It took me some time, but I finally learnt what love is and the intrinsic value to survival lies in love, art and poetry. Before 2013, I never believed in love. Love was something you watch in Disney movies, the fireworks, the kisses, the my-world-feels-like-a-movie type of unrealistic bullshit.
It was when V taught me to open my heart and allowed love to enter. He entered my heart and now has a forever home in it. Since then, I got in touch with my emotions and feelings. I started to learn about what gives survival its value. And fell in love, and also in love with art and poetry.
To me, art and poetry exists, because some emotions are too strong to be conveyed in just words of explanation. Like a kiss, some things are an emotional feeling. Art and poetry do that for me.
She didn’t love easily, it took a lot for her to fall. But when she loved it was with such an intensity it could be felt from a mile away. It shook the earth and made the ocean roar. And when he felt it, it made him question if he’d ever known love at all. — S.Z. // Excerpt from a book I’ll never write #282
Remember when V experienced my love and wondered what the hell was all those “love” he experienced before. It was nothing like my love.
Kisses in the back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer enough; they did a curious thing:
They dropped out of their world for a while and made another world just beneath it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy
Remember moments when we were just kissing below my apartment and ignored the world that passed us by. We dropped out of reality for those moments and made a whole new world with just us two. The locals hated us, but it doesn’t matter.
All these soft, warm nights going to waste
when I should be lying in your arms,
under the moon – the dearest arms in all the world
that I love so to feel around me
How much longer
before they’ll be there to stay?
— Zelda Fitzgerald wrote this to F Scott Fitzgerald before they were married
Nights in the shitty HK apartment and (tiny) bed, where we’d spend nights cuddling. I’d stay and stay and stay.
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other. — Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast
If there is one sentence that would sum the HK days up, this is it. Our “fancy” dinner after work, drinking wine by the glass windows and cuddling while watching movies in bed. Shitty physical environment, but the happiest warm feeling inside.
He’d never cared much for strawberries, but that summer her lips were so stained with the juices that they were all he tasted.
And he’d never had a favourite fruit, but two years later, a new girl is sat in front of him, laughing at his jokes.
“If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” She asks playfully.
Suddenly he remembers how her hands traced the veins in his neck and made their way across his chest. He remembers her soft breathing and limbs draped across his shoulders.
“Strawberries.” He tells her. “I could live a life on nothing but strawberries.”
— S.Z. // Excerpt from a book I’ll never write #54 -“Strawberries”
Wait for someone who bumps mouths clumsily with yours because they’re too busy smiling to kiss you properly. Yeah. Wait for that.
Remember when we first made out for an hour below my apartment? Remember all the silly ways we kissed and laughed and kept bumping but we didn’t care. And how we world hates us and judged us but it doesn’t matter because we were living in the world of our own.
“If you said you missed me,” she says, “and I told you I missed you too, do you think we could do it over?”
“We could relearn each other’s names and I could tell you about my childhood. You could get bored of my stories all over again and I could get mad like I always used to.”
“And I’m not saying we’d work.” She murmurs, “I know that we probably won’t.”
“But logic doesn’t mean I don’t miss you,” she says. “And right now I don’t give a damn about what logic has to say. Just tell me you miss me and I swear I’ll come running. Tell me you miss me and we can fall all over again.”
— Excerpt from a book I’ll never write
The time I brawled at Singapore’s airport.