2004 End of the Year Review

If I were to think about it, 2004 actually was not that great of a year for me. I mean, let’s face it, 2003 sucked big time, but 2004 wasn’t necessarily that much fun either. The reason why I’m coming to that conclusion now is because I’m trying to think of a song for Rememories 2004 that embodies my 2004 “feeling” and I am invariably coming up with depressing stuff.

The theme to Winter Sonata, for example, really does not conjure images of happy fairies prancing carefree, streamers in their hair waving turquoise in the soft breeze, dancing their rain dances in a bug-free forest. Images thrown into the subconscious silver screen may include cool tears rolling drop by drop in a painfully slow manner ceaselessly down the pale porcelain cheek of Yujin-na, female protagonist in said series.

Another song, You’re Not Here by Leehom Wong, sung in Mandarin in his almost plaintive tones, calls to mind a lonely evening spent staring out the window into the humid Hong Kong haze, wondering where my soul was hiding as renegade strands of smoke curled past the window frame to coalesce into the mist outside, already heavy with the stubbed out whorls of pensive smokers contemplating the night.

Drops of Jupiter by Train is the most upbeat yet, and I do feel that it fits in an ironic way. I needed a soul vacation since January 2003 but I never took one. That song reminds me of perhaps what I should have done, instead of filling my life chockfull of new stresses and complications to force out the need of dwelling on that minor chord reverberating relentlessly at my core.

I thought I was happy. Or perhaps, I kept myself busy with happy thoughts and lively activities so as to drown out the low murmurs of my soul’s melancholic discourse. The main problem was exhaustion. I think I was chronically tired from the lack of sleep built up since early 2003. I was tired of waking up every morning to the same nightmare that was my reality. Tired of going to bed knowing that I’d have to wake up to that dead feeling at the pit of my stomach again in the morning. Then awareness slipslided into general anesthesia and I effectively shelved my pain and neglected my grief, except I called it “moving on”. But was I moving on? Not really. I felt that same frozen sensation, where the habitat of your soul has transformed from a cozy duraflame lit, chenille thrown living room into the tiled, antiseptic waiting room of another body storage facility, be it hospital or morgue. Subzero temperatures required to retain the integrity of the body the soul’s left behind. Subzero temperatures holding me hostage in a moment of time I didn’t want to leave behind.

So that was 2004. One random experience after another, setting up a chain of completely unrelated incidents that made up my path of progress, juxtaposed by a chain of completely unrelated literature that made up my means of escape. I read a lot of books in 2004. Must have been 15-20 books I read. Almost all escapist in nature. And all that reading time was facilitated by my physical hopping around as well, traveling almost every single month out of the year either for personal or business reasons. Creating artificial pockets of alone time where I could curl up as best as economy class would allow and throw myself into an airplane featured movie or another complicated plot novel by Dan Brown.

My most prized accomplishment in 2004? The friendships that I’ve made, hands down, no doubt about that at all. I have made ten lifetimes of friendships in the past two years, and 2004 didn’t disappoint, with so many people that I am so lucky to have in my life. The million and one weddings. And two babies to top it off.

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Moments to remember...

January - Started the year off with the Jacknife Sugartruck gig at Amnesia on January 10th, playing the part of um…a 25 year old Avril Lavigne. Finally fulfilled dream of being a rockstar, can close that chapter now. Back to LA for Ryan’s first year anniversary. Decided in feverish state that it was time to leave LMN and look for less yellow pastures…thus leading me to the skittish frenzy of Finance.

February - Mellow, the hyperactive shih tzu, comes into my life, ringworm and all.

March - started a new job in finance, beginning of my friendship with St Barbara on the Chair day. Matt passes through town on his way to meet Sai Baba.

April - Best memory – In the Mood For Love party on Saturday, April 17. 40 or so close friends all decked out in 1962 gear for a memorable Chinese banquet. Jeremy with his mustache, Alan with his glass-less spectacles, Wilson with his comb over, Matt with his wig that everyone thought was real, Chris with his Afro, and all the beautiful cheung-sams on all the lovely ladies. So much love around the room. Cohibas at Peak Lookout with Brad and Eric.

May - Rememories 2003 published. June gets married!

June - Jenn's Taipei reception and Ros’ wedding at the St Regis Monarch Resort in Dana Point.

July - my brother and Trici get married on the 3rd. Anne’s wedding reception at the Grand Hyatt on July 11th.

August - Marc passes through town and we spend some quality time talking about everything. Tokyo for my first IPO drafting session, aka the Lost in Translation meetings.

September - Missed Kathryn’s wedding in Jackson Hole. :(

October - Missed Dave's wedding in North Carolina on the 9th. IPO in Tokyo. Once Upon a Halloween Eve party as the Fallen Angel Burning in Hell.

November - Totally depressing start of the month with Bush reelected on the 2nd. Excellent performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition amongst other pieces by UBS Youth Orchestra with a very pregnant Connie. Namkungs visit and have their terrible accident with the speakers at Grappa’s at Jardine House. Hawaii for Yidrienne’s wedding. MIT Sports Day with Rach, Sooly, Ed, Jean, Eliza, Mark, Julie, Kyle et al...woohoo!!

December - (Charlotte/NYC/Capetown) Xmas Eve Housewarming Toaster on the 24th at my house. Ed and Sooly’s with Rachel for Xmas dinner. Capetown for Helen’s wedding. And two babies born - Michael to Ros and Kurt, and Ashley to Connie and Tom.

Let us banish fear and guilt,
For guilt and fear are a waste of time,
Time for you, and time for me,
To fashion our own reality.

- "The Preludes", Joy Henrich Finnegan

Mercy - a poem for st. barbara

Mercy

The pain runs through you and through you
A fleet of overzealous electric eels,
Grazing every nerve ending rubbed raw
Over and over, Time’s relentless wheels

Me, a bystander, barely standing myself
From the invisible, intangible tidal waves
Pouring forth from your being
As you cry out to be saved

But who will show you mercy
In such an hour, such a state?
Will new prayers on bruised knees
Move the gods to undo fate?

How many sidelines must you share
For another withering friend?
How many bedsides must be graced
With tears that have no end?

If only these currents running through me now
Can siphon away tears from your sea,
Then I will form a million rivers
To channel your pain to me.

*14dec04*
(for st. barbara)

Hunger - a fragment

I’ve grown so comfortable in this place I’ve created for myself, surrounded by the fluffy down of memory. Walls of my cell lined with frames of you and I, interspersed between bookshelves overflowing with things-unsaid and things-that-maybe-should-have-been-said and things-that-would-have-been-nice-to-say. How can I take these pictures down, these photographs lodged into my being, the removal of which would be like a surgeon going in to the jugular for repairs? I would have to tear myself apart to tear myself away from you. Is it true that when people die they grab onto a piece of you on their way out, a piece which stretches across parallel dimensions like multicolored taffy? My multicolored taffy soul has stretched over a million miles of memory. A million miles of you.

It’s so sunny in this place, so warm and fuzzy without being itchy or uncomfortable like last winter’s sweater mistake. I could lie here forever, reading, rereading, writing and rewriting more and more volumes of imaginary conversations.

But there’s no food in this cell and I’m hungry. I know, it’s mundane. It’s not otherworldly, this hunger. But it’s true. The little “love” gremlin inside me has shriveled up, malnourished beyond recognition. This little monster is dying. It looks out of the bars it’s created for itself. Looks out at the Love Out There and knows its spindly arms cannot reach this coveted L.O.T. So it steps away from the bars, averts its eyes, slumps down onto the cement floor and raises its weary head, distracting itself with the frames, the multicolored frames on the walls until finally it falls asleep. The next day and the day after that. And now the monster, once chubby and burping out loud, has lost its chatter. No strength to grasp the bars and peer out anymore. Slowly the L.O.T. has become another frame, another memory, another distant non-reality. Another dream snuffed out of That Which Is Possible. And T.W.I.P. slowly recoils and begins to take the shape of the perimeter of this cell and its friendly shadows.

I never wanted to live this way. You know that, I know that. So what is stopping me from coming out of this cell, anyway? (In case you didn’t know, this cell is unlocked. The jailkeeper and the jailbird have conspired and merged.) I just can’t seem to tear myself away, just can’t seem to shake free of my taffy web, the more I twist and turn the further cocooned I’ve become in this sticky sweet, funhouse dream. Even I have drowned out my own muffled cries.

*08oct04*

Frozen - a fragment

I am caught in a time that only I can remember, because this time lives only in my memory, my memory and yours. But your memory is gone, dissolved away as you did not too long ago. And it wasn’t too long ago, was it, since the last time you reached out to swallow my hand in yours? Not too long ago, since we fell into a friendship that plunged into a romance, and sent me careening into a happiness I never knew could exist.

And then I was frozen. It happened in a millisecond, or 2.5 milliseconds as you would have put it. The air hangs still. You can almost see the frozen molecules clinging to one another, forming a quiet nothingness that preserves you lying there, and me standing here under two megatons of realization waiting to fall upon my head. I am afraid to exhale, to bring me into the next moment that follows this one: the moment in which you are pronounced dead.

I have been holding my breath for the past year and nine months. Sometimes I wonder if anyone notices. I like to pretend that they don’t, that they cannot have the intuition to know the difference between the me that walks around everyday, going about my business, and the popsicle me inside, dead amongst the living. No amount of warmth from the suns in all of the solar systems out there can melt it. The core of me lies dead with you, interred in a cement grave with a green plush pony, a high school varsity jacket, the biggest watch you’ve ever laid eyes on, a wallet with pictures of you and I (a double of which stands in my living room to this day), and an urn containing your ashes. What are ashes, anyway? Remnants of molecules, piles of atoms reconfigured, a desperate preservation of that which was you. But the dead are most finely preserved in memories. Memories from those who knew you that don’t necessarily correspond with others’ memories or with reality. Wayward, inconstant memories that deceive and give an approximation of truth, leaving the memory-addict wholly dissatisfied, frustrated in its evanescence, pissed off in its perversions, angry in its clarity, and ultimately, fiending for more.

I can live with your blue shadow forever, can’t I? There’s no compelling reason for me to join the rest of humankind, out there in the real world beyond the comforting chill of preservation. I used to abhor the cold, but now I look for love in its twilit corners. Swathed in indigo gauze, this world of you and I keeps me dead amongst the living.

It hurts to live this way. It hurts like when you are holding your breath underwater and your sinuses start to press in and the sockets of your eyes ache because your head is about to explode. It hurts like when someone dies on the news and you realize you can’t feel any sadness for it. It hurts like anticipating the dizzying but necessary pain you will get when you’re about to move an arm or a leg that’s fallen asleep. It hurts like all the pain you’ve ever felt in your whole life compacted into one heavy bullet lodged deep in your heart, all 2.5 megatons of which pull the whole of you down, down, downwards until you fall upon knees already bruised.

*07oct04*

Funny thing, grief... - a fragment

Grief is a funny thing. I wear it around my shoulders every day. Sometimes I flaunt it, a badge of honor for my emotional travails. Other times I draw it close, taking comfort in its familiarity. It doesn’t always match the other items I wear and most of the time it’s a clichéd black wool knit, although the tightness of the knit varies upon occasion. Mostly, the knit is tight.

I often wonder how many others I pass in the course of the day are wearing similar shawls. I suppose some wear veils instead, giving rise to vacant stares or spiderwebbing ‘round squinted eyes. Others perhaps have chain mail undergarments, imperceptible and impenetrable. But mine wraps around me where his arms once were, warms me in the night, my thin armor against the leftover world which barely understands, if at all.

I’ve constructed a special wool that’s non-itchy on the underside, but prickles any hand that tries to find a place upon these shoulders, separating us from them. This shawl allows for a particularly comfortable defensive position as I draw it close around me and clasp my hands upon my sternum, my heart safely defended from them.

*06oct04*

April

“April is always the cruelest month…”

The first tear always comes as a surprise,
Even when you feel your eyes well,
Your sinuses pressing in,
But that first splash upon your cheek always startles.
*19apr04*

I feel nothing, but in a weird, uncomfortable kind of way.
It’s like dead-air on a radio station.
*21apr04*