Dear Time Traveller,
This blog was started on 10 April 2011. Happy decade years old! I will dust you off and write more often.
Welcome to Checkpoint May 2021. We’ve just reentered our second Circuit-Breakerish… Thing. We cannot dine-in, group sizes are 2 pax and you can’t visit Ping’s House.
You have a den in Pasir Ris. Mom is living there, and Ah Po is temporarily staying there with Moe, the helper, as well.
They’re staying there because of how the toilet in Ah Po’s house was gonna be renovated. The noise would apparently be too much for Ah Po, but I’m just realising that her hearing is terrible anyway. Ah Gong is still staying at Jurong.
Ah Po has been discharged for about a week already. She fell down for the millionth time, and she has a huge baluku above her right eye.
It sounds funny, but internal bleeding has dyed parts of her skin dark brown. Beyond that, she’s doing good. Hard-headed bb.
Mom looks frail as shit. She had diabetes and lost half her weight over a few months, in 2019. Sometimes, your numbness switches off for a brief moment and you tear up at how poor mom looks now.
You are learning how to draw boundaries between you and Mum. Whenever you turn Mum down, you flare up in anger, which you can now see is the only way you’ve learnt how to tell her to maintain boundaries.
You still experience tremendous guilt when you do so, and would abandon yourself just to help her be happy.
Last night, you had a nightmare where you yelled at mom, “WHY DID YOU TELL ME THAT?” and she wouldn’t look at you. She would duck and weave and hide and you would briskly walk after her, sobbing, yelling so hard your vocal cords turned to mush, yelling blood out of your mouth, bits of flesh falling everywhere.
You took mom out for a meal, one off-in-lieu, at Muji Cafe. When dad picked her up and she went back home, you wept openly at the Hai Di Lao benches in Plaza Sing, because, for the first time in decades, you saw Mum as the loving presence that she represented.
You are still working with Dude, on Photo Pose, a game where you have to do poses which a Kinect sensor will capture. You have to then match the poses you did before, as many times as possible, within a minute.
Your company still only has two immersive rooms: one of them is at Geylang, but the client company you worked with ordered 2 more for future nursing homes.
You discovered that your discontent with your boss’s style is possibly a problem with your working attitude, maybe it would help you if you shelved your ego for a little.
You weren’t angry at his micromanagement, you were afraid that you would be exposed as a shit employee and a shit person.
Rory and you have started talking again. She’s the girl you had a will they won’t they with, and you have both exited a texting hiatus since November 2020, where you asked her “what are we”, after you met at Ginett.
She said “nothing”, and you explained to her that you “Transcended Love”, which is a really incelly way of explaining how you understood what “Love is a choice” meant.
It feels like you guys are playing games on who cares less than the other about hanging out.
You don’t know the answer, but recently she’s been asking if you were both “good”, and you realised that you have been not very honest with her the whole time.
You are doing better now on that front, by responding whenever you would respond to anyone else, instead of buffering replies.
Your best friend is seeing this other guy. It still isn’t easy, but you have realised today that your pain isn’t wrought from false love, but purely from abandonment.
You are afraid that you would stop being important to her. Her words still resonate in your mind, “you know I still care about you, right?”
You still feel shame that these feelings still linger after 2 years and you would give anything for the times when you saw her as nothing but a bean who’d text “hi” after weeks of not replying to you.
But you understand that there is a tragedy in life where there is no going back to how things were; the only way is forward.
It hurts less every time, you think.
You are still a single virgin; you fear sometimes that 27 is a bit too late.
You wish you could have your years back to fuck up, because then it would be because you were immature.
But now you don’t really get to use that excuse, and it scares you.
You share a room with your brother, but if dad joins mom in Pasir Ris, you get their huge bed. It’s not a divorce thing, the season parking just can’t be transferred easily.
You suspect dad kind of wants space from mom’s incessant demands too, but is using this as an excuse.
You still write letters to Sophie.
You share Spotify, Netflix and Disney+.
You can make Kombucha.
You still aspire to make that webcomic, but first, you have to finish that second tarot card.
You are currently editing episode 5 of But Not Boring. XM is burnt out and can’t help. Sometimes you wish she wasn’t, but you understand she’d show the same compassion to you.
You have a Surface Pro 7.
Your game of the month is still The Binding of Isaac, but the Repentance DLC.
Wisdom teeth are getting extracted next Monday. Your keloids still hurt.
You worked out two days ago and your abs still hurt, so bye bye daily workouts.
You are watching Wendi perform in Three Sisters tomorrow.
They have an antigen rapid testing thing, and your Tracetogether app said that you may have possibly been exposed to two different COVID-19 patients, and hopefully you aren’t a spreader.
Love,
Shao 2021
Leave a Reply