Most stories begin with lies … a lie told long enough has its own life. Kudos to those who buy the truth; but she would rather a big fat lie. A good lie, she meant to add. A big, fat and good lie (note: not the same as a white lie) is a story of its own — original and not fettered by moral rectitude, relieved of the obligation to truth.

~ Carissa Foo

Should people be treated as fictions? The question is an ethical one only if we assume that fiction is a copy of actual life … Instead of art aspiring towards lifelikeness what if life aspires towards art, towards a creative, controlled focus of freedom, outside of the tyranny of matter? What if the joke about life imitating art were a better joke than we think?

~ Jeanette Winterson

I miss you so much: 

to be honest, I barely even know — anymore — what it is about you that I miss; but I do. 

Just that I do. 

There certainly are many ways to love — and love manifests itself in multiple ways: after all, at least to me, love is not so much an idea or a concept, but a relation : and if it is a relation, then surely it is formed by the ones in that very relation, continually formed, reshaping, changing, morphing … which might well be what makes love in all of its forms fascinating, intriguing, but always also infuriating, confusing, filling us with doubt, sometimes dread, even despair, but also longing … 

There is a possibility that we are all always hiding in that cupboard … some of us have learnt to be honest and admit it to ourselves … or maybe it just slips out, occasionally.

Where perhaps love is taking the risk of opening that door and letting someone in; and at the very same time, entering someone else’s cupboard — I’d even like to think there is a possibility that the two doors come together for a moment (ideally not face-to-face where the rest of the world is shut out, but side by side, where you can slip into each other’s cupboards whilst still having one’s own … )

I tried to drink you away — to dissolve memories of you.  

But as my dear dear friend, Sara Chong, tries to never let us forget, ‘we drink  to slip into our own skin — be it alcohol, caffeine, or water. When we drink, we seek to become more of ourselves, to modify and alter our chemistry; it is an act of solvency, to absolve, to solve, to find a solution. We drink to dilute and concentrate in response to the world around us’.

Where the more I drank, the more you dissolved into me. 

…

Jeremy Fernando, I wish we were lovers, Singapore: Delere Press, 2024, is available here: https://www.delerepress.com/books/iwishwewerelovers