☀☀☀
Sarah, 18, Singapore
(click the flower above for older entries)
Twitter: @sarahbananachan
Instagram: hisarahnademe
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What moving on feels like
Friday, June 27, 2014 || 6:21 PM
I now say your last name when I say your first name - string the two together like they could never be separate entities - because you are no longer the first person I associate with that name. I read poems without you in mind. I paint on canvases without remembering red was your favourite colour. I string roses onto rope and sew them into the hems of my skirts without remembering you hate the smell of flowers and you despise roses because they're covered in thorns. You used to be a thorn: until one day you simply weren't. You are no longer able to draw blood from me with just a prick and a pinch of the skin - you cannot hurt me. Your taste becomes an aftertaste; your right dimple a souvenir with no place to call home.
(wrote this post in fifteen minutes at a starbucks in the middle of tackling chemistry and eating a quiche, do pardon it)
Appreciating life (and then some)
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 || 12:33 PM
I am in love. How can people say that love naught exist when I am so, so in love - then explain to me then, what I am feeling, how I would let my soul rip apart and float among the constellations just to let these things continue living. No, I am not in love with a person - I am in love with the way the sun falls on bare skin and ignites flames, the almost indignant warmth making you feel alive, so, so, alive. I have a thing for morning heat, I don't exactly know how to put this into words but there is something about the sun that reminds you that you are mortal.
I am in love with the sky: it's blue (due to the refraction of light, I might add) is so brilliant; it reminds me of a painting but so ethereal only a master hand can touch. What about clouds - cotton wool placed in the sky, white fluff amidst all that brilliant blue. The blue reminds me of your eyes; they are the exact same shade as the sky - and I wonder if your eyes work like the ocean: blue because they reflect the brilliance above (or perhaps they reflect your brilliance within).
I am in love with skin, skin in all shades - cream coloured flesh that flows over the sinews, golden brown epidermis that has been kissed by the sun. I love the soft parts that shudder at a touch and feel invariable under my fingertips; the dry parts, weathered from labour only you know of. The sensory touch is deathly underrated, I would trace testaments to your smile on the backs of your hands - whatever skin you have is immediately beautiful.
I am in love with the grass and the flowers and the barks of trees. I am in love with nature because it is stark, honest - also because it is pretty. It is so easy to be in love with pretty things: anyone can testify to that.
What it must be like to have a muse
Thursday, June 19, 2014 || 4:15 PM
I want to write about you for years; immortalise you on pieces of paper and on the insides of books and the backs of napkins. You will now live forever because what is written can never be unwritten.
(i have yet to find someone i feel this way about, but the thought is awfully poetic and it just came to me so i wanted to share)
4am thoughts
Monday, June 16, 2014 || 3:04 AM
I like to re-read books. I find comfort; amenity in reading and re-reading the same lines over and over (and over and over) - knowing the next line before my eyes can scan the slope of the letters, before the words register in my brain to make sense of a story or a thought. Sometimes when it gets late and I can't seem to fall asleep, I read my favourite poem (Having a Coke With You by Frank O' Hara, please go google it if you have never read it). I read it repeatedly, relishing each line with renewed awe until my eyes get weary and my heart beat slows down to a steady pace. Every so often, after my eyes get tired from the constant scanning and my eyelids need to flutter shut, I switch to the video of O'Hara reading his own work. I love the lull of his voice: I continue to echo the same words in my brain again and again and again (God, I don't even know why I like that poem so much - I just do, it is so fantastically romantic). I've been doing this since I was fifteen and the poem touched my heart for the very first time - two years later I have it memorised, every word burnt into the edges of my cerebellum; each line tattoed all over my nerves.
How can I claim I get bored of things easily (I always argue that shine dulls and that novelty begets interest) when I can devour these things time and time again and feel just as good? Or perhaps that is exactly why I like doing that - because books and poems and movies will always be there for you despite your fickle mind and wayward tendencies. Put them down and they'll wait for you indefinitely; pick them up and they'll always love you wholly and without reason.
Or maybe I am a freaking liar. Maybe I need the same thing thrown in my face repeatedly, I want to drown in it and I want to drown in you - too much is never enough.
Notes to self
Saturday, June 14, 2014 || 7:18 PM
1. Don't do things like deleting old conversations, pictures, numbers off your phone - eradicating all evidence that proved you were ever prevalent in my life. I don't need that absence, that gaping hole to serve as a ghost of a reminder - I am strong. Reading our messages and looking at your face will not make me miss you. Nothing will make me miss you.
2. Stretch as much as you can - let your limbs be limber; extensible, feel the pain (and savour it) in your muscles as you hold it for thirty seconds. The ability to distort your body into positions that go against human nature: that's your thing, man. I miss how flexible I used to be, slipping into oversplits with ease. Now I can barely do a split without my muscles screaming in agony. Stretch: It will be useful when you want to return to dancing proper (which will be very soon, I promise).
3. Stop using your damn phone - checking Instagram every two minutes will not fill any void you perpetuate to have. If life is a question, you will not find the answer on your too-bright screen. Your face is not built to be constantly lit from the glow of your handheld device - stop it. Look up - you're missing out on life as it hastens; dashes by you.
4. My love for yoghurt dates will never falter - don't fight it, girl. Go for as many yoghurt dates as is appropriate.
4. Call other people by their names. Instead of murmuring incoherent syllables or waving your hands, call them by name - taste the feel of each syllable in your mouth. Say their name because it feels personal, your voice tagged to how they identify themselves. Everyone says my name a little differently and I have them all memorised, carved onto my skin for all to see and etched on my heart for only me to feel.
5. You are not born better, you can only become better with conscientious effort. I have the propensity to slip into this limbo (it happens so fast before I even realise it I am more than halfway there), and it is a terrible syndrome. Picking myself up is never easy, but it has to be done.
(here's to the new sem- let's make it a good one)
I got bored and this was my quick fix
Saturday, June 7, 2014 || 12:49 PM
(Fiction #2)
You are a new- age concept: I knew that from the get go, when your flounce triumphed over the hearts of everyone you encountered and your smile (I always thought blinding smiles were a myth but) stunned my mouth into silence. I could not believe you were real until I remembered you were covered in endless skin that had a million tiny nerves just beneath the surface and you could feel pain just like the rest of us. Though you didn't seem like a "rest-of-us" person, for you seemed to connote more than that - you walked like you could fix problems; like you had a magic hand that could govern things people claimed were out of their control. Perhaps my initial attraction to you was selfish - I was a mercenary, bowled over by the fact that you could patch me up, reconstruct all the pieces I had constantly strewn all over the floor, the carpet, my clothes.
Yet you were a game changer. I, filled with skepticism and second guesses flourished into someone who could love wholesomely, genuinely. Both of us hated cliches, but our love could be packaged into novels and sold in bookstores because you changed me - like how all great lovers transform their partners. You threw coins into wishing wells and wished for world peace; I followed suit and wished for you to stay.
You make up for every mosquito bite on my legs and every bruise on my heart. The air I breathe is laced with you. I love you - maybe not forever, but I love you now. I love you present tense.
(I suddenly realise I write about all these things with such conviction like I've felt them with my own heart and skin. How can I write about things I have never experienced; will never experience? I must have very good imagination)
Four things I know to be true
|| 12:34 AM
One.
I don't write poems. Poetry is not an abstract concept for me - I write, for God's sake - but I don't write poems because I don't know how. Where do you put the space between the sentences and leave gaping holes, abysses for your own thoughts to arbitrate all that linear space? What is the difference between this
and
this - how do I know when to do what? No one teaches you these things, I've never been required to write poems in class (not that I've ever been required to write provisions about having your heart touched yet I do anyway). I know poems don't have to rhyme, but I've always preferred it if they do - and I'm not fluid with rhymes. Call me a fool, but I've always found in simpler to write in proper sentences, run on lines that collect behind the other so quickly you barely have time to catch a breath. Maybe that's why people like poems - you have room to breathe. I don't write poems. I don't know how, and if I tried it would probably turn out shit.
Two.
Yet I insidiously write about you
All the time
In a form
That looks suspiciously like poetry
Three.
I have nice handwriting.
Four.
You'll never see it (again).
Writing it here instead of telling you because I no longer want to be your burden
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 || 1:59 PM
One of those days where everything that could possibly go wrong does. When you're losing what you thought was a firm grip on life (now you're struggling even to maintain a slippery grasp) and you look down while on public transport because you know that if you make eye contact with a solitary person, you WILL cry. The tears you're trying so hard to balance on the brim of your eyes will leave their brink and fall. People will stare - and you'll never forgive yourself for it.
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