perhaps, I may have just been subconsciously wanting to impose my uncomplicated joys onto those around me. My best memories of beaches have always been the treasure hunt - looking for seashells and stones that other travellers might not have noticed; the special token, shaped just in this way, just this colour, waiting for me to eventually arrive here to find it. But the kind of shells I choose are the ones that are broken, imperfect. It seems more magical somehow, to be able to imagine what the rest of the shell and its sea creature might have once looked like.
I don't usually like cars, but this is possibly the only sensible means to get around the island. I resist the urge to count poppies - they appear like red punctuation amongst the cistus, the Corsican lavender, and numerous other little flowers I haven't yet had the privilege to be acquainted with. But poppies are not found everywhere in the world, and the surprising sight of the crimson petals make me deliriously happy. In higher altitudes, you get the occasional very large, purple poppy, and every time I catch sight of one, it is like a private, purple blessing.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>I'd always believed that we should keep an ample supply of dreams and pick them off like apples.
In the early morning the secret in our hearts stayed home under the covers while we travelled in opposite directions, over distances that don't match, stretching time at different speeds.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>So much later, I saw that you recognised me, not for my face, perhaps for my name, but really it wasn't either of those things that mattered.
"Feel free to appear in my dreams," you said, but I was not certain if I had a say in such things as destinies. I swallowed the nagging feeling, wondering — would the world have been a different place if we had never met?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>For our all creativity and ingenuity as a human race, we still made awful constructs like these: mere rectangles from all sides and all possible vantage points. But it was a small brick house hidden amongst these indifferent edifices that we were aiming to reach, for an intimate evening of folk music.
What would it have been a century or two ago, when we might have gathered in a village square, instead of a modern lifeless desert reachable only car because the buses don't come frequently enough, and even then we wouldn't have been able to see at which stop we ought to alight?
You recognised me in the hallway, but not for my face nor my name, more for something I have stood up for, fought against, have written and talked about. I felt humbled by the sincerity of your young voice telling me that what I am doing is important, buried the feeling of having been inadequate and merely thanked you.
You told of having sung songs around a camp fire, but I could harbour no such childhood experience. The only similar memory I had were those hot, tropical nights when our city drowned in darknesses of frequent blackouts, swallowed by the silence when the electricity stopped humming, televisions left to die like cold chemical bricks of black and mosquitoes provided background melodies to the sound of my piano as I randomly pulled notes from the humid air and spun them into song.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>I took myself deep down to the depths of the gateway to the modern kind of hell. They require you to pay to enter and to make your passage these days; gone are the days of riddles by trolls or the wise old man who guards the boat and lets you cross if he deems you fit enough.
At the newsstand, an elderly woman tried her luck at the lottery, her forehead furrowed in concentration as she carefully scrubbed out squares with the edge of a coin, and I wondered for a moment if this were a modern kind of hope.
Whence comes this unconscious dance, that even chance is manufactured?
In the carriage everyone covered their ears against the noise, or to fill their heads with another kind of noise. Perhaps this is simply the modern idea of choice.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Is it a shadow of doubt that you have painted over your eyes -- finely lined -- a colour matching the light copper of your hair?
Do you expect to charm with the yellow sheet of mathematical exercises over your too-short skirt?
Would it have made us irresponsible mothers for not having been able to explain that no matter what we do, the world has not yet learned to reconcile our beauty and our intelligence?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>The cars that drive by mercilessly press down on the snow in the middle of the road. We conquer you, say the wheels to the snow. But the snow does not feel compelled to reply, and simply expels a soft lingering whisper that sounds exactly like waves at sea on a calm summer's day. The snow banks on either side of the pavement resemble sand dunes, except they are bleached white by winter; their slightly rougher texture makes them glow and glitter under the orange of the sodium street lamps. But every time there is a snow storm I dream of walking on warm, hot sand, the familiar feeling of each step sinking in, absorbing the featherweight of my body, my lightweight sense of self.
I like the winter. I like to say: I chose to live here - even for a little while. I find myself taking it for granted that I walk out of my front door completely wrapped up against the elements, and it hits me every now and again that I'll never be able to accurately describe this experience to my childhood friends from the tropics. "It's like sand ... except, white, and very cold. Melts when you touch it. Sparkles at night. Oh yes, and sometimes it even gets too cold to snow ..." Maybe all I want to say is, "It makes you feel alive because you are constantly reminded of your humanity," but that's altogether too abstract and too vague because I would have to explain why that mattered.
We didn't choose to be born, and somehow, this most often translates into a kind of psychosis that also implies we can't choose how to live our lives, or how we can't influence life around us. Destinies are complex, obscure and shrouded by myths, so it is much easier to not care and pretend our lives are individual little private hives of activity - that your life does not relate to mine if I didn't know your name and if we didn't share the same blood. And so in the metro everyone wears their earphones in forced blissful ignorance, in the subconscious collective bid to isolate ourselves. People drive cars because it is a convenience - but really, a convenient way to create their own, isolated, individual universes, moving towards a destiny they imagined they chose even if the pattern had been laid out by those who came before us. In the streets, strangers pass by one another as mere shadows.
At one point on my way home, there was the depanneur's delivery bike in the middle of the path flanked both sides by snow banks, so I had to negotiate my way carefully between the big white bucket in front of it and the big white pile of snow to one side. The deliveryman was coming down a flight of stairs carrying a big box of empty beer bottles, and we bade each other "Bonsoir!", which, tonight, strangely meant both "hello" and "farewell".
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Each station was built at a time where it was customary to show off our human might, standing high and defiant against nature, so we created tall imposing concrete structures to prove a point, and anoint them with artwork that proudly displayed our intellectual superiority. It never occurred to us then that our intellectual capacities could keep changing, and that art could just be fashion, so everything looked 40 years out of date despite being glamorous on opening day.
A plump, older woman smiled at a mother and her young daughter, wrapped up completely in pink. A young girl walked in, the air around her folded in intensity as she arranged her hair and her things, then proceeded to spread a book on her lap. The people who weren't talking to one another wore white earphones that snaked from either ear to a hidden location deep within their puffy dark winter coats.
This is a temporary place, a temporary existence, so we scorn it as such - we live it as such.
Today, the tabloids tell us that elsewhere, other people are living more exciting lives: look who's having a new baby, who just got divorced, who just got married, who just got back together. They tell us these things so we can forget our own lives have any semblance of significance. Every now and again, the advertising on the walls change, just to give us a sense that time is plodding forward.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Today, you look a serious poet, a black tousled shirt with white pinstripes, a thin book of Poe in your hands, a furrow of concentration on your forehead.
I want the fat man standing at the door of the train to move - at least his belly - out of the way so I could read the title your fingers partially conceal. Another man looks across at me, perhaps noticing that I am staring too hard. Who's the real poet besides the one who wrote the book?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>"Digging a hole," he said, still grinning, by way of an explanation.
"I can see that," said I. "What's it for?"
"A pond. You know, for goldfish."
My first thought was that neither him nor his wife had the time to look after the garden, let alone maintain the health of goldfishes in a pond. They'd bought the property not too long ago, and most of the house still echoed, crying out to be filled with furniture. I supposed the pond was a priority.
I looked doubtfully at the hole in the ground, which resembled more like a dip in the slope on the hillside. My uncle wasn't exactly an accomplished handyman, but I guess determination yields results. Of a kind. Eventually.
This odd sliver of a memory slipped into my mind as my feet took me down a familiar back alley, the kind that exists only because two-storey housing rise on either side; their back doors, balconies, porches, and back gardens facing these forsaken lanes that only local residents are supposed to use.
Perhaps I am a local enough resident by now. Or is it because that I claim this as my home, therefore I belong here? When the women hang their laundry out in their balconies over the back streets, do they see me as a stranger? Or when the men mow their lawns and repair their cars? Does my body blend into the background of the landscape even if my eyes wander, my ears listen and my heart beats at a different rhythm to the soul of this place? I would be a travelling minstrel but for the lack of a harp.
Yet, it was walking by one of these desolate back gardens that made me think of my uncle and the grandiose dream of a fish pond in the yard of his suburban home, thousands of miles from here, many years ago. These unkempt, overgrown gardens will soon face the onslaught of a long winter; what can one strive for, when the flowers will wither like evaporating dreams?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>