...and love stories and love letters



While in the process of clearing stuff, I came across a pink file packed with yellowing foolscap paper. Handwritten, the black and blue inks were fading already.


They were my stories. The short stories that I had written in my teens. Good Lord, I read them and cringed. My hair stood. Geez, they were BAD!!! Cheesy, corny, hair-raisingly, goosebumply BAD!!! All about how boy meets girl (usually me!) - ugh, teen romances in the line of Sweet Valley High!! Yikes!


I stopped reading after one or two horrified glimpses of some passages. I could not continue. They ought to be trashed. And fast! The world would be far safer without this kind of drivel floating around!


They ought to be stuffed into the trash pronto. But did I? Nope. I stuffed them quickly back into the pink folder and zipped it shut. Why? After all, I would not read these again - not even under pain of torture. So why keep them? Did I want my children to read them after I died? No, then they would know their mother was a closet Mills&Boon fan who writes delusional soapy trash! So why the heck am I taking up valuable shelf space (and believe me, shelf/storage space is premium space in Riang!) by keeping them?


I guess it's hard to throw away that part of the past. And these stories, like my many volumes of diary, contain a borehole in the well of memories I have of life back then. Yes they are sappy - but then, so was I. Yes, wishful thinking, lots of fantasy - but that was how I was back then too - lots of daydreaming and make-believe. When you're not the belle du jour, the class clown, the rich girl, the girl with the cute boyfriend, then fantasy is always a nice escape. So those stories which are about the girl who secretly has a crush on the cute guy, but who doesn't stand a chance because she wears coke-bottle glasses and is short and pudgy, goes through a makeover, comes out a confident swan and leaves hearts broken. Sheer fantasy. Frivolous fiction. Self-indulgent. Look closer and you'll see the girl I was, the sort of girl I wished I could be etc.


It was uncomfortable for me to read those words because I could not stand to see the girl I was. It was a case of "Eew! That can't be me!" How could I have been so irritatingly needy, so emotionally exhausting, so self-indulgent (ok, that last bit still holds true because... behold the blog!)!


Uncomfortable to read now, but maybe one day, I will. Then I may be more ready to torch them or trash them for good.


I also found, in the same stack, my old 'O' level exam question papers! Interestingly, I had chosen Reproduction in Human & Social Bio as one of the essays to write. Looking at those, I can only shake my head and try to recall my grades and be thankful my time for exams is over. Also found Lit notes from my first three months in VJC - class 85A13. Ah great class. Fun times. Great bunch of people. Wish I never left. Wonder where they are now.


And then I found letters that I had written to KH while he was on a year-long working trip at sea. No email then. We lived through snail mail. And believe me, it was snail mail that kept our relationship going. Today email has taken the romance out of this. Replies can be so instantaneous. None of the agony of waiting, none of the constant re-reading of worn letters in bed at night, none of the peering at the letterbox daily. There's something to be said, even today, as I fingered the bundles of letters with stamps from countries all over the world, about letter-writing. Love letters written in the e-medium seem so cold. One easy press of the 'delete' button and they're gone.


With handwritten letters, you can feel the paper, hold it up and inhale deeply of the smell of a ship's cabin, imagine a rocky sea, the faint smell of diesel and salt, the smudge of a beloved fingerprint. And when photographs fall out of the envelope (as opposed to a click and open attachment), you can touch the glossiness, hold the thin papers to you, keep them under your pillow at night. And years later, you could still find them bundled up with rubber bands and string, half-forgotten but ready for re-reading and re-telling.


KH had sailed everywhere then - Japan, across the Pacific, Hawaii, the US coast, and back. On previous trips he went through the Panama Canal, down to Cuba, the eastern seaboard of the US, across the atlantic, in the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, Africa, Goa, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and so on. And during the long months apart, we would write. And write.


Those letters, telexes and faxes, I would never throw away. They are sappy yes. Eye-rollingly sappy as I read them today. But I could never throw them away. His letters are full of grammatical errors, spelling errors and so on but through them I saw port life in Kobe, re-fuelling in Alaska (was it?), saw Disneyland LA for the first time. I travelled through his eyes. And I have to say, for someone who HATES writing, the guy wrote PAGES! hee...


And when we needed to talk urgently, I would telex him on the ship (very costly in those days) from the local post office here. And he would call me from wherever he was. So we have had phone calls in phone booths in unknown cities and ports at odd ungodly hours of the day (due to the time differences) with him 'tonking' in coin after coin, operator's impersonal tones cutting through our conversation and sometimes in the frantic goodbyes, getting cut off before we were ready.

So we have his letters to me and mine to him. It would be interesting to read them in sequence one day when we're old and grey! That is, if they have not all faded or devoured by bugs and dust by then.