Invalid DateTime
I’ve been publishing on the web for the last 12 years. It was because I wanted to write and publish on the web that I learned to look under the hood and build things. Which is why I do what I do now.
This is a list of stuff over the last 12 years.
2003: Stupid and heartbroken at 18
An Exercise of Faith
X Weeks of Not Missing You
Two Weeks
2004–2005: OMG, I’m gay? Coming out and being ok
The Eight Ages of a Woman
Release
Excavation
Roundtable
Incandescent
2006: Starting to see the world
Arts and Lies, And
Other Mornings in Other Places
Why I Am Still A Feminist
Amar Shonar Bangla
Portraits Unphotographable
A Bus and Chai Story
2007: Finding my place in the world
Hungry Asian Woman
Sudder Street
Chasing the Monsoon
2008: Home is Singapore, KL, Bombay and Jakarta. Sometimes On a Boat. It Still Is.
My City
Peanut Butter, This What?
The Country Codes My Girlfriend and I Have Known
Bombay Burning
2009: Death at Home. Life On The Road in the Middle East (for a year)
And All the Roads That Lead You There are Winding
Ah Gong and I
There’s Always Chicken Curry at Funerals
And the Living is Easy
The Torino Express
You Asians Have Two Stomachs
Two Hundred and Nine
Strange Damascus Memories
2010–2011: Domesticity & Autorickshaw Races
We Have No Dungarees, Saar
The Great Southern Trunk Road
Lakewood
A Drinkable History of My Family
2012: The Saddest Year + Going to The Nordics, Hungary and the USA
Taj Mahal Foxtrot
The Years of Living at High Velocity
Wilderness TV
The Road Less Ridden
The Places We’ll Go
Departing Thoughts
Boomerang
63Random
Left & Leaving
2013–2014: A Slow Recovery Back in Singapore
Before & After the Fire
Love, Singapore (the one about lesbian dating in Singapore)
The One About Having It All
Over & Over
74 Weeks Later
Another List of Things
I Follow Cities
An Indian Decade
Rebuilding
Don’t Lugi Be Happy
The Geography of Hope
What I Learned
Video Games & Political Consciousness
Singapore’s So-Called Moral Majority
2015: I turn 30, and I am still on the road but something has changed
To the Mountain
From Manhattan to Myanmar
A Tale of Two Cities
Two Pairs of Pants
Mee Lay
Split Language Disorders
The Manual of Intimacy
I’m Over Here
Invalid DateTime
First, meet a girl for the first time on the lawn in front of her house. Sit very closely by each other. Say hello, I'm a poet. What do you do?
When she replies, I'm an entrepreneur. But I also run a charity. Laugh, and give her whisky, the same one that you've been nursing.
She comes and she gives you a cigarette, and it makes you feel like she's looking out for you. But really, she's just gone into her house to meet your mutual friend to ask in all seriousness, so… does she like women… at all?
That friend laughed a little. And did not have an answer.
She went back out to the lawn to give you another cigarette. And a bourbon. Woodford Reserve. So good, so smooth, all 72% corn, 18% rye and 10% malt. There was 10% of her that paused and said, this is a very good idea. There was 18% of you that stopped for a second and thought, what is going on?
There was all 72% of the man sitting across from you, all love and all happiness and all he wants to marry you, now.
She went away. She came back. She went away again. You told her: you are worried about how much you like her. Because you are going to hurt her. She did not believe you. She said she did not care because this was just going to be fun, that she also wasn't ready for anything more.
You believed her.
You met her at a bar when she got home, right after she got off a plane. She waited two hours for you when you sent him off. She was happy to see you. She held your hand, and you said: hey, you're holding my hand. You brought her to the river and showed her your favourite spot. You tried to be chaste. She tried harder. She went away again.
When you saw each other again, it was the end. It was the start of the end of the beginning. But you already told her that.
As though telling someone that you're going to break their heart, makes it any better when you do. As if telling someone all the ways in which you are broken, cuts any less when you cut them.
And then when you have her completely under your spell. Tell her that you love her. Tell her that you care for her. But you care for him more.
You're sorry, you love her so much. But. You asked her, is there a but? After she said she loved you too? She said-pensively-no. But there really was one.
Come over one day and find her worried and afraid, at home, alone. Tell her that you haven't stopped thinking about her. Tell her that you love her. Tell her that you love her so much that when you sleep with him, you can't stop thinking about her.
Then go back to him and tell her, this isn't a competition, Adrianna.
December 26, 2003
Some weird poetry from 2003, when I was a wee child.
two weeks before
and the morning after
all that mattered was not what really happened
where it brings us now, or what a gamble
we'd just taken.
It was you planting your signature hasty goodbye
sweetie on my cheeks in the elevator just before
the doors opened to my morning; and I would
step out to the tune of one bewitched.
It was you seeking out my lips under those
sheets, in the dizzy assurance of one who never
gave much thought to all that
she said; about as clueless as I was,
But at least I never pretended to know any better, and
even came out to the truth that morning brought.
two weeks later
and a headache after
all that matters is not what games we played
what games played us, or which part of you
I saw through.
It is coarseness lingering over still fresh wounds
threatening to persist in the spite of me dumping
them in pungent saline thinking it might remove
each vestige of my guilt.
It is your image cruising over my nightscape
explaining, in the manner I knew best, how
once you were done with me these would be
all you'd leave me with.
I ought to have listened, somewhere in the interim
of that morning and this night, but tried too hard
at mending the chasm between my yes and your no.
two weeks later
and a heartache after
who can say for sure what games we played?
all that matters is not the end heralding your
beginning, but the beginning receiving my end.
It will be me seeking a closure you were too selfish to grant,
calming a present lover's fears, being the pawn
in this game of which I was co-creator;
taking danger by its horns yet scarcely daring
to hazard a breath, for it may conjure your illusion.
two weeks later, and a mourning after
it will be me claiming your scalp, not that
I care much for victory or vague triumph: only
in hastening the signature dawn of a second morning.