The Quiet Moment of Waiting

I’m standing in a clinic queue right now—one of the many lines I find myself in every day. You queue for banking, for the bus, at the grocery counter. For such an ordinary experience, I should just take it for granted, the way we take breathing or blinking for granted. But curiously, there’s a sense of something amiss. It feels, in its small way, like suffering. Not the dramatic kind—no one writes tragedies about waiting for your number to be called. But it’s a feeling that clings to the mind like a dull ache, a quiet wrongness you can’t quite name.

 

It’s a curious cycle. When I’m trapped in waiting, my mind drifts toward the question: what do all these waits actually mean? Perhaps you’ve wondered the same. We’re all waiting for something, always. Waiting for exam results. Waiting for the Chinese new year, when the lucky money comes again. Waiting to hear back after an interview. Waiting for the light to change while running late. Waiting for the bus that never seems to arrive on time.

 

 

 

These tiny waits accumulate into something larger. If we were to add them all up, we’d find that a surprising portion of life is spent in this strange suspension. Present in body, but not quite here. You are leaning forward into a future that hasn’t arrived yet, unable to settle into the moment you’re actually standing in.

 

What does waiting reveal about us? At its core, it is a confrontation between our desire to be agents of our own lives and the stubborn reality that we cannot bend time to our will. We cannot make the bus arrive faster. We cannot know the outcome of a job interview the moment we walk out the door.

 

There’s a small ritual of disappointment built into these situations. When you ask, half-hopefully, “When will I hear back?”—and they reply, “Possibly in a month”—something sinks. It’s too long. Too vague. We want certainty, and we want it now. Modern life, in particular, has trained us for immediacy. We refresh the page, check our phones, glance at the clock, as though our attention could somehow hurry things along. Beneath the surface, there’s always a low hum of irritation.

 

Why does waiting feel so unbearable? Perhaps because we’ve come to see it as wasted time—empty, unproductive, a gap between the moments that actually count. In an age that prizes busyness over stillness, doing over simply being, waiting becomes a kind of failure. It resists usefulness. It refuses to justify itself. And so we treat it as mere transition, something to endure on the way to somewhere else, rather than an experience worth inhabiting on its own terms.

 

Waiting is often dismissed as empty time, but the quiet suspense between one moment and the next carries its own quiet power. In those pauses—standing in line, anticipating a reply, watching the clock before a new beginning—we are suspended between what was and what will be. This in‑between space invites reflection, heightens awareness, and deepens our appreciation of what finally arrives. While impatience urges us to rush past these intervals, waiting subtly shapes our resilience, teaches us trust in unfolding processes, and reminds us that growth often happens in unseen transitions. The suspense of waiting is not wasted time; it is the threshold where anticipation matures into meaning.

 

I used to find waiting unsettling, an uncomfortable limbo I wanted to escape. But I’ve since learned to bend toward these pauses, even to welcome them. Waiting resists being “useful” in the conventional sense—if usefulness means actively doing, producing, advancing. Instead, the suspense of waiting invites us into a different kind of attention: a heightened awareness of the present moment itself. These pauses position us in a liminal space between what was and what is yet to come, offering us space to slow down and reflect. Often, the wait isn’t an obstacle delaying our progress but a preparation, priming us for what lies ahead rather than holding us back.

 

Consider how our lives unfold like stories, shaped by the drift and turn of happenstance. In any good story, the transitions between scenes are rarely empty—they’re filled with authorial asides, atmospheric shifts, internal reflections that enrich the narrative’s texture. These interludes aren’t filler; they’re intrinsic to the story’s meaning. Our waits function much the same way. They give us a window for our own reflections and awareness, a chance to observe rather than simply react. In those moments, you might feel something approaching authorship over your own experience—not because you control what happens next, but because you can step aside from the current, hold yourself at a remove, and simply witness. Here, in the pause, we’re granted permission to be rather than to do, to inhabit our existence rather than relentlessly propel it forward.

 

Perhaps waiting is, at heart, the experience of standing before a crossing. We wait in order to move into another stage. The traffic light changes, and we cross to the other side of the road. Our number appears on the screen, and it is our turn to see the doctor. Each wait, however brief or mundane, carries the quiet possibility of transition. What follows may become a consequential moment. In this way, waiting stitches together the twists and turns of our lives. If life itself is ritualistic in rhythm, then waiting is not incidental but intrinsic to its design. To cross a threshold is to risk change; once crossed, life may never be quite the same.

 

Though waiting often feels ordinary—almost woven invisibly into the fabric of daily routine—it matters precisely because it marks the space between “before” and “after.”  If we extend this idea further, if we imagine the span of an entire lifetime as a kind of waiting, then the significance deepens. What then of the  final crossing  — the one we all must cross ?  Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Crossing the Bar’ captures this ultimate moment: the crossing from life into what lies beyond.  This beautiful poem goes like this:

“Sunset and evening star,

 And  one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning   of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving  seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from    out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

 And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

 The flood may bear me far,

 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.”

 

The poem frames death not as an abrupt end, but as a passage—like putting out to sea, borne by a quiet tide toward a hoped‑for meeting “face to face” with the Pilot. In this light, waiting becomes more than delay; it is preparation for crossing. Just as the poet envisions death as a serene transition into another stage of being, so every wait in our lives, small or great, stands as a passage. To wait is to stand at the edge of change—and to trust that on the other side, another chapter awaits.

So, even waiting here at this moment for my number to be called, I’m already crossing.

 

 

Unhousing Myself



I’ve been living in a hotel for a few months now, and I’m beginning to see it not as a temporary arrangement but as a possible long‑term way of life. At my age, why should I feel bound to the convention of maintaining a “home” in the traditional sense? If one can afford an extended hotel stay, perhaps it’s worth experimenting with a different mode of living altogether.

When you think about it, a home—despite all its sentimental associations—is also a kind of baggage. I don’t even mean this in a metaphysical way. Quite practically, a home demands upkeep. It requires time, money, and a constant low‑level vigilance: repairs, cleaning, utilities, clutter, the slow accumulation of things you don’t need but somehow keep. A hotel, by contrast, strips life back to essentials. Someone else handles the maintenance. You occupy space without owning it. You move lightly.

There’s also the emotional dimension. As we grow older, perhaps part of aging gracefully is learning to loosen our attachments rather than deepen them. A fixed home can anchor you, yes, but it can also tether you to past versions of yourself—memories, habits, identities that no longer fit. Letting go of that can be a quiet liberation. A hotel room, with its neutrality and impermanence, invites a different relationship to the world: one that is freer, less burdened by history, more open to change.

In that sense, choosing to live in a hotel isn’t an escape from life but a reconfiguration of it. It’s a way of saying: I don’t need walls filled with possessions to feel grounded. I can carry my sense of home within myself.

Where Grief Becomes Language

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er-wrought heart and bids it break. 

Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3


Grief often reshapes the way we see art, and sometimes it reveals the hidden stories behind the works we think we know. Reading Hamnet made me reconsider Hamlet not as a monument of genius alone, but as a vessel of private sorrow.

Shakespeare writes Hamlet while still moving through the dense, unspoken fog of losing his son, Hamnet. Agnes, his wife—so attuned to the rhythms of the earth, to the pulse of living things—cannot decipher the way her husband grieves. To her, his composure feels like distance. His return to London, his relentless work on the stage, his immersion in characters and plots all seem like evasions, as though he has shunned their shared sorrow. While she mourns with her hands, her breath, her body, he mourns in silence, in absence, in the strange inwardness of a man who turns pain into language.


For a long time, Agnes believes he has abandoned the grief that has hollowed her out. She imagines him thriving among actors and patrons, untouched by the loss that has reshaped her world. But when she travels to London and sits in the dimness of the theatre to watch Hamlet, something shifts. Onstage, she sees a ghostly father summoned from death, a son who cannot release the past, a family fractured by absence. In those figures—so distant from her life yet uncannily familiar—she recognizes the contours of her own mourning.

Only then does she understand: her husband has not escaped their grief. He has carried it with him, threading it into the fabric of the play. The ghost onstage is not merely a dramatic device; it is the echo of their lost child, the shape of a sorrow he could not speak aloud. Through Hamlet, he has given form to the ache that bound them both. Agnes realizes that the play is not a departure from their loss but an offering—a way of holding Hamnet close, of keeping him alive in the only language Shakespeare knows how to wield.
Art holds a central, almost sacred place in Shakespeare’s life. We often imagine the Bard spinning his plays out of sheer, unbounded imagination, as though genius alone were the source of his creativity. But that view does not quite do justice to the depth of his artistry. In the case of Hamlet, it is grief—raw, bewildering, and transformative—that becomes the true engine of creation. The death of Hamnet does not silence Shakespeare; instead, it is transmuted, refined, and sublimated into one of the greatest tragedies ever written.

The beauty of art, in this sense, proves more enduring than any epitaph or ritual gesture. A gravestone marks a life; a play reanimates it. Through Hamlet, Shakespeare not only memorializes his son but also inscribes himself into the fabric of cultural memory. The tragedy becomes a double act of preservation: the child who died young and the father who mourned him both find a kind of immortality in its lines.

Language becomes the vessel through which grief is transformed. Instead of loud cries or outward displays of sorrow, the pain distills into quiet, resonant meditations on death, memory, and the fragile condition of being human. The play’s reflections—its ghosts, its hesitations, its questions—carry the weight of a father’s loss without ever naming it directly.

In this way, art becomes a means of transcending death. What is lost in life is carried forward in language. What cannot be restored in the world is reimagined on the stage. Through the alchemy of creativity, Shakespeare turns grief into something enduring, something that continues to speak across centuries. And in that transformation, both he and Hamnet step beyond the limits of mortality.

The Mythic Life of Ordinary  Days


When you wake up—still half‑lost in sleep—you shuffle to the kitchen and make a cup of coffee. You pull back the curtain. Sunlight spills in. It’s a tiny ritual you perform every morning without a second thought.

But here’s a question: have you ever noticed that you’re actually starting to  re-enacting a host of ancient myths that follow later in the day.


I’m serious.


To begin with, you pull yourself out of sleep, that strange in‑between place where dreams wander off on their own and nothing quite makes sense. As you open your eyes, the room slowly comes back. The contours of things reappear. The world, which  completely disappeared for the whole night, quietly takes shape again.


Then you put on your “day self”.  The part of you that knows who you are, what day it is, and what needs doing. The dreamy nocturnal part fades into the background, and your thinking mind puts back in gear.


And without really noticing it, you’ve just done something very old.


In ancient Egyptian myth, the sun god Ra rises each morning to bring light and order back into the world. Your version starts when you turn off the alarm. Chaos gives way to form. Darkness gives way to direction. A new day begins — not with a fanfare, but with a sleepy decision to get up.


So you might be thinking, ‘okay, this is a cool parallel… but so what?’


The “so what” is that what happens inside you—the small, intimate world of your feelings—isn’t separate from the big patterns of life at all. Every culture has stories of loss, transformation, and renewal because those movements happen everywhere: in seasons, in ecosystems, in the rise and fall of worlds. And they also happen in us. The microcosm mirrors the macrocosm. 


When you feel completely undone—when you grieve the loss of someone you love—it can feel like a descent into an underworld. That inner journey, as personal as it feels, echoes a much larger rhythm. Our ancestors recognized this long ago. They noticed the same patterns playing out in nature and in the soul, and they wove that understanding into myths and rituals. 


Those stories are like maps of the inner landscape. They remind us that what’s happening inside us isn’t random or meaningless—it’s part of a cycle that has been lived, named, and remembered many times before. And when you realize that, you’re no longer just stuck inside your own pain. You’re standing at the meeting point of the small world and the great one, able to draw on a deep, ancient wisdom as you find your way through.


You begin to realize that your journey is more epic than you ever gave it credit for. Something shifts when you see this: you’re not just someone enduring a hard moment, you’re a hero in your own right—no less real than any figure from a Greek tragedy. 


When you descend into your own underworld, you’re not failing or falling behind. You’re in the middle of the story. You’re shaping it as you go, even if it doesn’t feel graceful or heroic right now. And this moment—this dark, uncertain stretch—isn’t the end. It’s a chapter in motion, a passage between what was and what’s still becoming.


You don’t need to watch Greek drama or read classical epics to appreciate the epic scale of human experience or grasp the depths of the tragic human condition. These grand narratives exist within each of us, playing out in our daily lives. While Greek dramas and epic poems certainly create magnificent spectacles that amplify our sense of awe and pity through their larger-than-life heroes and cosmic stakes, we ordinary people possess all the same essential elements of human dignity and struggle. Our lives contain the same fundamental conflicts, desires, and moments of profound significance, even if they unfold on a smaller, more intimate stage.


This recognition has become especially pronounced in modern times, where we have developed a profound appreciation for the individual as sacred and sovereign. The democratic spirit of modernity insists that every person’s inner life matters, that every consciousness is worthy of deep attention and respect. We no longer believe that only kings and warriors merit epic treatment; the checkout clerk, the teacher, the office worker—all carry within them the weight of human experience.


If you examine modern schools of the novel, you’ll discover how authors understand that ordinary people repeat and re-enact the ancient myths, embarking on grand journeys even when they never leave their hometown. James Joyce’s Ulysses provides perhaps the most famous example. The novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, simply potters around Dublin on an ordinary Thursday in June 1904. His journey deliberately mirrors that of Odysseus returning home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, but instead of battling Cyclops and resisting Sirens, Bloom attends a funeral, buys soap, eats lunch, and navigates the complexities of his troubled marriage.


For all the mundane activities that fill Bloom’s Thursday—getting breakfast, visiting the newspaper office, going to the public baths—he encounters events and moments of surprising depth and resonance. He confronts his personal history, including his grief over his infant son’s death and his anguish over his wife’s infidelity, all within the larger context of Irish history and the struggle for national identity. Joyce demonstrates that Bloom’s journey through Dublin is no less grand, no less heroic, and no less worthy of epic treatment than Homer’s Odysseus sailing across the wine-dark sea. The interior landscape of a single human mind on a single day contains multitudes.


The remarkable thing is that you don’t need to be consciously aware that these myths are shaping your life—they’re already embedded in your psychology, operating beneath the surface of your awareness. Over the course of human culture spanning millennia, these archetypal patterns and stories have been passed down through generations, depositing themselves in the depths of our minds where we cannot directly perceive them. They function like invisible scaffolding, providing an unconscious framework that helps us organize our experiences and derive meaning from the chaos of daily existence. We live out these patterns without realizing it, our choices and responses echoing the ancient stories our ancestors told around fires thousands of years ago.


But something transformative happens when we become aware of these mythic undertones running through our lives. This awareness creates what we might call psychological gravitas—a weight, a depth, a sense of significance that elevates our understanding of ourselves. When we recognize the mythic dimensions of our experience, we suddenly possess a vocabulary and a structure for understanding what happens to us and what we do. The random-seeming events of our lives begin to cohere into patterns; we can see ourselves as protagonists in an ongoing story rather than merely drifting through disconnected moments.


This consciousness fundamentally changes our relationship to meaning-making. Instead of passively receiving whatever significance our culture assigns to our actions, we can actively participate in creating our own meaning. As we carve out purposes for our life journey and make deliberate choices about the direction we want to move, cognition of these innate mythical elements provides us with a pathway—a method for consciously constructing meaning rather than stumbling upon it accidentally. We become both the author and the hero of our own story, aware of the ancient patterns we’re working with and capable of adapting them to our unique circumstances and aspirations.

Deserted Rural Houses

Stories Carried Forward  — An Introduction

In many families, the most enduring stories are not the ones that end well, but the ones that fall silent—stories marked by absence, disappearance, and unanswered waiting.


These tales were written by my brother James some years ago, recounted to him in childhood by our father. James has always been someone who prefers to hold his writing close, treating it as a private experience rather than something to be shared with the world. Yet when he read the ghost story on my blog, something shifted. He found it deeply moving—as he told me in a WhatsApp message—and it stirred memories of these sad stories he had written down years ago, preserving our father’s voice and the voices before him.

What binds our stories together is not merely that their protagonists have evolved into mythical figures across generations of retelling. Rather, it is how these tales lay bare the human condition itself: ordinary people pitted against the inexorable forces of destiny, revealing in their struggles the full spectrum of hope and despair, dignity and frailty. These are not heroes in any conventional sense, but their very ordinariness makes their courage—and their losses—all the more profound.

I needed little persuasion to convince James to share these stories on my site. As is often the case, only the writer themselves knows best how to capture the rawness of feeling, the particular cadences and nuances that give life to memory. In its natural flow of language and unassuming style of narration, James’s text carries within it not just the stories themselves, but the act of their transmission—father to son, one generation passing tales on to another. As I told him, “The way you recount these episodes, they already possess the fullness of a story, and they have inspired me deeply.”

In both his tales and mine, we find ourselves bound more closely by the ancient, familial gravitas of storytelling. They take us back to an earlier time, when people gathered around firesides not merely to pass a long winter night, but to make sense of their lives through the tales they told—what it means to be human: our vulnerabilities and strengths, our losses and our endurance. By recounting these stories of the past, James honours not just our own family’s history, but the universal experience of migration, separation, and the terrible lottery of fortune that shapes all human lives.

_______________________________

What follows is James’s story, told here verbatim

1 February 2021

When you hear someone mention Toishan — a sleepy, obscure rural area tucked away at the southern tip of Kwangtung Province, China– you might immediately conjure up a picture of the many Chinatowns across the U.S.  In the 19th century and the early 20th century, if you roamed around any Chinatown in the U.S., your eardrums would be invaded not by English but by a dialect peculiar to Toishan. What  was a relatively obscure, rustic dialect spoken by a limited number of Chinese people was elevated to the status of a national language in the U.S. Chinatowns.  This was testimony to the dominant role played by Toishan natives in the U.S. Chinatowns. Times may have changed but the stamp left by the people from Toishan is visible throughout the Chinatowns apart  from the popular spoken language. The commercial businesses,  which are essentially small eateries, laundries and grocery stores,  are replicas from Toishan.  The Toishanese, after gaining their footing in the U.S.,  began to send remittances back home to their loved ones whom they left behind in their hometown. These village people, who have connections with overseas relatives in the U.S. are the envy of all the people in the district.  They are well-off with regular remittances from the U.S.  They began to build houses and villas,  turning Toishan into a picturesque place.   Toishan, though obscure and backward in the first place, has gradually achieved the status of a wealthy county thanks to remittances sent home from the overseas  Toishanese  in the U.S.  Outwardly, the Toishanese  should take pride in their economic achievement. But behind each success story, there may be untold miseries which tend to mitigate the joy of success. Why did so many  Toishanese turn their back on  their homeland and brave the hazards of the sea to seek their fortune in the U.S. in the 19th century?  Their struggles were well mixed with blood, sweat and tear.


A farming community could thrive on its agricultural produce. Staples such as rice and wheat and cash crops like vegetables and fruit would sustain the community generation after  generation.  When life is well- off,  the idea of seeking a greener pasture elsewhere by moving away or by emigration would be remote on people’s minds.  That so many  Toishanese  chose to leave their hometown in pursuit of a better life elsewhere just serves to pinpoint the harsh physical realities of the community.  Arable land is limited and infertile.  Much of the terrain is hilly, making crop cultivation difficult.  In front of the villages, Tam Kong – a tributary of the Pearl River – is shallow and fisheries are out of the question.  It’s hard to eke out a bare existence. In reaction to the hostile physical environment,  emigration has become a means of survival. In those days when travelling abroad was mainly done by sea, braving the gruelling long voyage across the Pacific or the Atlantic in dilapidated boats was highly hazardous, as can be imagined.  The travellers were constantly at the mercy of the stormy seas and the  inclement weather.  Historical records of boats or ships sunk during the voyages are unavailable and are only left to imagination. It needed superhuman courage for people to make such a hazardous sea voyage in the first place. Stories of miseries, separation and bereavement consequent upon leaving one’s hometown in pursuit of a better life abroad abound in the memories  of the older generation.  I remember my father telling me many such sad stories when I was a child.  Keung Chai, a child of ten,   lived alone with  his elderly grandmother in a small dilapidated village house.   Grandma, being too old for any hard farm work to sustain herself  and her grandson, fervently hoped for an opportunity for Keung Chai to escape the oppressive , harsh reality of life.    She had a distant relative living in the U.S. It was arranged that the boy should go to America to try his luck for a better life. Separation between Grandma and child was indeed heart- rending. To keep a small, helpless child at home was tantamount to a bleak future.  To let a child go into the wide world on his own was full of unforeseen hazards. Grandma and the boy kept weeping at the heart-breaking prospect of separation. The hour of separation finally came.  With a small bundle containing some old  clothes slung on his back, the child and his Grandma sat listlessly outside the house, awaiting the boat to  arrive.  From time to time, Grandma would send the boy to the riverside to see whether the boat had come. When the boy came back and shook his head, Grandma would again collect the boy into her arms and covered his face with kisses while her tears would trickle uncontrollably down her wrinkled cheeks like streams. Finally the boat came to take the boy away on his  unknown quest for a better life in the U.S.  There was one final hug. Both Grandma and the child were too  overcome with emotions to speak any words. Only the chests of the two were seen heaving up and down uncontrollably.  Both might hope for a reunion sometime in the future. But such happiness would forever elude them. Grandma followed Keung Chai to the riverside, limping all the way. The boy was distress-stricken at the imminent separation from Grandma, who was all the world to him.  From time to time, Grandma pressed the boy’s hand to cheer him up. ‘The world is before you, my child,’ she said gently.  ‘Work hard and be kind.  You’re  sure to have a promising future in the States. Don’t bother about me. I’m old but I’m only too glad to see you well settle down in a happy land. Take this to heart: your happiness means the whole world to me, my dear.’  So saying, they soon found themselves at the riverside, where the boat was awaiting.  Keung Chai stepped on to the boat, wiping away tears with the back of his hand. Grandma was at pains to fight back tears and force a smile to encourage the boy, summoning all her willpower to suppress her misgivings about the possible eternal farewell. The boat was now slowly steering away with Keung Chai  standing on the prow waving goodbye to Grandma. ‘Take good care of yourself, Grandma. I’ll send you word as soon as I arrive,’ the boy shouted at the top of his voice. Grandma was rooted at the riverside, waving back to the boy. They kept waving to each other until the boat vanished into a dot over the horizon.


Grandma tore herself home from the riverside, aided by one or two fellow villagers. She kept oscillating between hope and distress. At one moment, she was hopeful. She pictured  to herself  that Keung Chai would make his way upward in life and she would be so proud of him. But the next moment would see her plunge into the nadir of despair: after all, the path forward for the boy was only too uncertain.  Very soon weeks turned into months and months into years but still there was no news whatsoever from Keung Chai. Every afternoon, at the expected time when the postman would pass the village, Grandma would  seat herself outside the house longing for the postman to appear. She would be lighted up with hope when she saw the postman from afar.  Her heart  kept pounding violently.  ‘Let there be something from Keung  Chai this time,’  she prayed. Her eyes would go wild with expectation.  But every time, she was let down. Her hope of the day  was shattered.   The postman seemed to be able to read her mind. He said kindly, ‘ No, Grandma.  There may be good news tomorrow.’  Grandma forced a smile and looked her thanks.  She turned back into lonely house and wept bitter tears: the hope of the day was once more shattered.  Day after day the same process would be repeated. Oppressed by old age and tormented with a broken heart, Grandma soon passed into eternity. With her passing, the house soon crumpled and fell into ruins. There was an eerie silence about the place. Occasional passers-by would point to the house and sigh, ‘Providence was so cruel to the kind old lady and her innocent Keung Chai. What have they done to deserve this miserable fate?’ Equally eerie was the mystery surrounding Keung Chai’s  whereabouts. Did he make it to the U.S. despite the hazardous voyage?  Was he  drowned in the sea? Was he kidnapped and trafficked to some unknown place? The answer is anybody’s guess. The truth of the matter is that  Keung Chai  has never been heard of anymore since the day he boarded the boat that was supposed to take him to the U.S.  There is so much sadness about the story. Misfortunes associated with poverty were rife in those days. Grandma and Keung Chai’s  story is not unique: similar stories abound, as handed down from my parents. They all attest to one  common culprit:  stark poverty, which forces men to try all means to better their lot. In their struggles against adversity, courage and perseverance, though of utmost importance, may not alone help them come off triumphant :  some favour from Providence is essential. But how Providence presents itself  in your favour defies human understanding. It is intangible, invisible and its existence cannot be verified by science. Somehow you feel that it exists in this world in one form or another. Again, why some people are well- favoured by Providence  while  some fare badly is another problematic issue. It is independent of character. ‘God’s will will be done.’ That, perhaps, should be our attitude in dealing with human affairs which in many cases defy explanations or logic and boil down to mysticism. In the case of Keung Chai, had things gone according to plan, a different story might have been handed down to posterity. But their plan didn’t materialize and sadness ensued. There is no lack of similar sad stories of lifelong separation, disappearance, decay, death, hard labour and wretched lives exerted on the Toishanese through extreme poverty, as recounted by the village elders.

Further down the alley from Grandma and Keung Chai’s  house – round the village corner facing the river – there stood another ruined house overgrown with wild grass. Some of the walls had crumbled. The doors were all half broken. Wild dogs ran in and out of the house through the broken doors, rummaging around for food. The house was infested with rats, cockroaches, snakes and other harmful insects. An eeriness reigned inside the house. Village people dreaded approaching the house. They would quicken their steps when their way led them past the house. Yet don’t forget that it was once a brand-new home for a couple, newlywed. Ah Ying, a young bride of 20, was from a neighbouring village. The bridegroom, Ah Ming, was two years her senior and made a living by selling home-grown vegetables in the marketplace. Life was quiet and peaceful for the young couple. They loved each other dearly though in those days arranged marriage was the norm. Happiness does not necessarily involve wealth as a prerequisite. Ah Ying and Ah Ming, though leading a humble life, were by far happier than most who lived in more affluent circumstances.  They found great solace in each other’s love. They were the envy of the village. We all yearn for a life of peace and contentment. But humanity seldom triumphs over the attraction of wealth and  prosperity. Gradually,  Ah Ming found out that some fellow villagers were getting better and better in their financial circumstances through receiving remittances from their relatives in foreign countries, especially the U.S.  He began discussing with Ah Ying, ‘We would most likely end up living a poor life by continuing with our present circumstances. You can see some of our fellow villagers are becoming more and more well-off through receiving remittances from their relatives abroad. Why don’t we do the same? I’m young and as capable as many other people. Let me go to the U.S. Once I  get a footing there, I’ll send you over and we’ll  have a happily- ever-after. Ah Ying, being a simple-minded girl, was very much delighted at the prospect of a grand future in the U.S. – the Gold Mountain, as it was generally called at the time.  To undergo the pain of a short separation from her beloved would pale in comparison with the promise of a happily-ever- after. So it was arranged that Ah Ming would leave for the U.S. in quest for a promising future as soon as a ticket for the ocean-going vessel was available. But alas! Just like the case of Keung Chai, Ah Ming was never heard of again once he left the village and his young wife. What had actually happened to him was again  anybody’s guess. There were rumours that he had fallen into bad company when he landed at the Chinatown in San Francisco. He took to drinking and gambling and soon ruined himself. Chinatown was a den of vices at the time. Many a young lad from China was led astray and ended up in wretchedness. The aspiration for a beautiful life in the U.S. vanished into thin air. Meanwhile, back at home Ah Ying languished at the long absence of Ah Ming.  She was pining away. Hope turned into anxiety and anxiety translated into desperation, which was far worse than destitution.  Ah Ying, a young bride of 20, had practically become a widow with Ah Ming’s mysterious disappearance in the U.S. Soon she passed into  middle age and looked much more aged than her real age. She died of a broken heart long before she reached her old age. The house, like the one once occupied by Keung Chai and his  Grandma, soon grew desolate and fell into ruins. Houses without a human presence usually share the same fate : when a house is inhabited, cooking and other human activities keep it vibrant. It is kept clean and well maintained. When it is deserted, moisture and dust would set in. Insect infestations soon arrive in their wake and that spells its demise. Ruined houses dotting the villages here and there in Toishan all tell more or less a similar story like that of Keung Chai or that of Ah Ming. Sad stories certainly they were. Yet in the same village, you will also see grand houses filled with fruit trees and hear the merry laughters of children within. These are prosperous households. They are prosperous through the good fortune of their loved ones making a successful life in the U.S.  They are not necessarily superior to Keung Chai and  Ah Ming. But one thing they excel over  Keung Chai and Ah Ming is that they are better favoured by fortune. That’s why they prosper, to the great joy of their families while  Keung Chai and Ah Ming failed to make their way in the world, bringing their families into ruin. Thus within the same village, decay and regeneration stand in stark contrast to each other, attesting to the vicissitudes of human fate.

– End of story –

Continue reading “Deserted Rural Houses”

The Ordinary as a Test of Freedom

I meet my brother for lunch every week. I tap a heart to my beloved. I scroll through my photo album and notice faces I haven’t seen in years. And then it hits me—how quickly time has passed, how quietly distances form, how easily a life can drift without anyone meaning to drift. In that moment, “catching up” stops being a casual intention and becomes a kind of urgency: not panic, but recognition.


None of this proves anything metaphysical. It doesn’t need to. These are ordinary gestures—small, repeatable, almost effortless on the surface—and yet they carry real consequence. They’re shaping my life. When you’re struggling to name a grand purpose, meaning doesn’t arrive as an answer from the outside; it shows up as something you ‘do’: a pattern of chosen commitments that you keep returning to.


A weekly lunch is not just a meal; it’s a decision to remain in someone’s life. A heart icon is not just a symbol; it’s a renewal of attention—brief, but intentional. Reaching out to an old friend is a refusal to let time turn everything valuable into “back then.” These acts matter because they push back against the inert pull of days that would otherwise run on autopilot. In a world that won’t guarantee significance, they are the way you carved out so that you can say to yourself:  something ‘counts’.


And once something matters, your actions are no longer merely personal preferences. They become a form of alignment: you begin to live in accordance with what you believe in —relationship, loyalty, care, memory, presence. That alignment brings a quiet sense of duty, not as moral theatre, but as a lived seriousness: ‘this is worth showing up for; this is worth maintaining’.  Not because the universe demands it, but because you do—and because a life without such chosen obligations can start to feel like it’s dissolving into sound and fury.


These aren’t grand gestures arguing for cosmic significance. They’re ordinary rhythms, almost forgettable. Yet they carry weight precisely because they’re chosen without guarantee. You choose them because you know that’s what gives you meaning.


In a world that won’t explain itself, these repeated acts become anchors. Not because they solve the question. They’re the practical ground of meaning itself: small initiations that keep you from surrendering to indifference, and that give your finite time a direction you can stand behind.

Where Imagination  First Met Truth

When I was a kid, my brother used to buy me English and Chinese storybooks and simplified versions of classic novels. From the very beginning, I found myself opening out into new worlds through those pages. They captivated my young mind in a way I couldn’t fully explain then. These weren’t just books I read and set aside—they were places I entered, spaces where my imagination stretched and my sense of reality quietly expanded.
Only later did I realize how much they were shaping me.

I still remember some of those stories. Robinson Crusoe was one of the first. A man alone on an island, figuring things out day by day. Back then, it felt like pure adventure. Now, I see it as a lesson in resilience and imagination. It showed me that even in isolation, the mind keeps working, keeps building meaning, keeps going.

The Mill on the Floss stayed with me in a quieter way. Maggie’s inner conflicts made me aware, very early on, that life isn’t simple and that people often carry invisible struggles. That story taught me how to sit with complexity, how to feel for someone without needing clear answers. I think that’s where empathy first began for me.


Greek mythology opened an entirely different door. Gods and mortals, fate and choice, beauty and tragedy—all of it expanded my sense of wonder. Those stories in the later stages of my life stretched my vision of reality. They didn’t pull me away from the real world; they widened it. The imagined situations pushed the frontiers of what I thought reality could be, showing me that truth can live inside symbols, myths, and stories passed down across time.


These works weren’t just creating worlds of imagination. They were quietly showing me how writing itself can be a way of seeking truth. Even when the stories were fictional, the emotions felt real. Through characters’ doubts, mistakes, longings and their struggles, I learned that truth isn’t always found in facts—it’s found in experience, shaped by story.


Somewhere along the way, I began to want to write. Not with a clear goal or ambition, but with a feeling. Writing felt like a way to understand things I couldn’t explain yet, a way to ask questions I didn’t have answers for. Imagination and truth no longer felt separate to me. One led naturally to the other.


What I understand now is that my brother gave me more than books. He gave me a way of seeing. Those early stories expanded my reality, shaped my inner world, and gently pointed me toward writing as a form of truth-seeking and thus immortality.


I may not remember every plot or every line now, but I remember what those books gave me. And that, in a quiet way, has stayed with me ever since.

A Second Existence – Epilogue  to ‘The Day That Wouldn’t Turn’

All stories are rooted in reality.

This story emerges from one of those early memories that lodge themselves in the mind like a splinter—small, nearly forgotten, yet somehow never fully dissolving. I was about seven years old, in Primary Two in Hong Kong, 1967. Our English teacher was Miss Lee, a young woman whose exact age I couldn’t gauge through a child’s eyes, where all adults existed in that vague territory of “grown-up.” Looking back now, she was likely in her twenties—barely begun.

One day, she simply wasn’t there anymore. The classroom door opened to a substitute, and Miss Lee’s absence stretched from days into permanence. Then came the whisper that travelled through our school in that mysterious way news reaches children: she had taken her own life. I cannot recall now who told us or how we came to know. The official story was sparse: young teacher, tragic decision, life cut short. Details, if any, have worn away like text on old paper.  But  sparse stories haunt  precisely where they omit. 

It was my first  encounter with mortality though to a seven- year old, death was abstract and incomprehensible —something that happened elsewhere, to others. Miss Lee hadn’t been close enough to trigger immediate grief in a child’s heart. She was simply our teacher, a figure at the blackboard, a voice reading stories. Yet her absence left something behind, a kind of shadow that has never quite lifted.

For many years, I carried the convenient explanation: a young woman who took her own life at her prime must have died for love. It was the story that made immediate sense, the narrative that required no further questions. When tragedy strikes someone so impossibly young, we tend to reach for the familiar plot—the failed romance, the broken heart, the love that destroyed rather than saved. I viewed her story from this assumption, because the idea that dying for a love that failed, however banal, offered a framework that made the incomprehensible seem comprehensible.

But as years accumulated and I grew more nuanced in my understanding of the complexity of human condition, this neat explanation began to feel like another form of silencing. Life resists singular explanations. A person is never just one story, one disappointment, one unbearable weight. She was a twenty something lady — old enough to have accumulated layers of frustration, aspiration, suffocation and longing that had nothing to do with just romantic love. Perhaps she was crushed  by the weight of others’ expectations, by a future that seemed to be a corridor with no doors. Perhaps it was the specific exhaustion of being brilliant with nowhere to apply that brilliance, or being seen only as what she could never fully be.

The truth is, I’ll never know the precise calculus of her decision. But in growing older myself, I’ve learned that reducing her to a love story was my child-mind’s way of organizing chaos—and then my adult mind’s lazy acceptance of that childhood framework. The real gift fiction offers isn’t the ability to solve her mystery with a convenient plot, but to acknowledge the mystery’s true dimensions: that a life can be unbearable in ways that have nothing to do with romance, that despair can accumulate from a thousand small refusals rather than one dramatic rejection, that sometimes the story we tell about someone’s death says more about our need for comprehension than about their actual experience.

Over the decades, this memory –  if memory is even the right word for something that time has dissolved into imagination –  has settled into the sediment of my consciousness, mixing with other losses, other moments when life revealed its fragility. The specifics of Miss Lee herself—her face, her voice, the particular way she held chalk or turned pages—have faded beyond recovery. What remains is not her portrait but something more elemental: an early understanding that lives can simply stop, that young women with their whole futures ahead can choose to step out of time entirely.

I find myself calculating sometimes: she would be in her eighties now had she lived. All those unlived decades accumulate into a kind of shadow existence, a parallel life that never was. In Hong Kong’s relentless forward motion, her story was quickly paved over, but something in me refused to let her disappear completely.

I’ve borrowed the shape of my seven-year-old bewilderment and wrapped it in fiction, creating a ghost who waits in that flat, suspended between departure and arrival. Because that’s what haunts me still—not just her death, but all those interrupted possibilities, the thesis never defended, the pupils never taught, the life never fully lived.

Fiction cannot resurrect the dead, but it can offer them what history denied: complexity, interiority, voice. In imagining Sylvia’s ghost, I’ve given Miss Lee a space to exist beyond the verdict of her final action—not to excuse or explain, but to insist on her fullness as a person who was more than her ending.

She can therefore be given  a second life in the reconstructed reality of a story. And perhaps that’s the power of fiction: to create parallel realities where different laws govern what’s possible. You might argue that,  as with Bryony’ s alternate ending  in Atonement,  these reconstructed lives and possibilities are self-delusion—comfortable lies we tell ourselves about permanence and loss. But here’s what unsettles me: I’m not sure our own sense of existence is any more “real” than the reality we create for the dead in stories. We live inside narratives too—the stories we tell  ourselves about who we are, why we matter, what our lives mean. Our consciousness is already a kind of fiction-making machine, constantly constructing coherent narratives from the chaos of experience. We’re all , in a sense, fictional characters under our own self-authored stories.

This story, then, is my attempt at what the living owe: to tell a story for someone who can no longer speak, to imagine her not as tragedy but as a complete consciousness, still waiting to be understood. In giving her fictional form, I haven’t changed what happened, but I’ve changed how she’s allowed to exist in memory—not as a cautionary tale or a tragic statistic, but as a woman who lived, who struggled, who mattered, and who deserves more than silence.

The Day That Wouldn’t Turn: A Short Story


The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
—Czesław Miłosz


I got off the bus into the early dark. That particular November dusk already filled with a cool sensation. A woman stood still  beneath the amber streetlight.  Leaves from the trees that lined the street dropped and brushed past her hair and  shoulders. They had clung  to their branches until with a quiet resolve, they finally let go –  drifting past her before resting on the ground softly, waiting for the wind to carry them somewhere. She looked at me as if we had agreed to meet and  I hadn’t remembered.


“Would you come with me?” she  beckoned  in a tone so soft that I could hardly hear it. 

As if under a spell, I heard myself say yes and followed her.  At the time, I didn’t know why there was  none of the usual calculations and hesitations that rise when a stranger asks too much too quickly.  I could hear  only my footsteps as  the leaves crackled under them. Perhaps I was too conscious of my own.


She led me farther from the bus stop, away from the constellation of  neon lights on Shaukiwan  Road.  We continued  until the city’s bluster  and din faded behind us.   Before I knew it, we were  walking past a row of dimly lit Hong Kong cafés, their neon signs flickering in the humid air. Through fogged windows, I glimpsed marble tables, red vinyl stools, and ceiling fans turning lazily above the haze of cigarette smoke. From an old radio came the ghostly strains of Cantonese opera—music from another time. The aura was eerily familiar.    It felt as though we had stepped into the Hong Kong of my childhood.

As we turned into a narrow alley,  an old worn building surfaced from the dark,   its concrete  the colour of weak tea;  balconies rusted, laundry lines hanging slack. I recognized the type immediately—a post-war tenement like the one I’d grown up in, the kind still sheltering families in some run-down areas today. But this one stood strangely isolated, a solitary block with no neighbours, as if the city had receded around it like a tide. She looked up at a single window that framed a faint yellow light.


“So… it’s your home?” I asked, needing something – anything – to fill the silence between us.

“I keep a place,” she said. “It keeps me.”

That’s where I … she paused before she uttered  ‘live’, looking up at that lit window.  In the immensity of the dark, there was no mistaking it; every other unit was a blind eye.

The entrance to the mansion smelled musty with a hint of rust. No bulb burned.  I felt my way up a wooden spiral.  The banister was worn  smooth with the polish of hands that, as I would later find out,  had long stopped coming home. I was about to turn my phone light on as I was ascending. But she stopped me.   Please don’t , her voice  slightly trembled . The staircase was too narrow  to  permit us to walk abreast. I followed her, with each  stair groaning under my weight.  I was curious though why hers were accepted with its stoical silence .


At the top, her hand hovered near the latch of an rusty iron gate.  It’s a bit nippy inside, she warned.


The door creaked open. A small dining room awaited inside, lit by a weak bulb  that struggled against the darkness. I could see her more clearly now. She looked in her early twenties—her complexion pale, her eyes touched with sorrow. She was so pale  she might have been formed from the weak light itself.   She was wearing  a pink coat over a floral, knee-length skirt, the kind of style my mother and her contemporaries would wear in her young days.  Most of the time, she gazed towards the window, as if searching for something far beyond it.
I wonder how the world outside is now, she mused. 
You may well step out and feel it yourself,  I was going to say.  But I held back, surmising that she looked so sickly  that she must have been too frail to go outside.  Yes, it’s a bit chilly outside. I said. I knew  I’d said something  irrelevant.  She  pressed herself against the window for sometime. She then left her face off the window. The window  did not leave any steam as if  she was holding her breath while she was looking. 


Your dress, I said, looking at the careful pleats and  the modest hem. It looks belonging to  another era.


Really? She glanced at the mirror as if noticing it for the first time in years.


No one dresses like that anymore, I said gently.
I suppose fashions change. How long has it been?  She smoothed the fabric with pale fingers.

She turned  her eyes to the wall above the table.
A photograph in a rosewood frame hangs on the wall. It captures a young woman in her early twenties. She stands in a park, framed by a profusion of flowers, her hands loosely folded as she smiles toward something beyond the camera’s view. Her image, in her pink dress and light windbreaker,  create a relief against  the surrounding azaleas, lending balance to the composition. The sunlight falls across her right cheek, forming a small, luminous highlight that draws attention to her calm, youthful face. Her unblemished complexion  and bright clear eyes exude a freshness that unmistakably only belongs to the very young.  Perhaps because there is a breeze stirring her hair, sending soft waves across her shoulders, she gently restrains with her hand  a few strands from drifting free. Her body leans lightly against the trunk of a nearby tree, giving the pose an easy, unforced grace. Her smile captures a quiet, fleeting moment of natural warmth.


I took this in the Botanical Garden in the autumn of 1966, she touched the photograph.  I sensed an uncanny moment as I looked between the image and the woman beside me. They were the same. Not similar,  not  resembling, but the same.  The same pink coat, the same angle of the shoulders, the same tilt to her chin—only much paler now, perhaps the years had slowly drained the colour from her while leaving everything else untouched. It was as though she’d stepped out of that silver halide a moment ago and spent decades trying to find her way back into the frame.

The room suddenly felt unmoored from reality. Where was I? More importantly—who was it that was sitting across from me? The girl from the photograph who never  ages past that distant  autumn of 1966, or something that had simply borrowed her shape and refused to let it change?


Are you afraid of me? Perhaps she had noticed that I was shivering. Yet the  profound sorrow in her face stirred something gentler in me, softening my fear before it could take hold.

No, not really. I composed myself.


As she moved towards the window, I took the moment to survey the place. It had the stillness of a held breath. Navy blue paint peeled from the walls in long strips, exposing patches of gray plaster underneath. On the dresser, an old wind-up clock sat silent, its key still protruding from the back, hands frozen at some forgotten hour. A lamp with a yellowed shade cast dim light over a small table which held its arrangement like a museum display —a teacup with dried residue forming rings inside, a pair of glasses folded over a newspaper, a bowl with three wrapped coconut sweets, all coated with a thin film of dust.


You want to…. tell me a story? I asked, trying to establish why she wanted me to come with her.


If I doubted anything about reality, it’s never that reality had deserted us. This WAS reality now: The flat. The woman. The clock. The table and its things.   Actually, everything within these walls. This was what was real—so why should I trouble myself with my own idea of it? I’d completely lost track of what that “reality” was supposed to be anyway. Whatever order of reality this was, it had become the only one that mattered. And I, through my deepening entanglement with this place, felt myself becoming part of the reality the flat contained—as if this was where I’d always been meant to be.


I was no longer afraid.


On the wall, a calendar showed  the 13th  of July 1967.
The calendar has held that date for as long as anyone remembers, she said. it hasn’t  been turned ever since .

I didn’t die here, she added.


Where then? I asked, confused.


Her eyes moved to the window. The sash was painted shut, sealed by decades of humidity and neglect. That window hasn’t opened since the 13th July . I walked to Sai Wan Ho Jetty on that day. There’s a small stretch of water there, away from the main harbour traffic. That’s where I went in. Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if describing a routine errand. But afterwards, I found myself back here. This was my home.  Her gaze drew mine  back to the calender.  Everything about me ended and began all in the same day.


A silence fell between us. My gaze drifted around the unchanged room and caught on something I hadn’t noticed before—a clothesline stretched from wall to wall. A single floral shirt hung there, arms spread slightly as if mid-gesture, the fabric holding the ghost of a shape. The print had faded but I could still make out small blue flowers against what was once white.

She followed my gaze. I wore that on my last day.

By this time, I already felt at ease with her and felt at home to ask more. She sat down at the table, running her fingers along its worn edge.

People say I died for love, she said. It makes the story simple. It fits neatly into their desire of hearing a tragic romance.  She looked at me. But it wasn’t just him. It was everything the waiting turned me into.


She told me about how she fell in love with a young man. He promised he would come back from his study overseas, —perhaps in one year, he said. At first the letters came thick and eager. Then they thinned, like a season fading. Then nothing. Hers went out into the void.

His name doesn’t matter anymore, she said. What happened to me was bigger than a name.

I had a life of my own to live. Her tone grew more certain as she continued.  I taught primary school to save money to go to a university abroad. I  had to tend to my aging mother and look after my little brother. I waited for my opportunity.  I waited for his return.  Over the years, that life turned out to be one of waiting, hoping and eventually disenchantment.    The waiting was just one thread woven through all the rest.


The things on the table chimed in with their testimony. A rejection letter from the University of London, —the paper yellowed at the edges but the words still sharp. Two tickets for West Side Story, the show date two months past, never used. A stack of pupils’ exercises she’d been marking, red pen still uncapped beside them. An unfinished lesson plan for teaching the alphabet, the letters A through M carefully illustrated; the rest left  forever waiting. Amidst all this lay a scrap of notepad paper on which was written in a steady and careful hand: prepare pills for mother.

Every day was full. She continued: But full of things that led nowhere. I was always preparing for a life that kept being postponed.

I spent my life waiting. At first, I knew what I was waiting for: His return, the day when I could have saved enough money for university, the results of applications. And then year after year, I lost focus. It all blurred into a dull sensation,  waiting with no specific goal.  It just became a dreary game of waiting,   yet I felt compelled  to wait. As for waiting for what, I was no longer sure. She looked away, her voice fading.
Instead of letters coming from him,  rumours found her.   Some said he had fallen ill. Some said he had stayed overseas, married there. Someone swore they saw him back in the city, thinner, changed, a quick shadow near the tram stop.

I waited for years, she murmured. When footsteps came down the corridor, my heart quickened. Could it be him? But the doorbell never rang with that particular visitor she had been expecting —a slim young man with hair parted to the right, who would say her name and pull her into his embrace.


She paused, then again: Waiting became the role everyone gave me. At first, I told myself stories— He’ll come back soon, I’d whisper to my reflection.  Just save a bit more money, then apply to university again. But my mother had other plans. You must wait until your brother grows up, she would say. A daughter’s duty is to family, not books. So I waited for my brother to finish school. Waited for enough savings. Waited for life to somehow rearrange itself into what I wanted it to be. Each year, another reason to postpone. Another obligation. And he—the one who never wrote, never returned— became just one more thing in a long list of things that would never come.


By the time I finally understood he wasn’t coming back, it didn’t matter anymore. The role had already been written for me. One word: Wait.  Then there was another voice inside me gathering momentum:  Sylvia, you can break it. Now,  I know what I should do. She said calmly, and I could hear in her voice that fatal moment of clarity—when the path forward had suddenly revealed itself.


I didn’t die for a man, she said firmly. I refused the life that made waiting my whole identity.


She told me about her childhood—growing up in a modest family  where her younger brother always came first, no matter what she achieved. Her father didn’t  particularly like working; responsibilities slid off him and onto everyone else. But she cherished small joys too: a stray cat that chose their doorstep, the triumph when her first loaf of bread rose properly in the oven. And that first Christmas ball at school when she was 16—she wore a blue floral dress and when a boy asked her to dance, she felt something shift inside her, some door opening onto a different possible life.
Those were the little stories, she said, the threads in the fabric. But they felt like sparks—bright for a breath, then gone into the dark.

She had been keeping diaries —years of them—and a bundle of the man’s letters. I threw them away. They all contained an agonising voice of a life that clamour for fulfillment yet being dragged by indefinite waiting.   When I decided to define my life on my own terms, I let them go. Each entry pinned me to a day I didn’t want to live in anymore. When I burned them , I felt a tremendous sense of letting go, symbolic if not actual.

I asked if that brief liberation might have prepared her for what was to come. 


Sort of,   she said softly. I still felt crushed by the gravity of the present. The diaries were the first refusal. Death was the only thing left that I could choose .

On  the 13th of  July, the feeling that had been humming for years gathered itself. Everything she had postponed stood around her at once, and all the doors she’d been promised were still shut. It was as if a black circle opened in the middle of the room, made from every “not yet” she had ever obeyed.

It wasn’t a rushed decision, she said. I stepped into it – she stressed the word –  refusing to keep orbiting a life that never let me begin.

I missed my chances, she whispered, and a tear rolled down her cheek. I was cut off in my prime. I lost the chance to find out what living feels like over a long stretch. Maybe even to learn what a love that lasts actually is.

Maybe, I said.  You might have suffered more by living. Or less.  But who knows?  We only guess what other lives  could have been for us.

She smiled. You’re saying there might have been lives I saved myself from without knowing?

I’m saying none of us gets the full accounting. Most lives are patchwork anyway, and whatever warmth we find comes from the stitching itself, from creating meaning for your present.


She was  silent again. But I had tried, she said.

She glanced at the calendar. And this? What do you call this?

A life with one day kept, I said. Not wasted— just a different way of becoming.  You spent everything you had to preserve that single moment, that exact point you ended your life.

She was quiet for a moment. I missed the chance to grow old. To watch those pupils become adults with their own pupils to mark. And to see if the city would change or if I would.


Perhaps by freezing yourself that day, it’s not so much the dramatic moments you would have missed as… that gentle erosion and shaping that comes from everyday life. Like an artist’s kneading, you know? Small things—hair going gray, hands that know their work, that favourite teacup that gets worn smooth where your thumb rests. The window where you’d watch the same trees turn green, then brown, year after year. Everything in between.


Yes. And more, she said. I missed the chance to forgive, she continued with the words coming harder now. To forgive him for not returning. To forgive myself for waiting. Maybe forgiveness only comes with time, and I didn’t give myself enough.

Do you regret it? I asked.

The question seemed to fill the room. She didn’t answer. The silence stretched until it became its own reply: some choices are beyond regret. They simply are what happened, the path the story took.

Why tell me all this? I asked.
I need someone to know I existed—that our love was real, even if it ended in shadow. That I once lived  with a throbbing heart.  Please write that I did not succumb to frustration. Write that I refused to live by the script life handed me. I didn’t accept the part.
She looked at me directly. Write that my story isn’t that of  Ophelia floating downstream with her flowers. I chose to leave—I just never got all the way gone.


Never got all the way gone? I echoed, not quite understanding.


I’m caught, she said, her voice steady but distant. Too far from life to return, not far enough gone to reach whatever comes after. Suspended in the space between my  memory and the next world’s threshold—like a door that won’t quite close. Her words made me think of the Haunted Mansion’s ballroom scene in Disneyland—spirits locked in an endless waltz, circling through dusty air and faded music. Like her, they were caught in a single moment stretched into forever, performing the same steps in the half-light between worlds.


People like to box me into a neat romance that failed—a pretty tragedy with a moral attached.  But I’m not a cautionary tale. I was a person.

So you’ll write my story? She looked at me, almost beggingly.

Her expectations weighed on me like a coat I hadn’t asked to wear but couldn’t refuse. This was no longer just about a young woman long forgotten by history. Her story had become something else to me now—a debt between the living and the dead, a responsibility I hadn’t sought but recognized. Perhaps it was the way she’d walked me through those collapsed decades, showing me how thin the membrane was between her 1967 and my present 2025. Or perhaps it was simpler: she had no one else to ask, and I was the only one who’d followed her up those stairs, the only one who’d sat in her unchanged apartment and conversed with her – though anyone reading this may think it mere  imagination.

And perhaps most importantly —though I can’t quite  explain it—I felt sure I’d met her when I was small. The memory wouldn’t come clear, only the conviction that somewhere in my childhood’s blurred landscape, she’d been there.  The obligation felt both ancient and immediate—the old contract between witness and testimony. She’d chosen me, or time had chosen me for her, to carry what remained of the 13th July , 1967, back into the world of the living.
How  then could I refuse the dead their only request?


Yes, I will. I promised.


Thank you. And those were her last words.


Whereupon she got paler almost to the point I started to be struggling to distinguish her from the weakening   amber light. Her form grew fainter, as if the telling itself were a key turning. The house listened once more, then let go.

Silence settled. In the mirror, only my own face looked back. Outside, the autumn wind stirred the leaves with nothing but its own voice.  When I looked back the flat, the lamp that had burned for fifty-eight years went dark.

I stepped out carrying her story. Only then did I understand why she had chosen me: I, too, had my waiting hours—for a love that had left, for a life that would not arrive. Her warning was simple: waiting is not a life.
By morning, the old building was gone. The site stood empty—truly empty—for the first time since 1967. Perhaps that was her peace: not in death, not in the long vigil, but in being seen at last—remembered without the myth, carried forward without the neat bow of a moral.

I thought of the small things she’d wanted: the harbour at dusk, the steady tide, the children growing, the gray that comes honestly. I promised, out loud to no one, to choose one unglamorous act of living each day and to call it by its name.


She was weightless in every physical sense—a woman made of memory and air. Yet she’d been pinned to this place since that calender date by something heavier than any living body: the need to be known, to be remembered, to have someone say : yes, you were here and listened to.
Somewhere – if there is a somewhere – she should now feel lighter for having been told.

And somewhere closer, the part of me that kept a chair for what never arrived got up, switched on a new light, and began to write. Through the writing, the gray man at the present, the woman who never ages past 1967, and that child in a classroom sixty years ago became part of the same story—though which one of us was telling it, I could no longer say.

Written on 25 December  2025

(Epilogue to follow in the next post)

Escaping the Illusion of Infinite Choices

Have you ever opened Netflix, spent 20 minutes scrolling, and then… just closed the app? Yeah. Same. At this point, I think I’ve spent more time choosing what to watch than actually watching anything.

It’s funny—we live in a world overflowing with choices.  The gamut of cereal.  Different kinds of milk (oat, almond, soy, cashew… I can’t keep up). An endless  list of job adverts. In my case, a hundred book titles   my friends swear you ‘must’  read, or a Google search would recommend you. You’d think all these options would make life better, right?

Well… maybe. But it ain’t always a yes.


There’s this idea in philosophy and psychology called “the paradox of choice”, which basically says: the more options we have, the more overwhelmed we feel. And honestly? That checks out. Just yesterday, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to choose a book from google search. Yes, just a book. Sounds like not that big deal. But I ended up spending the amount of search time that I would have used to do other more interesting things. But that’s what it was. 

Here’s what’s wild: having more options feels like freedom, but it can also feel like pressure. If you have only two choices and you pick the wrong one, you shrug it off. But with 200 choices? Suddenly you start thinking, “What if I missed the perfect one? What if I chose wrong? What if my soulmate book is sitting on page two of search results?”

And that’s where things get interesting. It’s not just about book choices. Choice shapes how we see ourselves. What we pick becomes part of our life, our identity —and that makes choosing feel bigger than it really is.

But let’s be honest: oftentimes, we don’t need the perfect option. We just need one that works. Still, something in us loves to agonize over tiny decisions as if we’re philosophers contemplating the meaning of life.

So I’m curious—what’s the last thing you overthought way too much? 
A pair of shoes? A restaurant? A phone avatar? (No judgment. I’ve changed my avatar three times this week.)

Here’s what helps me when I’m stuck in Decision Overload Land: 
• limit the number of options I’ll even look at 
• give myself a time limit (surprisingly effective!) 
• accept that “good enough” is… well, good enough  and jump right into it with a leap of faith.

Because maybe the goal isn’t to find the perfect choice. 
Maybe it’s just to enjoy the choice we make.
What do you think?

Are you a “decide in 5 seconds” person or a “compare every grain of rice” person? I’d genuinely love to know.


P.S. And honestly, in our age of endless information, this whole “paradox of choice” hits even harder. We’re constantly nudged into this myth of option meaning freedom —when half the time, it just means more stress. The good news? We do have agency. Sometimes the most powerful choice is simply refusing to get sucked into the endless scroll of possibilities.