The Waiting Room

by Yi Feng Choo

Well, it doesn’t matter. This is special silk, very hard to make. You won’t be able to tear it, even if you try. Special how? Isn’t it just spider silk? It is made from children. Children? Yes, children who don’t grow old. Children’s hearts that have turned to silk, children’s heads that have been filled with fluffy cotton. Children like you and your little friend.

Some people come into your life, and you push, and fight, and hug, and when the tears have dried, you are haunted by the feeling that you won’t soon see them again.

Singapore was the creature that was woven from imagination and memory, and somehow still superseded both. A place of mystery and brevity.

I’m sunken down to my waist when I realise that it is not death that horrifies me in this lightless tunnel, but life, its want, the abhorrent excesses that arise out of a desperate need to sustain itself. A city, after all, is just a cesspit-in-waiting.

I magine with me what the experience of biological death might be like: a long sleep, an all-enveloping heaviness, a gentle and irreversible descent away from the world of light and into a mysterious, unknowable plane of darkness.

They were lost for words, while I, having lost a body, could only sit on one of the many vacant plastic chairs, feeling the cold of my undead flesh and skin, the unbreathing newness of my unmoving ribs, silently watching them grieve.

I’ve been feeling numb, in my skin. I don’t know how to explain it really, it’s like the person that I was before I was assaulted just shrivelled away, detaching itself from the periphery and leaving a wasteland as he retreated deeper and deeper into my core. I don’t know what I can do, or say, to bring him back out again, to fill out the frame of my being once more. I’ve just been feeling a lot of confusion. And anger, and irritation. I’ve always been the kind of person to put up walls around myself, but now the walls have grown spikes, and they poke and pierce my own flesh even as they enfold me and shut out the world.

But that did not stop others from trying to translate, and so they did. And in their trying clumsiness, they hurt her, for one of the many things she understood but they did not—in her daily task of forcing together parts that would not fit, twisting, tearing, excluding, destroying—was that all translations are acts of violence.

It would go on to swim intractable distances, covering kilometres upon kilometres in a single day, as she’d intended for it to do—a ship of sorts. There are things created to hold other things. A bumboat. A junkyard. A bungalow. A hearse. The plastic bag girl too, in a certain sense. Except that instead of germ cells, genomes and other broken translations of the old world, she had imagined her body to carry things far more intricate and beautiful.