Where and how should I start my tale. Not at the beginning, because unlike what most people think, the beginning is not where things start. It is always the end which marks the beginning and makes everything fall into place. Besides, beginnings and ends are arbitrary. So I guess I shall start at my tale precisely in the middle, and then perhaps lead it back to its source.

My father died at 57, young for a man of his kind. He has always been a leader, a doer. If a word can define this man, it is accomplish, in both the verb and adjective sense of the word. He never understood what middleground meant. He always had his opinion, which he saw as 'the' opinion. But anyhow, my father died. One day he was up ordering people about and the next day he was dead like a bedpost.

I didn't feel much for him. I was the oldest and expect somehow to take over whatever role it was the man played in the lives of those around him. People without realizing it threw these responsiblities and expectations onto me. Unfortunately though, I was clumsy at catching these responsibilites, dropping them all over the place, and with these fallen disappointments, so too my standing in their eyes fell. Not that I cared, I never wanted their good opinions anyway. Not when I had to be constantly held up next to my father as if he is the light source which will make my existence clear to the eyes of these others. No. I am who I am. Everything I did made perfect sense in my own internal universe even if it did not to anyone else.

Perhaps there is indeed a greater power out there in the universe, churning out fates like well-tuned gears. And we are all part of this great machine and sometimes we find out how we fit into a greater scheme of things. Knowing or unknowingly we all play our parts precisely as who we are or think we are. I was never a big believer of fate so I never actively defied my destiny.

It was about a month after his death, I was going through his belongings, all the old books, pictures, trophies and letters which no longer held any meaning they were just things gathering dust like some poignant testimony to passing days and a resting place for the light footed dust. I came across this old box full of yellowing and moth-eaten letters with faded words. I cared little for his artifacts so I chucked it aside. It was quite promptly forgotten lying in the pile in the middle among other things which I could not decide were of value or worthless.

Then by some strange chance, I was among his things one day, I spotted that old box of letter and took it with me. Who knows why we do the things we do sometimes, perhaps there really is a voice guiding us to things beyond our own knowledge. That voice sometimes carry us to safety and deliverance and sometimes to forgiveness. But I did, I picked up that box once again and this time I looked into the letters. They were all addressed to my father by an old priest. I assumed the writer is an old priest because he kept quoting from the bible in the letters, and always at the end, he signed off "In the name of the father, and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen" or sometimes it is "All in God's will. Amen" It was as if every letter was a prayer addressed to a man as common, unruly and disbelieving as my father. I was surprised to find that my father had kept correspondence with a priest for so many years of his life, I believe, judging by the number of letters, the letter exchange has started since my father was a young boy barely in his teenage years. He had always been the one to proclaim in that booming voice of his that there is no God but man himself. Now, finding these letters, I was reluctant to read them. Perhaps it is mean spirited of me, but I wasn't ready for my old man to suddenly become this secret saint with all this secret past which would so easily redeem him in my eyes. No, he would not get away that easily for all those years he had made my mother and I suffer in silence for his brutish ways.

I tossed those letters aside in anger, determined to burn them when the opportunity arise. In my anger, some of the letters fell out of the box, scattering on the wooden floor like ancient characters from lands long past. For some reason, they had a hold over me, a kind of power which stilled my hand from destroying them. Perhaps there was still room in my heart to forgive the old man even though I did not know it then. Perhaps seeing the pains it took for the old priest to write all these letters all those years softened my heart. But whatever it was, I could not bring myself to toss them into the fire with the rest of the old furniture chopped up into firewood.

I had wondered about the writer of all those letters. How did he know my father and why did he keep up his letter writing to a man like my father all these years? It made me a little sad to think that I had never known my father. Beyond the fact that he was the constant authority at home, dishing out orders to everyone around him, I knew nothing of him. Nothing of his childhood, his youth, his past. The letters made me wonder--who was my father, really.

I read some of the letters out of curiousity. One of them especially, stood out to me. All of them addressed my father by the name of Dominic, a name I have never known. My father always called himself Dom. It was Dom I have lived with and it was Dom everyone in town knew. This Dominic is a mystery to me. But this letter, the last of the lot read:

Dear Dominic,

I hope things are getting on well for you and your family. I heard that you have had a boy from the neighboring town's gossips, they sometimes bring me news of you and your kins. Your fame precedes you. It travels far and wide and it gladens my old heart to hear of you. It is a pity that you live so far away from me and I, being so old and frail no longer have the spirit to travel the distance by road to visit you, your lovely wife and your sprightly little boy.

But perhaps, my time is almost up. As these days go by now, I feel less and less energy in my body. But I know that my lord will commend me to him when I die. I have paid enough for my sins, the lord above takes pity on my old soul. These years have been long and weary and full of toil for my redemption. But you, my boy, I still do not have your forgiveness. Will you not shake my hand and give me deliverance from your hatred after all these years. My old soul is about to embark on its final journey and I would like a kindly soul of my own kin to send me off with at least a handshake. Will you deny an old man this? Surely, the wrong I have done you and your mother must have been repaid? Your mother, God bless her soul, gave me a last smile before she passed on even though I had been but a brute to her. But I was young and ignorant. And God knows, I have paid for it since. Every single day of my life I have lived in repentance. Now at my final days, come sit by me once again like you had as a child.

I pray with what short time I have left that I may meet you again.

In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

I trembled as I read the letter. There was no name signed on all the letters. It was left hanging like an unspoken word, too painful to articulate. I looked up the town where the letter came from. It was not too far from our own town, three days of journey on foot would take me to it. I set off the very next day in search of the town from which this letter came, my heart full like a pilgrim. My journey and search took me to a quiet little town. I asked around and was directed to the local chapel, a humble little house of God with a quiet little garden. The Priest almost looked surprise at my entry. He told me they saw very few visitors in these parts and asked me if there was anything he could do. I showed him the envelop and asked if he knew the writer with that hand. "Sure." He gave a puzzled little smile. "This belonged to the old Reverend. A wonderful man, he loved children, but he died all alone in the end, with no one to console him. We could not locate his family and he could not say where they were." I asked if he knew where the old man was buried.

He was buried right in the garden of the church. I went out to the quiet little graveyard overgrown with beautiful wild flowers and busy with insects and butterflies. There among other rows of gravestones, one stood out to me, and I felt my eyes cloud over. It had the very same name I carried engraved on it, below it was a verse from Psalms 130. It said:

If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins.
O LORD, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
therefore you are feared.

Just then, a breeze blew across the field and I knew in that instance that all three of us have been forgiven.

When she was very young her grandfather told her about the other side of the moon. He would whisper to her when everyone else was too busy socializing to notice a little girl that there was another side to the moon, and if she ever found it she should make her most fervent wish unto it and it would come true. She had asked if he had heard about the cow she learnt about in kindergarden who had jumped over the moon and if the cow got his wish. "Of course." Her grandfather had told her kindly. If the cow was brave enough to jump over the moon, he must have seen the other side of the moon and had his wish. What was his wish? She had asked. "No one but the cow must know. Perhaps it was so that he never would land again." How they had laughed picturing a cow still floating in the sky.

"What does the other side of the moon look like?" she had asked. "No one has seen it. It is invisible to the eye." He had said quite kindly. "But how will I find the other side of the moon?" She then asked. He told her that she would know when she saw it and she would know exactly what to wish for.

When she told her mother this, her mother laughed at her. "You and your grandfather are full of nonsense. Besides, the cow is a she." But soon after hearing about the secret side of the moon, her family moved too far away for her grandfather to whisper any more marvelous secrets. Before she left, she saw her grandfather at the airport, he said little, but looked at her with a twinkle in his eye, as if reminding her of the secret they shared. Looking back, she had wondered if that was perhaps a tear glistening. The next time she saw him was at his funeral. She looked at him with his strange yellow shiny and taunt skin of the dead and the blusher on his face which made him look like a doll. "What are you doing in here?" Her father had been so angry to find her peeking over the open coffin. He angrily reprimanded her mother for letting her see a dead person. Children are not suppose to look at the dead. Besides he was angry that they didn't make it in time to say goodbye to his father. He had gotten the news at the airport that they missed seeing him for the last time.

But life goes on. Nothing stops for those gone. Almost everything is forgotten. They way they talk, the way they walk, the sucesses they achieved, their little triumphs and failings. All except for those stories they have told and the secrets they shared which still resonates in some internal universe like some dark forgotten mystery.

And tonight, she needs that mystery. Needs it as souls needs darkness. She had just gotten a phone call that her husband had been in a motor accident. They did not have the details but his motorbike had crashed into a truck on the highway. They said he died almost instant. But they needed to further investigate the accident for a conclusive explanation. She had felt the kitchen spinning, she lost control of all her senses, she saw a dark shadow loom at the kitchen sink shaped like a grotesque black horn. She needed to wake her daughters up to tell them the news. She needed to walk down the corridor to their room--that haven where they still slumber ignorant of the fact that everything they have ever known was forever changed. But she was too afraid, too afraid to move. All she could muster was to keep breathing.

She stood there standing struggling to breathe. Outside, through the window, she sees a full moon. Bright, luminous and innocent. Its calm pale face, oblivious to the miseries of the world beneath it. Then she saw it, that shadow half, always hidden, seep out from under the light. She made her fervent wish. She wished for the strength to walk the corridor to her daughters' room and that she would have the strength in her legs to keep walking here on and after.

A old story revised


Where she came from everyone lived high up, where gravity had the least pull on the ambitions of men and the skins of women. Everyone got used to seeing things from a great height and everything looked tiny and ant like. Everything was scaled down to dots and resembled pixels in a low grade image on the computer. Nothing was very threatening when everything was so small. But back then she was never afraid of the view outside her window on the 42nd floor. She could see all the way to the sea and moving dots of lights like some high-tech impressionist painting. That is how Harry Potter's world would look like if it had been modernized. And she could almost believe she was floating in a the air while she peeked at her neighbors at their dinner table. The space which divides one family from the next is an arm length fall of 42 floors. The curtains could never shut out the sound of conversations at their dinner tables and her family had to make sure they speak loud enough to cover up the intruding voices of the neighbors. Elevators were always a chore. Jam-packed with people in suits and briefcases every morning. It is the one time everyone from all those different units meet reluctantly for that three minutes of unwanted physical closeness. Being in elevators everyone held their breaths and if they spoke spoke in whispers. An anxious experience with a horrible mixture of colognes and perfumes and trances of breakfasts. She had always thought everyone and everything seemed especially grey and silent, Even though television sets were constantly left blaring on purpose to keep silence at bay.

Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.

People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.

She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.

She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.

People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.

This strange new world she was now in seemed to be constantly floating on water. She wondered when she would feel grounded and attached to the land beneath her feet once again. Days went by in a haze, nothing seemed very real or significant. She has moved into her new home, a little house at the outskirts of the city where she lived side by side with people like her whose everyday struggle was to make themselves understood. It constantly surprised her that this was now her new home. The word home just didn't make any sense even though everyone was the same, her sister still walked around home in her underwear, her father still got angry when he had to wait too long for dinner, but everything was changed. She felt barren like her backyard where nothing grew except for weeds. She dug beneath the weeds once, and found that the garden was full of sandy soil, the kind that nothing, except for weeds, would grow on. Even though she had once loved plants and gardening, the backyard--the hidden desert could not interest her.

It was when she was out strolling on the beach which she found too cold, the sand too pale, the waves too icy to run and jump into that she found the coconut. She marveled at it, at its strangeness, at how out of place it was. A tropical fruit in this cold city which still freezes in the summer. It was being tossed around by the waves next to the stranded jellyfish. How could she describe the way she felt towards that coconut bobbing clumsily in the waves. She felt she saw herself right there in the waves, trying to stay afloat. At that moment she had no doubt that she was that coconut, and that coconut was her and that their fates were tied together.

She took the coconut home, she wanted to give it a chance to survive, a place for it to grow roots. The coconut soon became an obsession even she could not explain. She needed it to grow, she needed it to survive. She would water it several times a day knowing that the dryness of the city worked against the coconut which needed humidity. She would wait anxiously to spot signs of a new shoot which would give her the strength she needed in the new place. But weeks passed and nothing grew. The spot in the garden where she had cleared the weeds and careful dug a hole in the ground was the same as when she had first planted the coconut. Months passed, at first her family had been happy she had taken a new interest in the garden. Now they worry about how bitterly disappointed she was, and how she did little other than spending hours tending the coconut which never grew.

The days grew cold and grey, miserable rains came, then the days became dry and brittle, the cold air stung one's nostrils when one breathed. Then miraculously the days started getting warm again, the skies turned its brilliant blue again. Everywhere else, flowers bloomed.

One lovely day, her sister came out to the garden where she still sat waiting. She told her there was a place she needed to see. Taking her by the hand, her sister brought her to a plant nursery where everything was just beginning to bloom. They wandered among rows and rows of plants and flowers, a haze of scent and colors. Together, they picked out a young sapling, they hoped, one day would become a peach tree. Back in their garden, they went back to that same spot where the coconut tree never grew. They dug into the soil now soft, moist and ready for life, Removed the coconut, unchanged as on the day she found it. Placed the sapling in the hole and then covered its roots with soil. Standing, their hands muddy, they looked at the earth so full of promise, so full of life.

Where and how should I start my tale. Not at the beginning, because unlike what most people think, the beginning is not where things start. It is always the end which marks the beginning and makes everything fall into place. Besides, beginnings and ends are arbitrary. So I guess I shall start at my tale precisely in the middle, and then perhaps lead it back to its source.

My father died at 57, young for a man of his kind. He has always been a leader, a doer. If a word can define this man, it is accomplish, in both the verb and adjective sense of the word. He never understood what middleground meant. He always had his opinion, which he saw as 'the' opinion. But anyhow, my father died. One day he was up ordering people about and the next day he was dead like a bedpost.

I didn't feel much for him. I was the oldest and expect somehow to take over whatever role it was the man played in the lives of those around him. People without realizing it threw these responsiblities and expectations onto me. Unfortunately though, I was clumsy at catching these responsibilites, dropping them all over the place, and with these fallen disappointments, so too my standing in their eyes fell. Not that I cared, I never wanted their good opinions anyway. Not when I had to be constantly held up next to my father as if he is the light source which will make my existence clear to the eyes of these others. No. I am who I am. Everything I did made perfect sense in my own internal universe even if it did not to anyone else.

Perhaps there is indeed a greater power out there in the universe, churning out fates like well-tuned gears. And we are all part of this great machine and sometimes we find out how we fit into a greater scheme of things. Knowing or unknowingly we all play our parts precisely as who we are or think we are. I was never a big believer of fate so I never actively defied my destiny.

It was about a month after his death, I was going through his belongings, all the old books, pictures, trophies and letters which no longer held any meaning they were just things gathering dust like some poignant testimony to passing days and a resting place for the light footed dust. I came across this old box full of yellowing and moth-eaten letters with faded words. I cared little for his artifacts so I chucked it aside. It was quite promptly forgotten lying in the pile in the middle among other things which I could not decide were of value or worthless.

Then by some strange chance, I was among his things one day, I spotted that old box of letter and took it with me. Who knows why we do the things we do sometimes, perhaps there really is a voice guiding us to things beyond our own knowledge. That voice sometimes carry us to safety and deliverance and sometimes to forgiveness. But I did, I picked up that box once again and this time I looked into the letters. They were all addressed to my father by an old priest. I assumed the writer is an old priest because he kept quoting from the bible in the letters, and always at the end, he signed off "In the name of the father, and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen" or sometimes it is "All in God's will. Amen" It was as if every letter was a prayer addressed to a man as common, unruly and disbelieving as my father. I was surprised to find that my father had kept correspondence with a priest for so many years of his life, I believe, judging by the number of letters, the letter exchange has started since my father was a young boy barely in his teenage years. He had always been the one to proclaim in that booming voice of his that there is no God but man himself. Now, finding these letters, I was reluctant to read them. Perhaps it is mean spirited of me, but I wasn't ready for my old man to suddenly become this secret saint with all this secret past which would so easily redeem him in my eyes. No, he would not get away that easily for all those years he had made my mother and I suffer in silence for his brutish ways.

I tossed those letters aside in anger, determined to burn them when the opportunity arise. In my anger, some of the letters fell out of the box, scattering on the wooden floor like ancient characters from lands long past. For some reason, they had a hold over me, a kind of power which stilled my hand from destroying them. Perhaps there was still room in my heart to forgive the old man even though I did not know it then. Perhaps seeing the pains it took for the old priest to write all these letters all those years softened my heart. But whatever it was, I could not bring myself to toss them into the fire with the rest of the old furniture chopped up into firewood.

I had wondered about the writer of all those letters. How did he know my father and why did he keep up his letter writing to a man like my father all these years? It made me a little sad to think that I had never known my father. Beyond the fact that he was the constant authority at home, dishing out orders to everyone around him, I knew nothing of him. Nothing of his childhood, his youth, his past. The letters made me wonder--who was my father, really.

I read some of the letters out of curiousity. One of them especially, stood out to me. All of them addressed my father by the name of Dominic, a name I have never known. My father always called himself Dom. It was Dom I have lived with and it was Dom everyone in town knew. This Dominic is a mystery to me. But this letter, the last of the lot read:

Dear Dominic,

I hope things are getting on well for you and your family. I heard that you have had a boy from the neighboring town's gossips, they sometimes bring me news of you and your kins. Your fame precedes you. It travels far and wide and it gladens my old heart to hear of you. It is a pity that you live so far away from me and I, being so old and frail no longer have the spirit to travel the distance by road to visit you, your lovely wife and your sprightly little boy.

But perhaps, my time is almost up. As these days go by now, I feel less and less energy in my body. But I know that my lord will commend me to him when I die. I have paid enough for my sins, the lord above takes pity on my old soul. These years have been long and weary and full of toil for my redemption. But you, my boy, I still do not have your forgiveness. Will you not shake my hand and give me deliverance from your hatred after all these years. My old soul is about to embark on its final journey and I would like a kindly soul of my own kin to send me off with at least a handshake. Will you deny an old man this? Surely, the wrong I have done you and your mother must have been repaid? Your mother, God bless her soul, gave me a last smile before she passed on even though I had been but a brute to her. But I was young and ignorant. And God knows, I have paid for it since. Every single day of my life I have lived in repentance. Now at my final days, come sit by me once again like you had as a child.

I pray with what short time I have left that I may meet you again.

In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

I trembled as I read the letter. There was no name signed on all the letters. It was left hanging like an unspoken word, too painful to articulate. I looked up the town where the letter came from. It was not too far from our own town, three days of journey on foot wold take me to it. I set off the very next day in search of the town from which this letter came, my heart full like a pilgrim. My journey and search took me to a quiet little town. I asked around and was directed to the local chapel, a humble little house of God with a quiet little garden. The Priest almost looked surprise at my entry. He told me they saw very few visitors in these parts and asked me if there was anything he could do. I showed him the envelop and asked if he knew the writer with that hand. "Sure." He gave a puzzled little smile. "This belonged to the old Reverend. A wonderful man, he loved children, but he died all alone in the end, with no one to console him. We could not locate his family and he could not say where they were." I asked if he knew where the old man was buried.

He was buried right in the garden of the church. I went out to the quiet little graveyard overgrown with beautiful wild flowers and busy with insects and butterflies. There among other rows of gravestones, one stood out to me, and I felt my eyes cloud over. It had the very same name I carried engraved on it, below it was a verse from Psalms 130. It said:

If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins.
O LORD, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
therefore you are feared.

Just then, a breeze blew across the field and I knew in that instant that all three of us have been forgiven.

Ocean Beach on 8/31

The sand--fine array of glittery dust
through my hand,
in my mouth a sugar grain.
Evidence of last night's bon-fire
excavated like archaeological finds, reflecting the sun's
warm beam a black metal
smooth to the touch
and light on the hand.
Driftwood--aimless on the
body of sand,

fullstops

on the sandscape
for the eye to pause on.


Treasures, thrown up by the sea
fill my pockets
as I head home
hair thoroughly combed
(as I keep my balance in the carpet sand)
by the persistent breeze.