The Saddest

15^th April, 2024

Monday

08:30 a.m.

How presumptuous of me to think the recesses of the human heart is unexplored territory! How presumptuous to think my experiences are unique! But I did, I do, sometimes. I’m a coloniser declaring terra nullius where generations of feet have trodden before – culture, customs, stories.

We’re all a bit like Lu Xun’s Ah Q or Voltaire’s Candide, our ignorance a child’s newspaper hat—roll it up and you’ve got a telescope! —as we frolic about wreaking havoc with a toothless grin, adult teeth yet to grow in. Want to play Explorers?

If you’re looking for certainty, you won’t find it here. But maybe this overgrown trail leads somewhere.

10:30 a.m.

I’ve lost my way

in this labyrinthine mass of nothingness

The mist – it bends and twists, somehow.

I’ve lost my way in this fluid inertia

A break today, tomorrow a prison ball

Each languid step heavier than the one before.

I’ve lost my way,

And God forbid I go astray,

Discovering novelty in the uncertainty of discomfort.

I am lost

in this pleasant confinement

Which, in turn, is stripped of its pleasantness.

It is confinement, only

Warm, smothering,

Mothering confinement.

16^th April, 2024

Tuesday

Noon

If I were a Candide-like character (maybe I am), I might just think my feelings are unprecedented – an unturned stone in the depths of a forest unknown. But most of our feelings, yours included, are more a key under a flowerpot.

I might give my pain a name—grobelgaw! —only to see it labelled otherwise elsewhere. The phenomenon already exists, hence the labels, hence the etymology that extends back to empires (but, of course, we think we’re the first). Some called it ennui; others, disillusionment. It has been called a void, world-weariness, heartbreak, resignation, shame, unfulfillment, impermanence, melancholy and ostracism. My grobelgaw already has a name, and I’m a biologist eagerly documenting a common species of beetle. Oh, the embarrassment.

11:11 p.m.

There’s a weight to my hollow heart,

First a paperweight, then a shotput.

Like a tumour, it grows

And nobody knows it.

There’s a weight to my hollow heart,

as though I could cut the void from my chest

Watch the throbbing absence bleed out

on a surgical tray.

I pray for the day the hole is filled

like a bear stuffed with cotton

But today, like every yesterday,

There is a weight to my hollow heart.

A weight.

I wait.

Wait.

17^th April, 2024

Wednesday

10:28 a.m.

After my first heartbreak, I thought nobody could understand the depth of my pain, as though it were unchartered waters (how achingly naïve). That is, until I moved to China.

That’s called si nian cheng ji, they said. When yearning becomes sickness.

Yi ri san qiu, when a single day feels like three autumns.

Ke gu xiang si, when longing is so deep it feels engraved in your bones.

You’re lovelorn, sure, but you’re not unique. You’re not even alone in your loneliness. There are a bunch of neat idioms to describe that, too – yet another bouquet of withered adages to lay at the graves of failed poets and explorers. Few of us ever really know novelty.

The Chinese language is humbling in that sense. We learn that our feelings have been felt before, we learn empathy, we learn modesty. The very characters themselves are equally as humbling; they contain a semantic radical that denotes their meaning. The word “fate,” for example, bears the silk/thread radical as though our lives are interwoven, as though destiny ties us together. And yet, some of us might articulate this and believe it to be an original and even poetic thought, unaware that it was inscribed in bronze millennia ago – and some thoughts, even, in oracle bones and tortoiseshell.

You’re not the first; others paved the way.

Often, one character says more than a poem, and four say more than a page.

10:16 p.m.

Like the sea

I do not chase nor wait

Knowing that by nature

My fate is tied

To the shore.*

18^th April, 2024

Thursday

12:25 p.m.

I met a man who gatekept suffering as though guarding the doors to Heaven. I vaguely understand the bleeding romanticisation, but Salvation is not a meritocracy, and you don’t deserve a gold star for having suffered the most (and in vain, too!).

Others’ suffering has never undermined my own; it doesn’t threaten me, for I never made it my identity. Sadness is my thing! Be my guest, it’s all yours, and they snatch it up like a lead role. I’m happy to be Sadness’ understudy. Heck, I’m happy to be the tree.

2:33 p.m.

There are still those who roam

Beyond the four walls

Of home, sweet home.

Those who soak up more

Than a lone ray of sun

Across the floorboards.

Those who picnic

Doze off in the grass

Listening to the twitter-cheep of birdsongs.

There are those who still return

To their roots,

Those who are happy

And I am not amongst them.

3:21 p.m.

An Ode to My Houseplant

My devil’s ivy is an angel

Undemanding, independent, giving.

My sanity I owe to her

In exchange for a glass of water.

No complaints,

no withering, no whining,

Only unrelenting aid

from the dais known as my bookshelf.

4:01 p.m.

Madness is Not a Cold

I thought I’d gotten better

But madness is not a cold, not the flu,

Is not cured with Mum’s honey-lemon,

Nor ginger garlic soup.

It is not walked off,

Nor warmed away

With extra layers

A second, third duvet.

Madness is in the bones, brittle bones,

Like chronic arthritis.

Only if I were boiled whole

snapped like a wishbone

and sucked clean of marrow

would I be better.

19^th April, 2024

Friday

1:13 p.m.

I love the arrogance of self-proclaimed misfits. Their lack of belonging constitutes the very essence of their belonging elsewhere, amongst the other millions of misfits. The irony is amusing. Even when we don’t belong, we look for belonging somewhere, in the non-belonging itself. And in that sense, we’re no different from anyone else, looking for our place, our people, even when that means nowhere, and even when that means no one. This, I believe, implies we’re all nobodies trying to be somebody because to feel seen is to feel alive, and to feel invisible is to die.

We have so much in common, really.

1:54 p.m.

The breeze nips at the hem of my dress

Like a guppy at the water surface

Of a small,

small tank.

I’m in between two worlds

On a demarcation line unseen

Where is the surface?

Like a siren, it calls to me.

The breeze nips at the hem of my dress

Like a tugging child

But I’m far,

far away.

Far beyond the cliff face

Whose yawning jaws extend to the sea

Gurgling, gurgling,

gurgling.

The breeze, it nips at my dress

Like a loyal pet.

I think I hear it whine.

But the skyline, the surface, are calling.

2:43 p.m.

A Waltz of One

My undoing begins with love,

Always love.

I am a gown unsewn

Torn and fashioned into gauze.

Undressed,

I’m but a shivering compress

To stop their bleeding

But never my own.

My unbecoming,

It’s wrapped up with the halt of their pain

And I’m condemned to dance

A bare and lonesome waltz.

I am not there,

And no longer are they.

3:33 p.m.

May we knot together our fate

Like a noose

A life sentence, a sin,

But in unison.

Slip it not around my neck,

But this finger here, that’s the one

And with love,

May our wrongdoings come undone.

5:05 p.m.

If I were a Candidesque character, I might attempt a Haiku!

I like trees and rocks.

I like trees and rocks and leaves.

Do you like trees, too?

There’s nothing left for grabs but satire and self-ridicule because so few of us want to touch it; we poke it like a sea slug with a washed-up twig, grimacing at its slime and goo. Maybe therein I am unique (or a smidgen less conformist). I know how to be unserious. I think, perhaps, because I never questioned the sincerity of my pain. It was never a costume, never a moustache, never a pipe, never a game.

I don’t know how anyone contains themselves to the 5-7-5 or the theme of nature. Have you ever actually seen a nightingale? Could you identify its song? Have you seen a sparrow? Or do you just imitate the poets of our past, writing about tree bark and leaves from the comfort of your desk? I thought we were meant to write what we know.

20^th April, 2024

Saturday

11:16 a.m.

I was inspired by the May 4^th Movement, of making literature accessible to (and representative of) the masses by using vernacular language. The human condition needn’t be dressed up like an empress; the human condition, if anything, wears rags. The human condition is not calligraphy, but scrawl at best – that is, if it isn’t illiterate.

I encounter, sometimes, the misconception that intelligence makes us suffer, as though intellectualising our pain makes it deeper than that of those who fail to do so. I don’t believe the ability to articulate your suffering makes it any more painful than it already is. I wonder who’s sadder, an illiterate peasant girl forced to marry her abuser, for she is with child, or an educated frat boy with daddy issues? Literature often celebrates the latter.

I don’t know why we romanticise overthinking. Pity me, praise me. I’m so pensive I could die.

11:59 a.m.

I found a fly in my coffee

Scooped it out and swallowed it whole

It’s been buzzing about inside

Ever since

Kind of like you

And not even I can fathom

My poor instincts

I wonder,

Has the coffee gone cold?

21^st April, 2024

Sunday

10:56 p.m.

I once thought I’d invented love, and pain, and loneliness, and shame; nobody knew them like I did. But I’m just another heart carved in tree bark, I’m just another padlock, I’m just another soul looking up at the stars. And no, I won’t shy away from clichés, not anymore, for they’ve united us since Roman toilet stalls: “I admire you, wall, for not having collapsed at having to carry the tedious scribblings of so many writers.”

I suppose history’s the wall and you’re just another vulgar illustration, just another “was here,” just another fleeting mention of love.

But isn’t that liberating? You’re nobody and you needn’t carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.

* Translated from Chinese original work