She’s scrawled across the gravel, facing the dark sky with her mouth wide open. I hesitate for a moment. Her fragility scares me. It’s only when she stirs that I drop to my knees, splashing mud onto the both of us.
I prop my umbrella by her head, shielding her from the downpour and throwing myself into nature’s rhythmic chaos. As I fumble with my backpack, repulsed by the coarse touch of its drenched straps, she begins to emit a low guttural moan. The noise prompts me to caress her face — an instinct evoked by our shared past to soothe her worries — but my fingertips pause at her jaw. …
I have to be honest. I promised myself that I would write on this weeks back. There was so much I wanted to share about her, but most of it revolved around her death and its after-math. But I held myself back. Perhaps it was because of procrastination, the stress from my own personal life, or just not knowing how to talk about it genuinely and with enough respect.
Now, thinking about it, I don’t know what motivated me then to write about her. Did I really have good intentions, where I wanted more people to know about her so as to at least help make a bit of her dream come true and to somehow remind everyone to be kinder? My motives became questionable the more I started thinking about how to develop the story. I started thinking about how to make it attractive enough to reach more people and in a way, I lost sight of how to tell the truth. …
The Theatre of Cruelty, in a snippet, focuses on bringing the human subconsciousness to the audience’s attention. One practice that the main contributor — Antonin Artaud — supported was stripping the stage dialogue of words, thus reducing speech to “inarticulate sounds, cries, and gibbering screams” which was claimed to be able to express more meaning than actual ‘legible’ spoken words. Honestly, the first time I saw it, I wasn’t able to comprehend the significance of this practice so I never really explored it much during my Theatre days. …
Raise your hand if you’ve ever double-booked yourself by filling up your day with too many appointments, to the point that you arrive half an hour late at your high school get-together just to make time for that yoga session that you squeezed in between the two modules you knew you should have just saved for the next semester? Have you ever told yourself that you were going to be productive by cramming 3 weeks of revision into three hours? Or by signing yourself up for so many dance classes that you barely have time to repair your muscles at the end of the day? Do any of your friends and family tell you to stop over-working yourself, yet you simply insist that this was your way of making the most out of life? …
Despite their elusiveness and strong possibility of not even existing in the first place, mermaids have continued to captivate us. Many of us had our first glimpse in Disney’s Little Mermaid or H2O: Just Add Water, leading some to believe that such fairy tales were only for children. Yet, when we grew up, mermaids still managed to catch a current into our lives. They re-appeared as the enchanting Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey in Pirates of the Caribbean: Stranger Tides and the comical Jun Ji-Hyun in Legend of the Blue Sea. …
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