like dew to the pasture

Now I see, I mean really see, why people are deathly afraid of being alone. To be alone is to spend time with yourself, to live with this self, to get to know this self.

Solitude flings open that proverbial Johari’s window no one else could access. It could be a terrifying thing uncovering what’s inside that forbidden, foreboding window. You become intimately acquianted with the delicate neurotic workings of your mind. You hear its cogs turning; you are confronted with the rattling discovery — they’re not as well-oiled as you’ve always thought or believed (Aha!)

The walls here are thin,wafer-thin. I can hear the obese girl (but not morbidly so) as she attempts to turn, ever so slowly, so as not to make the bed creak. In room 234 someone is reciting the Vagina Monologues to herself in hushed tones (so no one hears, or so she hoped). Across the hall there’s an Indian nurse lighting her incense (I hear the matchsticks flick), and I am quite incensed (the reek seeps thru my door). Further down the other end of this eerie old floor, a woman is weeping. I wonder about her secret sorrows..then remember she’s a mental health patient from neighbor Hutt Hospital.  What demons tormented her? Or was it only this sullen, sinister hostel with its cavernous corridors, its compact compartmented rooms (isolated prison cells), its wafer-thin walls, that drove her to the brink?

Such muted sounds carrying over, this overheard tin lamp and its sallow yellow light, my normalizing clutter, my own breathing. Would my sanity be as friable? I am hyperaware of my equilibrium, how precarious it could be. I am near convinced this gray structure, this 5-storey 50 year-old shell might’ve been designed specifically to unhinge the psyche, down to the last rickety beam. How many others stopped short (or didn’t) of hurling themselves out (there’s always the square exit, seductive,convenient) to escape this asphyxiating space, to flee from the unhinging?

Already the hairs on my forearm are turning priapic; already I could feel the core of me fragmenting, in this room where the air is stale with my presence. If I don’t get out, get sunlight, I will drown in this room, choked by this self.

So tomorrow then. Tomorrow I will kick my legs hard and surface.    I will pounce on some fellow loner, engage in some inane human interaction.

We will talk about the weather. 

Friends: 0

Prospective Crumpet: Zilch

Cash-Flow: Nil

Sense of Direction: Kaput

Foot bunion:  3

Western Union: 1 (where the hell is it?!)

It is near evening and I walk this foreign streetpath with nary a friend, without a cent to my name. The cold bites. I am not used to this nippy air, not used to walking along deserted streets with immaculately manicured lawns lined by beguiling begonias. All I hear is the steady click-clocking of boots (mine, Guangdong-made).   I exhale and watch my breath as the 7degrees C forms it into little streams of foggy white. I pretend I’m a chugging Hogwarts train toot-tooting along in a leisurely pace headed to, uhm, no place in particular. One has to entertain oneself to survive a day like this.

I know no one here and no one here knows me. It could be that I don’t exist! It’s a curious sensation, the feeling of no-oneness. So this is how it’s like to be a ghost. No wonder those creepies get a kick out of haunting the living — to be a ghost is remarkably unsettling.  To float like gossamer through Windy Willy is unsettling.

It would be dark soon. If this Casper don’t find her bearings quick she could end up pretty literally dead. The word bereft tails me, trying to insinuate itself. I refuse to have it tagging along, I stomp it down with all the violence my synthetic sole could muster. I think of all the familiar faces back home. 4,672 miles north-west from here are people who knew me and know I am alive. This moment they are thinking of me, missing me, praying for me, wishing me to be safe and happy. 4,672 miles notwithstanding, I feel the wave of their collective karmic energies lift and sustain me.

I draw strength from this love.

I am bone and flesh and indomitable spirit and I exist.

I will  master this strange land.

(but first, gotta find bloody Pilmuir Street)

Of the manifold forms rejection can present itself, none is so mortifying as this.

It could’ve been covert and underhanded; a sly succession of half-truths and white lies systematically building up into increments of connect-d-dots logic, gently guiding you to that one obvious conclusion. A steady stream of evasions and prevarications thinly veiling the ostensible impalatable. A cunning creeping stealth, a quiet merciful exit.

Instead it was neither discreet nor disguised. That the aggrieved is deemed undeserving of even subtle deception seems most damning of all. That the body can rebel so,  such that the mind could not restrain its somatizing and the recoil becomes unvolitional, almost reflexive, it is unthinkably unkind.

Psychic tension/insurmountable anxiety/an uber-sensitive constitution/quarter-life uncertainty/emotional ambiguity/an issue of identity: a hosts of all-too-convenient excuses to explain away the plain incorrigible.

"How simple it is, she thinks. No deep meanings, no secret truths,no buried mysteries. All was simple, all on the surface."

And it was this simple. You weren’t disconcertingly sub-normal nor utterly repellent — just inconsequential.

And while it is tempting to regress to that old reclusive rancorous self — that safe shunning haven — you find that you can wait till things tide over. You wait for the "cokestorm" to subside.

Afterall it is not a crime. A waste of time maybe, but definitely not a crime.

I lifted my gaze towards the horizon and marveled as I watch it change its capricious hues. The sun, forlorn, bids the world farewell as it slowly, stealthily stole away, fleeing from my sight. Then I struggle to look as far as my eyes could see and behold before me Your breathtaking work – the limpid stillness of the ocean, the grace of birds in circling flight, the glorious sunset. All these you made. All these you proffered before this undeserving.

Before me spreads proof of your immense power, the infinitesimal greatness, the grand promise I could never quite fathom. Here lies all beauty that at once terrifies and stills me. Your ways, strange as they are, heals, enfolds, then wounds.

I dip my hands in the crystal waters and tried to clasp it by my palm for a brief moment. I saw myself reflected there, a perfectly deflected imperfection, illumined by the dying embers of the setting sun. And all seems well in the world.

Yet like always, contentment and constancy are no unsevered twins to me. Faithless as I am, the magic fails when the lights dim. Once the curtains are drawn over, I see no more. Water is just water, and life surrenders to a stultifying sea of ordinariness. I lost you and I lost me amidst the perfunctory and mundane – of keeping things together, the leaden weight of little worries and hollow concerns.

And I gradually lose hold of the sublime.

Yours is a love imperceptible and subdued, I demand  definition. I am blind to your little bursts of radiance, I exact concrete deliverance. My senses fail me, I know no substance beyond these temporariness of forms.

You are subtle, I do not feel you. You are too quiet, I forget you are there.

it’s been awhile since my last mind-numbing, limb-bending, adrenaline-pumping toxic stint.

the side-perks & privileges (no matter how deservedly earned) of "seniority" in our unit never quite sat well with me. i think that somehow (and this is true even in other aspects of life), having it easy lulls you to complacency, breeds in you a fall sense of hubris, & deceives you into believing that you are a demi-god of uber competency. this is why i don’t really mind much when i get swamped with ‘toxic’ cases. because the experience can be at once humbling & self-affirming, with all its gory glory. it reminds you that you are flawed, and also that you are capable of so much more than you give yourself credit for. so i tell myself.

after a long stretch of humdrum duty, i had another taste of the ICU extra-extra challenge d other day. Chua, Suan* gave me a mega-dose of ‘clinical chaos’, coming in septic & virtually unresponsive to any & all medical tricks my harassed MROD could conjure. Hypotensive? Fast drip 10 liters of IVF!! (hyperbolically speaking) haha. What can I say, our mds. are fluid-challenge junkies. Minutes later I see cutesie pink frothy stuff happily bubbling up & down my ET tube. Yahu, pulmonary edema is that yu?!! Dang.

The cardiac monitor is set such that the screen icons turn red when parameters turn abnormal. My entire monitor is ALL glowing red, vermillion scarlet rouge, red-eyed monster,redness redness everywhere.. Sauron Sauron is that you? Lintek.

HR 160s, I push Adenosine like Flash would, flipped up Suan’s mottled arm & flushed & flushed & feel quite smug about my exceptional technique…nothing happened. The OC in me worried. Did I get it in in less than 3 seconds? is my iv out? is this a fluke? a joke?

And Rody Sy is watching. His sharp, chinky eyes watching, watching the transpiring of nothing.

My patient will die. Or I might.

I tell myself that this too would end. And it did. Soon enough. Chua, Suan is dead and left me a vicious viscous green (Pseudomonas, Klebs,Alpha-Strep, who knows) souvenir to remember him by.

  *patient confidentiality teeheee