Do not mistake aloofness for airiness, else all breathing should escape the body. Too easy to confuse on account of its proneness to evanesce which some regard akin to forgetting. She doesn’t capitulate to any of this, knowing all the rest has merely been a bundle of niceties. There are more important things to reason with. Reason, now there’s a funny thought, what good is reason for groping around the dark? Therapists have a rather annoying habit of being right or making the totally obvious sound illuminating. Switch on a light, they say, as if it’s so easy to be in an empty room naked with your feelings. Your hands find each other; one of them swivels the ring on your finger that you bought for yourself. Noting that it’s looser that day than any of the others before it you realise it’s autumn, maybe winter, it’s getting cold. A memory from around this time last year enters and passes through the body, a material thing, with heft and girth. Piles of leaves do better, scattered by hasty passersby that scowl if the streets do not immediately clear for them. The streets look flustered, something about pathetic fallacy and a sensation. Maybe joint pain. Maybe broken porcelain. Arrangements in white are not just for wedding table settings. I won’t make it tonight, especially after having done a hatchet job with my alibi. You, and others, painfully self-evident incompatibilities. Colourless functions of time and space. We had to tell her, really. And in the end, it didn’t work out. What didn’t? The mowing of grass and your lilting pleas and stumbling around the freeway’s left flank into soft verges. You ask me with whom I am commiserating tonight, and I say with myself. Others have predilections like a tendency to the superlative, mine is a maladapted realism, fleshly pleasure and the all-too-frequent numbing of it under the pretence of communing. I think this as I walk brusquely past people charged with the pains of hanging on to their possessions. And the leaves scatter. I know I’m not one of them, I lose everything from scarves to a means of forgiving, things that don’t even belong to me. Because everything slips away eventually, even the soul from the body, ask the hole dug like a newborn’s cradle. Ask it, it won’t be as witty nor as morose as the epitaph that will be written by somebody close who completely misunderstood you. A hand in a too-big glove. All this cannot cater to the expense of living and then there’s that awkward you-shaped hole left for others to experience only in negativity and, either never speak of again, or talk about incessantly to their therapist with pathos. Others study you for impending disaster. There is no disaster, only superimpositions of scale, determining factors, ways of reading how and when fortune can be expected. A bluer sky than yesterday’s, the stepfather that is more sympathetic than he was before, and who you thought might never grow to love you and trust me, he won’t. But that’s inertia, the inability to stop it or to help it. Falling over yourself still has a forward trajectory though. Nothing ostentatious or with life warranty, only the body on temporary loan. Leveraging the family insurance policy and then feeling defeatist about the financialization of life, as it were. Only atrophied spirit takes the form of a punctured birthday balloon, the very one her stepfather paid the extra dollar for, it was clear and held a sad bit of plastic confetti, kind of sparkly. It’s a gesture. Splintered light and wrung shadows, and we’re back to the light switch again. Her only mistake is that she wished too hard for the lightest of impressions to leave an indelible mark, for hunger to feel see-through and need to feel like less like solipsism. Heartbreak or fiction, she stows it away. She no longer questions why asymmetries produce a suite of emotions that cause the internal organs to hurt.

A prose-poem by Elaine M.L. Tam