At Home: Living

This series of prose and poems were written for an installation presented as part of the Singapore Night Festival 2022, titled "At Home - Meditations on Love" by artist Mariel Chee. Beyond those contexts, these works can be read as reflections across the spaces indicated; cues to find new meaning in the familiar or stretch into the feelings and questions that already exist.

I had moved back from living in a hostel to living in my family home for some years now, but the experience stays more-or-less the same. My room is my own. And beyond: some degree of foreignness, a stranger in a strange land –

The television muttering a language meant for no one;

the couch a yawning expanse that all things moved to fit around it;

coffee table drawers with things buried for so long they calcified and became invisible;

months of newspapers stacked because you said that I needed to know what was going on in the world, but what I knew and what you knew were very different things -

I did not know for instance, where the remote control and magazines could be found nor how anyone could mistake fear for common sense

You did not know how I could be so sure that I have found what I’m looking for, why I could risk so much comfort for something so immaterial

– But now with nowhere else to go, there was proximity. And proximity did not breed familiarity, just intensity. And intensity bred all kinds of things too fast, too soon. What I did not love, I hated all the more. What you did not understand, you cared even less for. The days were long with little explosions that gave way to a silence that wraps around the room like a bubble, and clings to every surface. So that when we spoke, we spoke into the air. And words did not lead to communication did not lead to communion – they evaporated and all we were left with was the bitter taste of saying things too fast, too soon.

One day you came home with curry puffs – the kind we both like: thin and flaky on the outside but warm and generous on the inside – and set them on the coffee table. They were meant for both of us, you said. You bought more than you needed to as usual, and I was too full to eat more than one, but I said that was okay. The television that day was showing an old Hong Kong drama – the one about a cranky gifted chef who learns to love. I recognised it as I recognised sitting in myself 20 years ago watching the same show with you, feeling the same assuredness and wonder. I made a joke about the show; you laughed softly.

Are you learning to be patient, am I learning to be kind?

The dry June wind blows through the living room once more, scooping up in corners and unreachable surfaces the dust that has settled. All that has evaporated becomes a drizzle that falls like grace into where things find their place. And on an afternoon where you are watching a show you understand and I’m eating a snack I like; maybe this is where we will find our place.