Idol

I am very lucky, I think to myself, that I can float in and out of so many lives.

"Do you feel detached?," Idol asks me when he's finally warmed up. Idol is his name, really, not just during the season. Idol is the office friend of my first love Sui, whom I am visiting and whom I am about to confess the curse of my unforgotten and unspoken firstness of love (aka The Cannot Letting Go//The Monstrosity of Inarticulateness). Idol is bald and short and lean and has piercing eyes. I make Idol sound generic -- with a name like that, perhaps metaphoric -- but really, it's all true. He is far from a trope.

SUI GENERIS. SUI GENERIC?

Idol is an undeclared Renaissance man of the UN era -- diplomat's son, extracted from Malayan land of birth after just two weeks out of the womb. New York. London. Pro surfer. "I've been in entertainment." Scuba diver. Took a long time to warm up to me. And right now in our balcony conversation, requires very little sleep.

It wasn't a big deal, not even a snap, a mild irritation, but it was, it was the exasperation that made me put down my fork, that made me feel pathetic, that made me feel disgusted, that made me feel like I was eating her poison, vegetable lunch, all these things she buys for me to eat her stuffed piglet her happy baby her obedient nurse. I put down my fork not as a protest even, not even as defiance, it was like tears, the fallacy of tears, the fallacy that they are communicative -- they are about as commuincative as farts and burps they are heard but they are intended of service to the farter or the burper or the tearer alone. I, the fork-putter-downer, stared at glistening strands of bean sprout and kuay teow still sitting in the box, shredded green mango and carrot in spicey sauce, stewed veggies in brown sauce with perfect and delicious pyramids of garlic floating. I did not see my reflection with a big juicy bone in my mouth in that gleaming tray of sauce and cabbage. I did not drop my imaginary bone splashing sauce and garlic bullet onto my polo shirt because I thought the girl in the take-away tray had a bigger bone. But staring at my piled little plate and the styrofoam chests of lunch treasure I did think, sayang lah, you were hungry before and it won't taste so good later and if you don't pick up your fork again soon she might get angry and you would have hurt her feelings because she bought you lunch. So I made that choice, I will have to say I made it, well, I made it myself how wonderful, I made that choice to pick my fork back up and finish lunch just as planned, just as planned before exasperation made me feel pathetic and disgusted, just as before I lost my appetite. I ate slowly and deliberately and while the food never lost its taste it lost its identity as nourishment and took the crown of way to cope, a kind of sick escape. I felt like my father then: the companion who takes it sitting down -- the foie gras duck -- the 50 dollar slut. You put it in your mouth and hope soon for it all to disappear.

Session

"Does this happen to a lot of people?" he asks me quizzically, after an impromptu and intense counselling session (Mum groggy with her splash of wine, not to mention emotionally tenderized for the grilling after an equally ad-hoc one-on-one-over-yong-tau-foosession with me just prior). "These identity issues, a lot of people face?"

"Oh yeah, sure," I answer assuredly, wondering where in the back of my amateur Psychology Today newshound archive I might substantiate my assured claim. "Most couples go through this sort of conflict, especially at this point in their lives. You are facing three major impasses in terms of how you each view (1) your gender identities, (2) your roles within the marriage, and (3) your aging process and conscious self-realization."

He nods, maybe he grunts, and Dad grips and protrudes his jaw as he whittles his already short teeth to philosophical chalk. He's a do-er and a thinker, not a feeler, he already stated during this session, and from somewhere deep in the personal investment I have in the "clients" before me I hope that in swallowing that uncapsuled residue my Dad might come to appreciate the fine art of following the feeling-pill right down to his belly.

Navel gazing: it exercises your longus colli throat muscles and elongates the cervical spine ... not to mention draws your awareness to potential double-chin rooster gobbles that grow with age and gravity.

Mum starts gasping for air because with three instead of the usual soporific singular slosh she has managed to put herself into mild cardiac arrest, or perhaps refluxed her gastroesophageal, or very possibly provoked her last remaining latent menopausal symptoms, and in this distress calls session to a close and abandons her further bitchings for later ... fifteen minutes later, on the couch, whinnying and woozy. In recollection, elegant Wong Kar Wai soundtracks iPlay and I find it no wonder that I enjoy paradoxes and pathetically cruel realities, like the image of a poisoned mouse dying to the tune of Ne Me Quitte Pas. Bee-whizzing violins and sultry saxophones continue my mind-music video staring at these two bodies lodged on yesterday's couch into the realm of fantastical melodrama vignettes: the alternately hateful and loving couple I have always known as my parents.