a melancholy sort of night
a face like summer, i think ... somewhere dusk..

josh groban plays from the computer--i hate the phrase
as if it were as inanimate as that. as if music--

italian seems almost too good to use for everyday
you would expect romantic things to be said in it.
in italian, spanish, maybe even french: imagine,
pass the pepper, please. bless you. but even that:
vaulted cathedrals, the shuddering echoes inside.

this is called romanticising. just a language, after all.
but then communication is such a beautiful thing.
communication, communion. for which one does not need words, i suppose.
perhaps even the deepest kind is that which is wordless--
free of the boundaries, of narrow meanings and imprecision.

tonight is a night to be sad on.
--if i had anything to be sad about, which i don't at this point.
a strange beauty in sorrow seen from a distance.
not so close up. people never cry the way we like to say they do.

do you ever wonder what the future holds?
here we have it so nicely planned out. as if it will neatly fit into a box.
as if all is happiness and success,
as if all obstacles can be overcome.

as if what is left beautiful by the side of the road will never call to us,
as if we can look at it and smile and move on.
how do you want to live, really? happy in the maze of corridors that leads to your hdb flat, your house? the safe route, certainly.
would you dare try what you only dream of; do you have urbanised dreams?

what of the wilder: are they, too, born of a romanticism that we associate with the country, the exotic?
in that case, less valid?

the worst is this: imagine following that steep winding staircase up to the top and finding that it isn't, after all, a bell tower.
but what else could it be. so then
imagine that you look down and see only grey roofs, narrow streets, the weary yellow sky. imagine reaching the top and then beginning to believe that these were your original dreams.

*

(anyway, excuse me. i feel like thinking fragmentedly.)