Alien Landscape

a sign fell on the silent children

had a melancholic busride over to the east. only just reached home still in dirty clothes and sweating from too much human contact in one day.

when i still lived in the old block, i used to stare out of the window of my room for hours, talking to michael and having conversations with oblivious passers by. what i remembered very well was the big concrete octagonal dome like thing perched at the side of the beginning of the highway. i used to imagine up a lot of things from that dome. it was suspended in the air by stone pillars so i always thought of it as a giant slide for special chosen children. i would stare at it for long moments and imagine silent children sliding down it. i had an obsession with slides back then. i loved them. i loved to be at the very top and plunge down, riding gravity and feel the sand bump my rear end hard. it was the best feeling. i even made little depressions in any landscape into somekind of a slide. i would sit at the top and drag myself down and imagine the feeling of falling.
there were times i thought the dome was a spaceship or a dormant stone mountain or a fossil. that dome occupied plenty of space in my head
when i took the bus, i saw it looming up ahead and it stirred me. then i saw the sign at the fence that surrounded it. it said: NEWater reservoir supply. those three words just grabbed what is left of my best childhood memories, wrenched it out and slapped it onto the tar road. that was the end of my hope of unharmed silent children in a world of eternal 8 storeyed slides.
it was hard to imagine the very water that is stored in that dome ran through my body as i made my fables up about it. for all i know, i could be sipping the same water that was from there as i imagined and played quietly with those silent children. it was a thought that tremored the whole child in me. it almost broke.

i missed F when riding on that bus. he couldn't come. not then. i just spent the ride staring into trees. they were all out of bounds and wired with an endless fence. it was an unspoken rule in singapore that the greens are out of bounds. i do not understand it. God made grass grow so the ground would be soft to walk on, He made trees grow so the sun won't burn on our heads and so on. it is ironic that people would build hard roads above the grass and cut trees to make buildings in place. buildings which reflect the sun rays and magnify it threefold. it is so ironic that what is left of the greens are where they hide themselves and use the soft grass as training grounds for armed conflict. and they made everything green into an attraction or "private property". who are they to decide. who are they? it doesn't make sense.

i have to bathe.
Posted by NHJ 10/10/2004 09:34:00 pm

Sunday, October 10, 2004