A Letter to Whoever

Dear Barry,

There are levels to selling your body; selling your mind; selling your talent, hack though you may be. I've done it in various forms (as you so rightly pointed out, one needs to eat and fork out more than 10 bucks for a coffee at Starbucks, if one is to rest, complacent in these shifting sands of commerce and philosophy) but being a PR, writing what I knew not to be true, pretending honesty and upfrontNESS and manipulating outcomes, that was something else.

Some people are good at this. I used to despise them for being good at this, but now I don't. It takes a certain sort of toughness to be able to look someone in the eye and lie convincingly. In many ways I think I am still a child. I try to occupy my body, to be real, but more and more I float off.

I'm reading The Waves again, and funnily enough the character I most identify with is Rhoda, the girl who ends up killing herself, but you don't know it because of the way the novel is written....you just don't hear her voice again, and later someone happens to mention poor Rhoda's suicide...all those years trailing after Jinny and Susan, trying to step firmly in the earth, make an imprint, matter.

At the moment writing is pouring out of me, but mostly broken, twisted things. I got myself a supply of sleeping pills for five nights, but the problem with sleeping pills is that the effect tends to stay in your system a lot longer. I didn't take one yesterday because I had come back to Johor and I only want to take them in KL, when I have to wake up early and work...and I tossed and turned and threw off the twisted sheets and generally made a nuisance of myself.

There is something in me, something, something, something....so slick and slimy and writhing...that I grow so big to contain it and end up disappearing...I don't know. Nothing makes sense and I don't expect it to anymore. What I think is, plod, one foot in front of another, take the next step, do what needs to be done, just do what needs to be done and then see if you can finish it. I hate the tattered remnants of projects unfinished, unnamed, unsigned, like aborted children trailing around, their vague pale faces full of question, full of longing, full of this great big NOTHING in the centre of me.

I'm sorry for inflicting this on you, Barry. It's relentless, I know.

But you caught me in one of those moods.