Archive for April, 2006

I kept a pink coloured diary once, when I was seven years old. It was a 300-page blank book, with the sepia photograph of a dancer in ballerina's clothes on the cover. I kept the book for over five years, and I wrote many many funny things in it. Like how I have a mother and a father, and that I didn't have a dog, and that I wished that dad would buy me a dog too.

Sometimes I would come home from school and write about my best friend M, who gave me a piece of chocolate to munch on that day. In those days I didn't know how to spell the word 'munch', neither did I know how to spell 'chocolate', so I ended up saying 'my new best friend M give me a sweet today, it is very nice', errors courtesy of all the grammar that a seven year old kid could possess. In this diary, I was only seven years old for about 15 pages, after that there are drawings of strange human beings with heads too big for their bodies, or legs too thin to support the torsoes.

And then after several pages of rainbow sketching and fairy portraiting, I'm suddenly nine years old, with better Mandarin, and no English. When it was 1989 I wasn't very much of an English speaking kid, too many years of being trapped in an SJK does that to kids sometimes… today I distinctively remember my mom forcing me to not speak Mandarin in the house. In the pages where I am nine, I write about the funny thing the boy who sat beside me in class said to me, and that I thought he ought to take a bath in the morning before coming to school.

I'm twelve years old in the remaining pages, with no explanation of what happened when I was eight or ten or eleven. I'm speaking in a queer mix of English, Malay and Chinese, throwing around the words as if they were my second nature, and talking about the strange way my school's English teacher pronounced the word 'squirrel'. Or the time that I wonder whether I would be in the same school with my crush of the year after I left the SJK.

…

Today I found my very first diary, and today I remember that I had a crush of my own when I was 12 years old.

Maybe we girls start being 'hiao' at a very young age.

I read this and many questions popped up in my mind.

I think it's pretty obvious by now that I'm by nature a very conservative person. Some people consider me quite religious as well, but let's not dwell on that issue for now. But LMD's post did get me thinking, and I thought about a few scenarios that could have happened of course.

Sometimes I do think that I could really get a little loose around here, you know. Get explicit and all, talk about the things that happen in our lives that go beyond the usual necking and fondling. Obviously it's the kind of things that happen behind closed doors, but here again, I've got to reiterate this. We're by nature very conservative people, and I usually blush at the sight of naked people on TV.

Really.

What did I type there? Did I say necking?

OK I take that back.

But anyway, yes, I've been thinking about it. You know, I've learnt from people, experiences, listened to stories and gossips, about the sinful things that happen in our twenty-something yuppie-styled lives. It's not so innocent anymore. The kind of things that best-girl-pals can do, the strange happenings behind closed doors, that not-so-innocent smile you see that girl in the bar give this guy you know from work. The colleagues in the huge organization you used to work in, and the rumours that fly around the corners, that A is sleeping with B, that B used to fuck C. The things that happen that once upon a time, when you were younger, you thought they'd only happen on episodes of Ally McBeal.

Suddenly you're a living character in your very own episode of Sex In The City and you cannot help this, seriously, you eye your friends talking to each other and you wonder, 'Are they? Were they? Could they?'

…

So this one's for the women.

With many of your close friends being of the opposite gender, and with many of the topics you share being 'extra-sensitive' topics, which we usually regard as jokes (not so clean ones), did it ever occur to you that you could perhaps enjoy his presence, with a little bit more… spice?

Did you ever wonder?

Would you sleep with a friend?

…

Its easier for me to talk about this now that I'm openly loyal to a single partner only and proudly chaste (which I hope you believe). But before this, when I was single and not looking, yes of course, suddenly you start to wonder, what was that wink, was that a stare? And it's not even about being self-conscious.

Because there's no mistakening the longer lingering of his touch on your wrist, that look in his eyes when you look at each other, not smiling. There's no doubt to the meaning of the way he helps you put on your necklace, or the way he allows you to straighten his necktie for him. The single fleeting moment that you allowed him to play with the nooks and crannies of your ear, the times the platonic friend suddenly morphed into someone potentially possible, just because he bent over and helped you tie your shoelaces and allowed his fingers to rest around your ankle. Or that time when he leaned over and traced his finger across your neck, as he 'admired' the locket you were wearing, dangling a little lower than it normally would.

The guilty thing is, we've all been there before.