urges

I have this urge to re-renovate my flat. Which of course I do not have the money for, so it is but an urge. But I can blog about it, just as how some people substitute porn for the real thing when they have none.


And so I shall.


Perhaps I feel like renovating again - the last time being last October when I just got this flat, thus it is an obsessive urge - because, for one, I am falling in love with my flat again.


Jan has moved home and now I am living alone again, as I was for a while now. Many times I come home, put the key in the door, and thank God again for the flat he has given me. I always longed for my own place and I asked for it despite the fact I knew I would use it for selfish fun things like have parties and invite boyfriends home. My parents never knew I had this prayer, nor the secret desires of course, but they went ahead and sought this flat out for me nonetheless. It costs little, and they paid for the renovation, and my mom's and my CPF did for the deposit.


So I am a home-owner. Too bad the mortgage and bills and taxes that come with the title.


I love living alone. For so many reasons. Walking around naked or half-dressed is one of them, so is peeing with the door open. But that we do even if someone else is around sometimes, don't we?


Lately when I walk around my flat, I appreciate every step I take on my laminate floors. I take in the sound of my feet on the wood, the feel of smooth wooden panels on the soles of my feet. I love the quietness of my kitchen, the quaint, inviting kopitiam table that beckons me to take in solitude. I am glad I have bathrooms to wash and decorate, if and when I do. Even though my house is in a mess, or rather, as I would put it, in a state of flux between stages of chill-out neatness.


I enjoy the reading lamp in the night in a different way now. It really is my atas-cognac moment, although I have no cognac in the house.


A few spoilers at this time though, largely due to the current state of flux I euphemistically named, that is, my house is in a real mess. I have to re-pack my workspace-related art materials into the now spare and empty room. H and I are going to convert that into our new workspace - SOHO indeed and truly, soon. I need to do major housecleaning, as it is a year old now, this flat. I need a part-time auntie cleaner to help. None in sight. I could use a man to help. Which, man I have, but I somehow always engage him in other things instead, not housework (too bad I am still unsuccessful at distracting him from WOW; I seriously think computer games and real live women are completely and mutually substitutable).


Also, my bookshelf has too few spaces and too few books all at the same time. Many of the books I love are not on my shelves. They were borrowed, and returned, or lent, and never gotten back. Many books on my shelf now, I did not really enjoy. Irony!


(Dear me. I only just realised, rich tai-tai housewives like to redecorate too. Have I been speaking like one so far? Oh dear.)


I want to go and acquire the books that I love intensely, to keep on my shelves, to have with me in my old age. I should stop borrowing from libraries and add books to my permanent collection. Albeit, I will need more money for that.


I read Emily Dickinson online again, and I read rapturously. I tear at the sight of a poem I take in, remembering the past that I read them in, feeling the pain that Emily felt when she wrote some, loving her poetry so much that I wish I had the entire collection in print, thumbed and annotated by me to pass on to future Elaine (term borrowed, cf. Kelvin), and to others whom I will love enough in future.


Meantime, I write and write. That urge, I can satisfy immediately. It is almost free. And gives me the same pleasure. Talk about porn being a replacement for sex: writing is a replacement for so many things else. Even for painting.


I take it all in. And leave you with this:


Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

Part Three: Love

VIII

THAT I did always love,
I bring thee proof:
That till I loved
I did not love enough.

That I shall love alway,
I offer thee
That love is life,
And life hath immortality.

This, dost thou doubt, sweet?
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary.