"Stop it! Stop IT! NOOOOO!!!"
"I want to smell! I want to smell your flesh! I want to smell your flesh!!"
"YOU FUCKING FREAK OF NATURE!"
Pause.
"You know, that pretty much epitomises our relationship. You vaguely threaten physical harm and I distrust you when you say you're not going to physically harm me."
I won't be wearing a wedding gown for my wedding, but in an alternate universe where I am not only wearing a wedding gown but am also tall, I can sort of see myself killing and/or dying for one of these:
"I'm ok with him as a human being. I'm not ok with him as... a person who talks."
It's just hit me that I've been having a lot of conversations lately about friends and friendships. But I suppose I've been having these conversations all my life, ceaselessly. Forming, strengthening, breaking, re-forming alliances. You never really grow out of it. I suppose you can't.
Friendship really depends on timing. We might have made great friends in primary school but if we met today we wouldn't like each other. Two years ago I thought you were brilliant, today I find you obnoxious and tiresome.
It's probably a good thing that we all drift apart from time to time. In those spaces when our friendship is at rest, you get to be an emo wrist-slasher while I take up an internship at the UN.* And then we'll move on to other pursuits, and by the time we reunite, we'll both have changed enough to once again be perfect company for each other.
Of course not all drifting away is so cloud-like. There are always those harassing moments when one of us is struggling against the drift. I am hurt and don't understand why you don't want to be my friend anymore, or I don't want to be your friend anymore, but I don't know how to break up the relationship without any drama or hurt.
But even these conflicts perhaps we should all be grateful for. Without them to bitch about, what would we talk about to our friends?
To be continued.
* This is, as you know, a hypothetical scenario. In real life, I am more likely to be the one between us slashing my wrist through kohl-stained tears, if anything.
(Also, thanks to Cheow for inspiring the post header, if you're reading this.)
Our day today was lightened, if that is the way to put it, by a visit from Ms Vavasour's friend Bun, who joined us for Sunday lunch. I came upon her at noon in the lounge, overflowing a wicker armchair in the bay window, lolling as if helpless there and faintly panting. The place where she sat was thronged with smoky sunlight and at first I could hardly make her out, although in truth she is as unmissable as the late Queen of Tonga. She is an enormous person, of indeterminate age. She wore a sack-coloured tweed dress tightly belted in the middle, which made her look as if she had been pumped up to bursting at bosom and hips, and her short stout cork-coloured legs were stuck out in front of her like two gigantic bungs protruding from her nether regions. A tiny sweet face, delicate of feature and pinkly aglow, is set in the big pale pudding of her head, the fossil remains, marvellously preserved, of the girl that she once was, long ago. Her ash-and-silver hair was done in an old-fashioned style, parted down the centre and pulled back into an eponymous bun... She really is of a prodigious bulk. I thought that if her belt buckle were to fail and the belt snap her trunk would flop into a perfectly spherical shape with her head on top like a large cherry on a, well, on a bun.
-- The Sea, John Banville
John Banville always demands to be re-read.
Me: How do you braise chicken?
TR: What she just did.
Me: (Glares.)
TR: What?! I can't think of a clearer way of explaining what braising is.
Me: You know, on cooking shows, the chefs explain what they're doing verbally, they don't just cook and expect the audience to know what's going on.
TR: Yeah, but they're usually talking about their lives! "When I was in Bulgaria, my mother and father... Ok, now add some sugar. So you know, when I was raped..."
Why hasn't anyone started a line of perfumes that smell like food?
I, for one, would like to smell of roti kirai, on those days that I feel warm and maternal and want to come home early so I can cook and bake for my little Russian. On weekends I would smell of crepes, and we would have breakfast all day.
I want to smell of bread pudding when I'm out with my friends, so they will feel nice and hungry and talk to me, talk talk talk about every detail of their lives and I can soak it all into my puddingness like rum, or let it wash over me like vanilla sauce.
At work I would smell of coffee. Everybody would want to be my best friend and people would come to me for answers.
And on days I want people to stay away, I would smell of mint ice cream, cold and biting. Or curry. Nobody messes with curry.
I've been wanting to blog this but never got around to it:
Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to say "My hotcakes are no longer hot." You will be proud to know that I seized it.
...Yes, this was what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
There were things of course the boy that I was then would not have allowed himself to foresee, in his eager anticipations, even if he had been able. Loss, grief, the sombre days and the sleepless nights, such surprises tend not to register on the prophetic imagination's photographic plate.
-- The Sea, John BanvilleOn all sides there were portents of mortality. I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.
So much for never writing again.
It's occurred to me that the last time I felt blissfully happy, without a care in the world, was on the second day of our Halong Bay jaunt. It was morning, we'd just woken up, I opened the door of our tiny room on the boat and the first thing I saw was Xai's smiling face, and the second thing I saw was that there was a giant cliff right in front of me, and we were sailing by it.
And Xai said "I was just about to knock on your door!"
And it hit me again, I am on a boat and I just woke up to a sea breeze and a giant cliff passing by and my friend Xai whom I haven't seen in a year. It was kind of magical.
That was two days before my grandmother was hospitalised, three days before the Russian almost died (such a simple shorthand, that is, "almost died", which I'm really overusing to the point of meaninglessness) and about a month before I started going mad.
We're both slightly depressed, two people who are supposed to be pre-nuptially, annoyingly happy. Well I suppose it's as auspicious a sign as any that I'd rather be miserable with him than anyone else.
