let there be light

que sea la luz
abre mis ojos, Jesús
purifica mi corazón
llena este lugar
has tu voluntad

Tu salvación aquí está
un nuevo día

a tribute to us, our special third

today marks the third year anniversary of being with you, the love of my life - my first, my only and God willing, my last. the most fascinating part of being in a relationship for me remains this: we have been there for each other down to the denomination of seconds for the entire duration that we've been committed to each other - be it through thoughts, texts or in the corporeal form. the notion of love for me remains synonymous with choice. attraction to other fleeting ideals is inevitable and human, but the active choice of choosing this love personified at the end of the day for the past 1095 days is what makes our love so meaningful to me. the beauty of this exemplified by the preposition "despite" (in the sense of "despite this and that, i still choose you"), reciprocated by us both in a world only we have exclusive access to.

on 11th october 2016 i wrote: "interests are fleeting but education leading to self-empowerment is forever. i don't know what took me so long but it's this realisation that education is the only thing that will be unwaveringly for you, in multiple senses of the word. love will come when it comes, & i will wait for it - but i am done pursuing it.

i know my worth, & i will not let the world determine it on my behalf." 

i keep going back to the me before i met you because i need to remember how lucky i got and how difficult things were then. not that i wasn't whole in myself. i was already whole before i met you. in my formative college years i struggled with being passed off by the world time and again, vowing with each episode to come back stronger, smarter and more beautiful. and i attribute the self-confidence i have today in my worth and work ethic to those episodes which were (in retrospect) the building blocks of my personal growth. and this is precisely why we are greater together.

17 may 2017: "the beauty (of being whole in God and myself) is that you inhabit my heart but do not compose it, & in so doing we do not complete each other but complement & value-add to each other's lives. to have a life & career apart from each other is so important - it ensures that our relationship will never hinder, but always make both of us better persons"

almost three years later and this still holds true. beyond our shared chemistry, this has been one of the key tenets of our relationship that has made it successful. however, things weren't always smooth sailing. looking back on our journey together, i cannot help but recall those pivotal moments where we fought over recurrent issues now passé - one of the biggest ones being our life gap (attributed to our age gap), which i kept trying to convince you came with an expiry date. waiting out those 1.5 years was unarguably hard - we were both battling our own giants on our respective ends, trying not to let them get to us. and when they did, we would have another big disagreement until some hot tears were shed and things blew over until the next eruption. on my end, it was hard being four years behind - financially and career-wise, even though the pressure was always implicit. there is just so much more financial stability that comes with an established profession like medicine and four years of savings that i had felt pressured to match from the onset, which was obviously not going to happen when i didn't have a career to begin with. i was a sophomore in college when i met you, doing my best to invest whatever "free time" i had in my resume, in hopes of an optimal job offer at a big fish firm before graduation. i felt i was doing well compared to my peers because i had a solid plan from the beginning of where i wanted to take my nascent career plan and i was doing all these side career/growth things, but they never felt good enough because the fact of the matter was: i was still just a college student. the paradoxical feminist in me also struggled immensely with notions of masculine providence versus women empowerment and equality i had championed so strongly for. honestly those were some rough times, and sometimes i had wished we met at a later stage in life when i was more "settled" in life.

looking back, i'm still glad we met while i was still a sophomore in college. yale-nus constitutes the most formative years of my life. the me before college and the me after college are almost two completely different people. to have met you right in the middle of that exponential growth journey means you got to grow together with me, and our relationship got to grow together. when i look back on those growth moments i.e. me finding love at 21 when i finally had someone (you) to hold me in quiet moments of grief, solo sojourns to alicante and seoul and doing my first ever ldr, working on omnichannel projects at sephora and scoring brownie points at amazon, and even the year-long 28mc senior year semester that everyone called me crazy for - i look back and see you in all of them, silently rooting for me and being my homecoming, my place of rest and comfort. these memories are twice richer and beautiful because you permeate all of them, and we are stronger for it.

life is better together with you, with your hand in mine.
happy third, my love.

february flux & mini-miracle march

february brought with it the turn
of the financial calendar
which i had hitherto yearned for.
i was done with feeling stuck -
floating here and there, but not really
being anywhere. i couldn't fathom where:
where was i value-adding?
where was the growth trajectory i had envisaged
so clearly in my head, but had yet to pan out in reality?
and what, what was i doing
that made a difference to the people around me?
"most of the time i don't know what i'm doing."
it became my slogan, slowly making its appearances in 1:1s
with friends, mentors and even bosses.
and then it became my pseudo anthem -
feeding an internal desire for greener pastures
manifested in a three-year plan penned
in a personalised notebook gifted by my big boss.
(almost like a silent travesty)

if february were a person:
february barged in prematurely
and became travesty personified.
in a confusing, brutal turn of events
i realised that the shape and form of envisioned change
resembled nothing like the version i had in my head.
the stark realisation hit me
through the brick wall of my stupor:
benign corporations were after all still businesses.
the embodiment of good values was not mutually exclusive
with profit-maximisation and cost reduction.
anyone of us could have been those inefficiencies
that they balanced out on a leaner balance sheet.
our last team photo taken merely back in december,
cheesing to good times -
how strange that it is now a passé construct
existing neither in name nor substance.
an inaugural, harsh welcome to corporate life
that i will carry with me for future days
and will shape me for years to come.

psalm 30:5 -
"weeping may endure for the night,
but joy comes in the morning."
february gave away to march,
obscurity gave away to piecemeal clarity.
the silver lining shone through.
it was my opportunity to voice out and fight
for what i desired and against what i disliked:
accounts, industry verticals, language preferences,
the who, the what and everything in the in between.
it was either "now" or "forever hold your peace".
everything was up in the air,
up for grabs, like a visit to a candy store.
i finally had this unprecedented chance
to choose my preferred candy! the thrill!
and through it all, i came out of it
with a better understanding of which leaders
i worked well with and which i didn't.
through it all i emerged humbled
by the quality of leadership
in an organisation i felt had let all of us down,
except the vast majority of its leaders hadn't.
i learnt through both the easy and hard ways -
at the core of it all, they all have good hearts.
and how blessed am i, to be surrounded
by giant-slayers in the workplace -
some with the kindest eyes
and others with a grounding, steadfast quality to their statures.
and through it all i acknowledge that it is You God,
You who placed these giant-slayers in my life
and turned this mess into a mini-miracle.

time travel - part four (on pseudo love)

read part one, part two and/or part three here

21 june 2016: my thoughts centring a conversation with my gym buddy in new york, i wrote:

'the residue from a conversation last evening - the nature of a thought festering at the back of your head that had hitherto been only privy to you changes form when it manifests from your own mouth and you surprise yourself, surprise yourself at how weird it sounds when vocalised - "i realised i cannot truly say i have loved someone before - no, not in that sense" "oh...isn't that kind of...sad?" "i guess i just haven't found someone i would go that deep for" - to not have truly loved or felt truly loved at twenty - that hit me. fondness had always smouldered away - was always soldered thin under the solder of an overarching reason or inopportune timing, but whatever it was the glue had always been built on tenuous bricks of compromise anyway. maybe this is why memories have a stranglehold over me. for a girl who pursues absolute clarity i think i scare people away most of the time.'

8 feb 2020: wrt. to the defining moments in my life (defining being a moment impactful enough for it to have informed and altered subsequent trajectories of the paths i've taken), i wrote:

'at 21, you will finally believe in love".

truth be told, until then i was convinced i would eventually end up being together with someone i would try hard to love for the rest of my life, a response to being moved into entering and committing to a relationship for the sake of company and stability. till then, there was no one i could truly connect with, no one who could mutually reciprocate my feelings to equal lengths. i dreamt of a puppy love in junior college, which was my first formal exposure to boys post-puberty, but that yearning merely manifested into romanticised ideals that i eventually had to bury. i perceived the inability to attract who i wanted as a personal defect, thinking to myself that there was perhaps something wrong with me that turned people i desired away from me. this is my ode to remembering those moments of vulnerability and dull heartache - before the tables turned, before i learned that it is somehow fortuitously possible to find that favourite person who finds you to be his/her favourite person too.

falling in love at a coffee shop - landon pigg



[2013]

this was how i'd imagined i'll meet my soulmate. nestled against a sturdy pillar in my favourite quiet spot in rj: a book on hand, this tune on repeat, i'd dream with my head in the clouds of this abstract concept everyone seemed to be acquainted with in one way or another except me: love.

this also reminds me of my jc fantasy: i dreamt i would meet my soulmate while browsing through shelves housing contemporary literature in the rj library. in the first scene, he would be picking out books on the opposite side of the shelf before our eyes would lock for a long second. it would be love at first sight. in the second scene, he would come over and we would be browsing books from the same shelf. in a kdrama-rique fashion, we would reach out at the same instance to pick out our favourite book respectively - the same book. the rest would be history. this is called a fantasy for an obvious reason.


still into you - paramore 



[2013-2014]

internal monologues, in a time past where i lived in my head a little too much:

26 july 2013: 'i know this is wrong & i should not even be thinking about this but let's be friends?"

16 feb 2014: an internal catharsis - ankles deep in the sea, i set my ideals alight.
"delete, delete, d e l e t e". it was valentine's day that i set aflame my unrequited yearning for a boy with dreamy eyes.

27 june 2014: 'but i keep slipping back bc this pull feels like the gravitation of the full moon - i am the hapless sea that cannot hold itself together, the currents which cannot exert control over themselves - currents which crash against the shore but roll back into their own muck & subsequently carry themselves out to sea again'. i had fallen in too deeply in love with my ideals about love. i could no longer differentiate yearning for love versus yearning for a specific person, instead only knowing how to project my ideals onto a singular person.

sink - qrion



[2015]

this reminds me of freshman year in college. drizzly saturday mornings doing laundry. solitary, melancholic walks where i disconnected and plugged into my own world, wondering if i'd ever have the opportunity to share this richness with anyone else.

18 aug 2015: looking down from my window on the sixth floor, staring intently at the back of my freshman orientation eye candy engaged in a deep conversation with someone else. it was the beginning of a difficult transition phase - the first time moving away from home and into a campus for the next four years, about to reach my threshold for superficial conversations with acquaintances i couldn't care less. and so i wrote: "(i) have this burning desire to walk around the campus at night & dive into a really deep conversation with someone". but really, it was me projecting my acute loneliness from immersing myself in a new environment, onto a face that had seemed palatable amidst the whirlwind of flux.

30 nov 2015: i wrote, 'morning, 6th: i will be there if you ask me to.' until then, it was the closest i had been to experiencing the tip of the iceberg called heartache. i knew i still couldn't call that love, but my feelings had been genuine and pure. i'd also thought an airport send-off constituted closure, a closure that'd been good enough for me. this tune reminds me of this process of head vs. heart, anger vs. sadness, natural goodwill vs. the concerted hardening of heart.

this is what you came for - calvin harris 



[2016]

"and everybody's watching her / but she's looking at you" this was the song playing in the club on a friday night out. the club where i had waited all night to dance with a particular someone. it was the wee hours of the morning and i found myself looking at said person standing in front of me, but he felt like a complete stranger, a different person from who i thought i knew - the person whom i recall made me feel like i was finally more than an afterthought (the evidence? bc he bought me a brownie bar from cheers during his trip to the convenience store with his friends). although i was slightly inebriated, i still remember how i kept searching for his eyes, but he just would not look at me, nor make any effort to dance with me. meanwhile, i noticed from the corner of my eye, boys on the peripheries trying their best to inch closer to me with their ridiculous dance moves. i paid no heed to them. i only had my eyes fixated on this person, but through and through our eyes never locked. i don't remember much of what happened next except for how i had felt then: small, ashamed and extremely confused. i knew i was worth more than all of these, but all i could do then was to throw a closet self-pity party for myself and smile on the outside.



[2016]

6 may 2016: 'i looked up to the ceiling, felt myself effacing into the crowd like smoke dispersing itself on its upward trajectory, half-inebriated, the synergy of bodies chafing against one another to the beat that was drumming so loudly it hurt my ears yet felt so alive in my body it was moving me, arms strewn up, was i imaginary? body to body, packed like sardines - if this were the mrt i would have hated my lot but this was the place where people lost themselves to the collective effervescence of a crowd, lost themselves to their loneliness, lost themselves to insobriety (& impropriety), who are you but it's fine bc i am lonely & in need of company, so this is what it feels like to have somebody to hold - '

"so lost, i'm faded"

i told myself i would dance for my own perceived beauty and self-worth, but the reality was that i had let myself go.

~ to be continued ~

trying to make sense of a reality i still find hard to grasp

out of the blue
they made us part ways and say goodbye.
but how? how do i say goodbye
to faces i've been so accustomed to seeing around?
and how? how do i say goodbye,
knowing that i got to keep afloat -
even when i'd been learning the ropes
from them, from those whose expertise had been
valued, admired and sought,
but not rewarded by the one
whose opinion would have mattered
the most.
instead - tenure abruptly cut short.
gifted nothing but the short end of the stick
for all the late nights poured into oiling slick,
the machinery of this revenue generating machine.
the collective injustice of it all.
when we see ourselves as people,
but they see us as revenue and cost, profit and loss.
numbers to balance on the balance sheet,
meant for the perusal of shareholders, of which
we are all still complicit.

so many faces i'll miss dearly -
they've helped me shaped my first worldview
of how kind "cut-throat" corporate life can be.
they've showed me my growth matters,
my opinion still matters, even if i'm lacking
by virtue of being young.
how even the slight alignment of words on a slide
should be taken seriously, or risk ramifications
of putting my professionalism and work ethic under suspicion.
not forgetting the jokes and animated stories:
they remind me of friendship in a nutshell,
in a place where elsewhere, would have been a foreign concept.

shock has given away to dull sadness, and perhaps numbness.
i really wish we could all stay. i really do.
but i also realise life is an adventure.
we are all carrying luggages headed in different directions,
towards different destinations, with different timelines -
but we were lucky enough to meet for a stopover,
in an airport that had been kind to us
until our next flight out.

goodbye 2019

saying goodbye to another year has always been hard. i think this started back in 2014, right after one of the hardest years of my formative education i.e. the gruelling, "make it or break it" culminating moment of a-levels. back then, it felt like i'd worked too hard that year to say goodbye to it too soon and hit the reset button. i'm not sure if i'm wired in a different way but goodbyes are generally difficult. even if it's to a man-made construct like time, like the turning of a new year. but good things are what make goodbyes so difficult. i'm lucky to have had such a precious year that makes refreshing this already passé chapter incredibly wistful.

2019 was a particularly phenomenal year. just piecing together the one-second moments of my year is enough to make my heart full. the good, the bad, the ugly - they all seem sweet now that they are coloured in the hues of retrospect. akin to disparate jigsaw pieces that each carried their own fragment of a grand picture. when disparate, they didn't make sense - some moments were so wearisome they wore my heart out but i still had to carry them with me nevertheless, until the tidings of time brought good outcomes - outcomes i had yearned for, outcomes that are now past, outcomes that i may take for granted in this moment. i read somewhere that we tend to live for the future, but if only we would pause and realise: we are living in the moments we had so desperately wanted to be in (or the clarity of knowing we'll get here) just a good six months/one year ago. 

denise a year ago would have loved to know that she successfully graduated from college on schedule despite taking a semester off for aws - those insane, consecutive 28mc semesters she got accustomed to but would have loved to run away from in a heartbeat. she would have been ecstatic to know that capstone turned out to be a possible feat to accomplish, after an entire year poured into churning and cutting an academic piece into a 10k individual word thesis. she would have been so proud to know that her capstone advisor became her biggest champion as she presented that synthesised work to the global affairs faculty and her peers (and that her eye-candy prof was smiling and nodding the entire time to her presentation). she would have soared to the moon knowing that she made it to a tech enterprise that has since given her access to such great leaders/mentors invested in her growth, to an eleven-people strong fy20 cohort that has made the transition to working life seem too easy, that she would have visited san francisco on a work trip just to witness how big this company is, to meet with the co-founder and drink the kool aid, and begun her journey towards learning the one thing she had wanted to learn starting her career i.e. gaining client-facing experience. and in terms of love, that she would been able to visit osaka/kyoto and go on a junior-suite royal caribbean cruise with her favourite person. how comforted would she have been, denise from a year ago, to know that everything she had worried about eventually turned out to be not just okay, but blessed beyond expectation? 

i search for words to describe how some moments were so dull or difficult that i could only sit at utown green and find solace in being alone, in faith, in longing and in the in-between. one of the hardest weeks was that week that contained back-to-back the final capstone presentation and concluding round of case presentation & interview for the current company i am in. i never realised senior year would be so tough with the collective pressure of capstone (and bc this is a college that everyone feels the implicit pressure to show up with their best work, it made it all the more harder. yes, capstone was not going to land me a job but i couldn't let it flop - in spite of everything), the terrifying prospect of joblessness upon graduation - made more so pressurising bc i was juggling with almost twice the academic workload of my peers on top of everything. i remember that monday i was literally shrivelling in stress that i could barely eat. i had worked all day on my capstone slides and forgot to eat dinner till it was past nine, so i made myself some tom yum cup noodles. tom yum's my favourite msg flavour, but even so i recall eating one mouthful before puking it back into the cup and throwing the entire thing away. i had shrivelled to the point where my body didn't allow itself to eat. thursday evening was when the weight of those two momentous events lifted off my shoulders. i remember that night fondly: i had dinner with gym bud fred and we bumped into one of the case presentation panel k at the train station - he told me i did a great job, which gave me so much hope. it was drizzling and i dropped by seven-eleven to buy a beer. that night i cracked it open and savoured it (or the victory of ending the week) while slumped in bed, deliberating my performance, anticipating the monday afternoon call that i did not know then carried my offer. but all these are just fond memories now in retrospect. in the moment i felt like i could barely bear it, but that too, did pass. i have a fond memory of my capstone prof (who also became my favourite career advisor and all-in-all bae prof ) meeting and shaking hands with bae saying "i've heard so much about you!" "guess denise's just been shuttling between spending time with us both." "aw cute! i saw she wrote about you in the acknowledgements". date nights with bae (when he was not on month-long overseas exercises) became my weekly respite. they kept me sane and grounded, just like the familiar feeling of coming home. and now we're finally in the same stage in life - after waiting out two good years. we did it, love. we did it, together.

in this year i resolve to do two things: (1) to think of God particularly in fun times (usually those times are when i feel like i don't want Him there) (2) to fiercely protect the part of me that loves to create. work has made me lose that part of myself increasingly, but it is this part of myself that i keep coming back to in order to find myself - it is what makes me feel alive, and feel at home in my own skin. 

writing this from the sun-deck of the royal caribbean cruise ship on my last night here. crescent moon in the pitch black sky, corona in hand, kygo in my ears. solitude and cathartic writing that forces me to think and reflect with greater clarity. am thankful, and this is indeed the best way to end the first day of 2020. 

happy new year folks. 

remembering

(actually incredibly proud of myself for capturing snippets of my most formative four years in such a consistent and tangible manner, such that that i can revisit at whim from hereon, in the years to come) 

nostalgia is a funny phenomenon: there is only the good left, and even the bad times are coloured in a rosy, almost psychedelic hue. i remember how badly i wanted to graduate and be done with formal education, but now that all is done and dusted i cannot remember why i chafed at college life so desperately the way i did. there was a moment when i sat in the elm courtyard past 10pm with qiken catching up on life and he told me something along the lines of my self-inflicted pressure with my overloading modules and what not, and that i should slow down and invest in getting to know the community better etc or i would regret dearly afterwards. for sanity, i had deliberately picked my battles and shut out the white noise with mind over matter as my guiding principle, but somehow some friends got shut out in the process as well. but you know what? i still have no regrets, bc now that everything is passé i only have good memories left. even the bad are obscure memories cast in golden hues, dull flickering lights of a past that has made the present me stronger and of better faith.

what do i miss? i miss the littlest things of life on campus and the campus itself:

taking away lunch treats (double taps for an iced cafe latte, a slice of pipping hot but mediocre-tasting cheese pizza and two mini-sized haagen dazs ice cream tubs) to floor nine room D of saga tower B and tucking myself into bed as i feasted and watched jennim for a short lunch respite before the reality of my 28mc workload hit me like a truck once again

feeling incredibly happy from gaining a small paradigm shift in the way i viewed the world from class, and excitedly texting bae something like "do you know why china's so adamant about claiming the islands in the south china sea? bc according to unclos, claiming the islands means they'll be able to extend their territorial waters 12 nautical miles from there and project their geopolitical influence across asia..." - so eager to share my new knowledge with the person i love

cafe agora with the senior crew - the camaraderie of being able to count on bumping into my favourite people and lament about capstone together: some days i would turn up and see vincent, mars, jon, jieying, annie, and/or milly already there (and the occasional guest appearance from qiken)

chilly night walks across the elm courtyard and around utown post-workout with my airpods playing "pretend" and "love drunk" on repeat - that feeling of a deep-seated quietness in the midst of a whirlwind of things demanding my attention

the rare but treasured supper nights walking out to the al-amaans stretch with vincent - those supper nights that made us wise ("our friendship will really be over if we can't even make one supper night before move-out")

night walks at star vista and rochester park with koi in one hand and bae's hand in the other, just like the way we first met in my sophomore year

and of course, spending our third valentine's day feasting on cheap but good clementi sushi in the comfort of my home away from home - magnum night and the mistake of getting wang wang's hotkid milk beverage (it screamed childhood), or holding bae's hands as he clumsily twirled me around and i tried to jump on his back for a piggyback ride in the utown green field.