Mosquito

CLARISSA TAN
Dec 05, 2009
*Special to asia!
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I hate you, mosquito.

You satanic whirr-monger, you perfidious zig-zagger. You slayer of sleep, puncturer of peace, impaler of thought. You most literal of blood-suckers, who do not have even the courage or imagination to aspire toward metaphor. I hate you most of all because you have droned into my consciousness, squatted on my very writings.

If you were to go extinct tomorrow, it would not be soon enough for me.

 

Land

December 4, 2009

It’s amazing how we limit ourselves. We are like farmers with thousands upon thousands of acres, but who are content to cultivate only a little patch of land, spuriously tending to the sub-plot of our souls.

We are afraid to see life in all its variegations – its pleasures and sorrows and jealousies and spite and richness and cravenness and kindness and tedium and horror and bliss; it’s different kinds of love. We prefer safety. We want rules and regulations.

But today, I looked across the fields and thought – I want it all back.

 

Thread

December 3, 2009

There’s this thread I seem to have known once, and that I now feel as the slimmest of strings, a shivering wisp of the golden line that lets us into this world. I lose it often; I go for days and forget it exists at all. Sometimes I grasp at straws.

But what if that’s fine? Perhaps all that is needed is a distant memory, and that we hold on tight.

I’m trying to remember what I came here for.

 

Leaf

December 2, 2009

When we started using tea bags, we lost our ability to see the future. We no longer had any leaves to read, any stories waiting for us at the bottom of the cup.

What mysteries we have lost, what infinite tales of probabilities, by packing life’s messiness into little sachets! How shortsighted we have become, to demand to view all potentialities through a triangular paper filter!

Somewhere there is a rubbish heap where all our tea bags go, piling ever higher and higher, soggy with the weight of our untold stories, our unsolved mysteries.

 

Fontainebleau

December 1, 2009

In the high summer, with a wind blowing, the boy and the girl walked in the castle grounds. They had just seen the interiors, the floors of Francois I, the bedchamber of Catherine, the waiting rooms of Napoleon.

Outside, there were fountains and a garden that stretched on forever and ever, across a perfect day, the sort where time stands still.

And then the girl shuddered, for she realized that they were walking through La Cour des Adieux, and she wondered – was this “goodbye”, or “till we meet again”, or merely “to the gods”?

 

clarissa tanClarissa is a journalist who focuses on travel and the arts. As a desperately hopeful author, she writes short stories and is working on a novel. Clarissa won the Spectator’s final Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing.

Contact Clarissa

www.clarissa-tan.com