Rainbow Reverie

One of the weirdest, most frustrating, most tiring and yet happiest times of my life ended this week. In the last one week alone, I have seen two rainbows. Emotions buzz around inside me like errant bees, and this is an attempt to shoo them out the window, to make sense of them and to let them go. Wish me luck.

Have you ever had that feeling of dissociation ... like you're watching yourself, like everything happening to you is really happening to somebody else and you're watching it all slowly unfurl, like a movie or a story or a song? I get that a lot these days, although it's edging off now, slowly vanishing into the maelstorm of yesterday.

I can see myself sitting on a hill - a ridge, actually - in the middle of the night. All around me, far enough that I can see over them but close enough that they form a thick, encompassing, enveloping presence: I see trees. Tall, stout, black trees. I'm just alone, and its night-time, and the clouds are coming in.

The clouds gather all around me, and I remember - remember, remember, remember. Happiness and pain and regret and anger and frustration boil up within me, and as they do, the clouds gather closer and closer. The clouds are large and angry, and scary, and cruel; their gray is tinged with malicious intent, and they make me want to curl up into a ball and vanish, along with my shame and fear and jealousy. A shiver runs down my back. It's a high ridge, and the lightning, and it's open to the sky, and ... you should never be on a ridge, not in lightning, not amongst trees; not when you're scared. Not when all your emotions could smash down, down upon your head, at any minute and. Tear you apart? Roast you alive? A bolt of lightning contains a hundred million volts, and can fry you to a crisp. That's how emotions are.

I wake up. Maybe I fell unconscious, maybe I lay down and fell asleep. I don't know, but I wake up, and it's raining. Raining raining raining, raining so hard. The rainwater drips down my face, my specs, into my eyes, on my hair, down my shirt. It tastes like saltwater. Oh - my tears. The clouds are crying my tears. I look up, as my tears fall down, but I don't want to cry. I don't feel like crying. The clouds. It'd be redundant. I look up and.

Wait. A song, so soft only I can hear it, plays in the background. Shhh. Can you hear it? Can you hear it too? It makes me feel better. A tiny little bird, soft like a robin, sits upon my shoulder as I sit up. And then: it's time. I stand up and I dance, like I always dance, exactly precisely like an ass. That's how I always. Yes. I dance, slowly, softly, quietly, by myself, in the rain of my own tears, getting drenched in the cold and the wind, letting it all wash down over my face and by my ears and down, down to the street, down into the drainage and away to the ocean. It's over. The hands. The ridge. The dance. The eyes. The hair. The face. The smile. It's over. It is.

It is over. The rain stops slowly. I walk off the ridge, just to put some distance behind me, but I can still see the east from where I stand now. The insane red-yellow-orange-blue spectacle which is the Singapore dawn is about to begin. I grab the popcorn. And sit down to watch. It can only get better from here. And we ... we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. I twirl, once, as the sun rises slowly into the sky, and a new day begins.