These Things Between That We Feel
As you reach your block, the rain begins to subside like the bastard it has been all week. There goes your secret desire to take a hot shower while the tropical rain rages outside. The shower’s going to have to be just semi-hot instead, to make up for the slight rise in temperature once the storm dissipates.
For just a little while, just so you can fold your umbrella out of its bedraggled misery, you pause by the one surviving bench stubbornly loitering under your void deck. You shake your umbrella, belatedly realising just how inconsiderate you’re being, but whatever, right? Too late. There’s no one around any — oh.
Oh, but what’s this?
There, waiting for the lift, are a couple of people you recognise. That fifth-floor aunty has known you since you were young enough to want to be an adult while the other person practically grew up with you; the same primary school, the same secondary school, the same favourite stall at that hawker centre that’s within walking distance.
Neighbours.
Your eyes flicker between the indicators above the lift that would be reaching in just a few storeys and the other lift that’s on stand-by.
Ah. Okay.
You’d rather just wait. Just a little.
Your umbrella is nearly dry anyway. Might as well give just a few, larger-than-strictly-necessary shakes. Then you won’t have to deal with them. You won’t have to deal with anyone. You’ll get your own lift, hopefully.
No, you’re not anti-social. Not deliberately anyway. You just… know what to expect when you get your own lift. You get to press the button to your floor, and you get to let your brain switch off for those few seconds it takes to get yourself up to your floor. With others in the lift, you just get possibilities like awkward eye-contact and perfunctory nods and the like; one of them all that attractive. It’s not that you don’t like them. It’s not that you don’t know them. It’s just… it’s not all that worth it?
/
In this second issue of SingPoWriMo online, we have decided to look at the bonds that we have, that we hold tightly to, that we invest in, that we cherish. There are also the bonds we don’t want to hold on to, bonds that we struggle within, that entangle us in ways we don’t understand. We also take a brief, uncomfortable, awkward glance at the bonds we don’t know what to do with, bonds that seem like they’re just there, like the one with your neighbour whose floor is right above yours, whose eyes are going to unwittingly trail after your departing back, the same way your eyes do on the back of other neighbours.
We trace the bonds within the literary scene, like those within the spoken word community in Singapore, with Max Pasakorn’s primer on where you can go to hear poets read their hearts out. Where do we go to listen to poets bleed? What do you do at these things? Why should we even bother checking out something that has be flourishing for the past two decades or so?
What about a poet’s bond with her works-in-progress, which Teo Xiao Ting ruminates on in her recollection of her time spent in Manuscript Bootcamp, one of the most intensive weekends a writer in Singapore can subject themselves to. Why do feel what we feel when we let others put our works under the microscope? What do we do? Why did we ever think that bootcamps are a good idea?
Alvin Pang and our own Stephanie Chan then discuss the bonds that exist between the Singapore literary scene and those of our regional and international neighbors; how did they come into being? What do we gain from them and what do we stand to lose from losing them?
Finally, we look at the relationship (dare we call it a bond?) between the poet and the critic, and the state of poetry criticism within the Singapore poetry scene in the op-ed piece “Where Did All The Critics Go?” written by Joshua Ip.
/
You enter the lift.
As the door closes slowly, a movement from the corner of the see-through panel sets off the tiniest tingle in your spine.
Ah well.
The door opens and someone else you recognise walks in. Only you’ve not seen this neighbour for a while. Actually, you might have forgotten about this one completely.
You smile awkwardly and was greeted with a familiar nod. Friendly, even. They actually look a little happy to see you.
It’s been some time. They look a little greyer, a little more worn out than you were expecting.
You find yourself caring just a tiny bit.