II:
The Trauma of Being Normal
Fast forward a couple of decades: aged twenty, I would try to be normal, a decision I blame no one but myself. Perhaps I did it to spite Her, to convince Her there was nothing ‘wrong’ with me. That I was not a series of made-up statements culled from psychological treaties on motherless children. Even if her narrative was inaccurate, my ‘act’ was equally as cruel, contrived, contriving. I decided to be normal to convince the world that I could change into anything. I, in a way, killed my soul in an act of spite, severing the connection between I, myself and world. I cut each layer of selfhood I had built so I lay a naked self defined by the new matriarch who would take over my life, demanding absolute obeisance.
During those times, I would try to mould myself into a shape that I thought was fitting. I would attempt to eat like a civilized person, to not put my legs up, or stretch or contort my body in distorted positions in order to think. I would rein in the limbs of my body so they were stock straight, under the control of a prim and clean-cut mind. However, my body would give itself away, the fingers and hands fidgeting uncontrollably, the mouth convulsing, emitting a string of confused syllables in a mixed tongue. I could, all the while, feel my godmother’s omnipotent gaze on my back, dissecting, ordering, putting into form everything that spilled out. She cut and shaped, trimmed and pruned till by the end of the first month, I hardly recognized myself.
But deep inside, I knew I hadn’t really changed. A fledgling of a soul remained like a seed, dormant in the deepest recesses of my soul. When I remembered my nature, I would feel grotesque, a monster unworthy of living filled with evil intentions, desiring only to consume all things into herself.
I remember, too, her voice in my ear. Much later, I would feel it at a distance as a soft pulsing, a minimal murmur like an electric wire transmitting a menacing whisper: you are not normal. There is something wrong with you. Something very, very wrong. I would internalize this voice, this voice telling me there was nothing special about me but my abnormality. That I was incapable, impossible, incompetent, unable to do the simplest things in life. My childhood would come rushing to me in a series of questions, redefining itself as the history of a rich, spoiled child unable to do anything for herself. My history would reconfigure itself again and again in my eyes under the flickering lights of another’s gaze, so that what I remember would be covered in sediment or worse: deleted, erased, leaving but a phantom trace on the template of my soul.
During those years, I would stop drawing. When I wrote, I wrote feverishly in jumbled prose- poetry that would spill out of me incoherent, malformed, grotesque and slimy with the freshness of subterranean soil. Language spilled from me like the discharge of a diseased person. I had to speak so I spilled forth words in the darkest corners of notebooks, scribbles of what my soul had deteriorated into, while outside I checked myself, put on normal clothes, attempted to be appear normal. I was deathly ashamed of this disjunction between internal and external: to what extent was I that which spewed from me, a sprawling mark incapable of being washed? Was this really my fate, to be a shadow, defined by a series of deletions?
Shut out from the world, my senses deadened. I saw only what was in front of me. What was inside convulsed out in a series of obscenities. I wrote, and I forgot what I wrote. I died, internally, a slow and painful death. My soul withered, my countenance deadened. Physically, I shrunk into a shadow of myself.
Recovery would come much later, when I was at the end of my wits. The life drained from my eyes as my body also shrunk. My previously healthy, pulsing body shrunk to a shell of its normal self. My vision turned in on itself so I saw nothing that was in front of me. Time broke down into a series of meaningless events that had no significance. The ecstasy I had always had in chasing down adventures, moments of communion, seeking others of my kind dissolved. I was a body taking up a space in a house that I was not welcome, parasitically consuming my host’s food. I was an excess lump of flesh like a malignant tumour. Insignificant, profane, abject.
...
I can’t say how I ended up from point A to point B, except to say that my life has been marked by a death every seven years, the death being of some part of my selfhood. If my life cycle were characterized by the passing of seasons, these seasons could be broken down into these 7 year intervals in which I would say: I was born, I lived, I died. I was reborn.
These semi-regular deaths would come inevitably like the cutting of a thread. Each tether tying me to a previous life would be cut suddenly, inexplicably. There would be impetuses, yes, like my attempt to be normal at twenty. At fourteen, it was my insatiable curiosity that drove me to uncover all layers that lay beneath reality; at seven, it would be my brother’s disappearance and my newfound isolation.
Each death came swiftly. The internal clock within my body stopped. I fell. I rose. I was carried beyond myself by some inward rhythm.
As such, one could say that all points lead up to this pivotal moment, wherein I feel, deeply, inexplicably, into a void. I died to myself, and then was borne upwards out of sheer necessity, because death was not an option: the chapter of my life remained stubbornly open, unable to be closed by the strongest of hands.
Of course, stating it like that would be an gross oversimplification, for it is much more complex than that.
Let me explain.
I believe that there there is a naturally derived imprint upon every soul. Each soul contains the semblance to a feature in the environment, be it urban or natural. Some people have cat-shaped souls (as I did), others had wolf souls. Rarer were tree souls (one), and others had the impression of human features: a mask, unyielding to outside penetration, defined by an implacable smile.
Each soul leaves a trace upon whatever space it passes by, which is why sometimes cities feel so haunted, because time has happened on it like an electric shock, sending shivers and waves down its spine so spaces reverberate with the memory of past generations of selves who have passed and inhabited those spaces. History is embedded in spaces. All places are haunted. In a city like Singapore where time is accelerated, and everything seems to be hurtling into a seemingly ecstatic future, space is doubly dense, the result of the convalescence of traumatic past and euphoric present.
Also, each soul emanates a certain energy. When I place my hand to my heart, I can feel threads linking me to other people, to objects dear to me. When I think of God or the possibility of a universal creator, I feel my whole soul being drawing out of itself . Each bond is unique, individual, distinct. Each person I meet emits a certain aura, but this emanation is stronger than being a simple vibration. Sometimes, I am intoxicated by the aura of a person so that all I want to do is to bath in their presence, to rein them to myself. To see them within me. Some call this attraction, but I call it alchemy that ignites an obsessive zeal.
Similarly, each soul has a cycle. The person I became and the person who I was are not the same, although we share the same name, the same history, even the same face. However, my face now also has all my past selves buried underneath it. With each death, a part of me disappears forever, unretrievable. Every seven years, I die to myself. A whole dimension of selfhood passes onto oblivion, leaving me bereft. Every seven years, I am thrust into a black hole. Sometimes, I am born upwards immediately, as if by an angel. Sometimes, I cause my own death and it is I, too, who will have to journey into the underworld in order to fetch my self back.
This Orpheus journey is both successful and not, for I gain a new self, but I lose the past one forever. I am, in a way, recycled within myself, a soul drowned, whinged, and laid out to the new scorching sun.
And that is the shape of it.
....
A detour, perhaps, back into the past.
At age fifteen, the fear stopped. Abruptly, it fled me like the draining of blood so I became fearless. That was the gift that my new life gave me. What filled that void was an insatiable curiosity, a deep-seated passion that would run through my body as though I were filled with liquid metal.
What ignited this was actually a decision I had made to stop losing energy I was expending by exhausting myself with the drama at home. At some point, I had decided: enough. And I had let that cord go. And I felt an inexhaustible, relentless freedom.
At that time, a door closed too. I remember the feeling of that: as if, the previous chapters of my life had fallen away from my hands and now belonged to another person. I remember the fear, the falling, the feeling of doom. But this fear wasn't the sublime fear of bottomless night that I previously had, but a new type of fear: the fear of what was to come, of the unknown, of things unseen.
And deep within, I was thrilled by this prospect of new being.
At this time, I was partners-in-crime with my best friend, and I dragged her around on adventures numerous: through the neighbourhood I lived in full of surreal, dark bungalows cloaked in trees and night, through the playground that seemed to contain a sky limitless and swings to throw your heart to the wind. We talked for hours and nights till the dawn came, and I chased everything I was curious about with the zeal of a newborn being who had nothing to lose.
I got into 'trouble', although to say 'trouble' is to define it by normal, human conduct, which is in itself very reductive. I did not break any rules; I was more interested in seeing what I was capable of exploring, of becoming, of finding. My parents became abstracted figures in this picture, and I don't remember their presences but as puppet masters who tried to reign me in by the strings through abstracted gestures, but failed.
I was into the supernatural at that time, but not of the kind you would think. My house was haunted, and I was absorbed in pursuing the mystery of it, and so I did. This was one of my missions, and one of many other adventures I would embark upon. All this filled me with a newfound purpose, and I felt myself communing with the universe. I talked to it frequently. We had an intimate relationship in which I spoke my wishes and it responded. I was a child gleeful of my newfound power. I sang and danced and spoke my words like magic spells, each an evocation, a selfish wish.
Yet, I could also feel the clock ticking. It would all end, I knew. The relentless spilling of time was always there, in the backdrop, reminding me that this would not last. That at some point, the stage would break away, again, revealing the skeleton of time, its imposition declaring: this, too, will end. Live fast while you can. This will end.
At this time, I took pictures of everything I knew: my house, my neighbourhood which I knew like the back of my hand, my school of air and light, my friends. I took pictures as a person would who knew her time would soon be over, and hence was adamant to etch everything into the memory plates both in her head and into the contents of a photo album. Here was where my obsession with preservation begin: if I could take a picture of it, it would not disappear. I could feel it as it was, I was capturing its soul. So was my reasoning.
Sure enough, like the chiming of a death bell, the time came when my father told me we were moving to Vancouver, and the fact of it sank in my heart like a stone through a deep pond. Here, another ending. Another chapter to assimilate. Another thrust into time and space into a dimension unknown, propelled not by my own free will but by the omnipotent hand of my father.
I had remembered Vancouver: a land cold, devoid of spirits. I had remembered it from my visit at ten, and it chilled me that a place could exist that did not speak to me, nor respond when I cried into its belly for a response. Here was the personification of my deepest fears: to be unheard, to be unknown to. I touched its soul and it looked at me with the cold eyes of an ambivalent ancestral spirit. My soul swelled up with a perpetual refrain that soon became its continuous stutter: No, I don't want to be here.
After a couple of years, I went crazy. I tried to see the connections that I had previously seen during my time in Singapore, but the connections were tenuous. I shrunk into a well of unfinished sentences and weathered, taped-through logic. I wrote feverishly into high school notebooks wet by rain, I took frequent long walks into the forest trying to extort from it a semblance of an answer and all this time, it bit me back. I felt coldness, and soon, the coldness seeped into me as I felt my head melt deeper and deeper into a land where there was no boundaries but corners and walls and the only indication of the future was in the shape of an enclosure, closed in upon itself, secure but foreboding.
And this was when I left for Montreal, aged eighteen, seeking my fortune. Anywhere but here.
And that was how I made another long journey away from myself. A journey would take another seven years to complete the cycle in order for me to return back, but that's a story for another time.
~
