Saturday, April 21, 2018

silent chest / medicine pt II

I missed it.

I missed it. 'This man has got a very tight chest.' Rob said as he moved around, seemed to move past, move through me, his brow furrowed with frustration / concentration, moving at inhuman speeds to organise Xrays, Aminophylline and NIV for my man all at the same time. It's the worst feeling you can have as a junior doctor. And now I'm the one who can't breathe. I'm the one who cannot speak.

---

A very tight chest may not wheeze at all due to poor air entry. Beware the silent chest.

---

There are many ways of suffocating, some subtler than others.

---

show me all my sickness, make me understand my mistakes, then tell me how to get better.

---

can't have the clouds without first tasting dirt, can't be taller than angels before meeting the devil first.

---

Medicine is a way of getting better that often requires you to first feel worse

---


So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

- 2 Corinthians 4:16-17

---

"I mean, I like it and I hate it at the same time. It's the same attitude I have towards the whole of medicine I guess, you're doing amazing things, but it's hard at first not to suffer from... performance anxiety, like the first few times you're kind of walking on a tightrope. Doing stunts without a safety net. To get better you first have to realise all the things you don't know, come to terms with all the ways you aren't very good, and so when it happens your confidence takes a hit... and you doubt yourself a lot. And then you have to continue anyway, and try and overcome it with persistence. And you usually push through. But before you do, it's like your heart is being scooped out and torn apart or crushed under a massive weight. This is the part of the job that I hate the most. And knowing it's temporary or necessary helps me to endure the weight when I remember, but doesn't make it any lighter."

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Forrest Gump vs. Pygmalion

Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of bald social climbing—but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people, and that if I didn’t have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I didn’t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that.

My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving the London district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.

- Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongues

---

I have no common sense. I have only uncommon sense. I believe in everyone. I believe everything is possible.

---

Sometimes people ask me: "where's your accent from?"

The truth is, I don't have a good answer. I want to say, 'a little bit of everywhere.' (Nowhere) I want to say, it's a remix of a mash up of a portmanteau language. But then I have to explain.

In primary/elementary school we utilised a crude yet expedient pidgin consisting of fragments of English, Mandarin and Malay which then morphed into a more systematised monstrosity at a privately funded secondary school, where English predominated as the medium of instruction, and where I discovered that it is customary (sometimes even necessary) in most other countries to speak only one language at a time. Shortly after this, I moved to an International School where a cornucopia of foreign dialects and inflections clashed and assimilated and intermingled with each other on a daily basis - and I decided nobody would notice if I started speaking differently here, since nobody talked like each other to begin with. And so I began the process of co-opting my already confused and unruly pronunciation into something vaguely American - something that approximated the way people spoke on TV, because by then I understood that to be on TV was to be universally validated. To be on TV meant that you had somehow earned the tacit approval of the vast anonymous majority, and those who appeared on TV must therefore be paragons of populist appeal, an elect distillation of all that was humanly excellent and beautiful, unblemished specimens whose overwhelming pan-attractiveness clearly trumped us too-generic, too-eccentric, barbaric, imperfect, untelevisable folk. I believed that if I learned to speak the way TV people spoke, everyone would love to hear me speak. I shed my old ways of speaking like a woman attempting to lose weight to fit into a very tight dress, and for pretty much the same reasons. I settled into this new way of speaking with very little difficulty.

Four years later I moved to Nottingham to study medicine and my faux american accent began to take on shades of East Midlands intonations. And now that I live in Preston I'm starting to sound like a proper northern lad. But I exaggerate. Truthfully, these latter two transformations have only been minor adjustments. Tweaking the way I say, 'alright', 'go on', and a handful of other phrases. My speaking voice is essentially the same as the one I had developed in college. The only time I notice it drastically altered is when I speak to other Malaysians. Especially those from Penang or Johor, or anywhere other than from KL. It occurs near enough unconsciously now. I flatten vowels, drop consonants like it's nobody's business. 'yes ah?' 'ya, liddat lor.' I marvel at how good it feels to speak badly. To be a different me for a while.

---

The thing about my native accent that I'm apprehensive about is that when you say big words with a KL / Malaysian accent you sound cognitively impaired. Painfully foreign. Vulgar. Backwards. Unsophisticated, if you want to be generous. When I say 'big words' I don't mean complex, nuanced constructions like conglomeration or disestablishmentarianism. I just mean words with three or more syllables. Words like Photography. International. Anatomy. Anaesthetist. Government. In local parlance, using the phonetic say-as-you-see-it pronounciation of Malay, everyone said 'foe-tow-graph-ee' instead of 'photog-graphy', and so on with 'in-te-nash-she-nal', 'anna-tommy', 'anna-stet-teis'. Thankfully someone decided that 'go-vern-meun' just sounded silly and we all opted for 'gahhmen' instead. (Sometimes, 'blaardy gahhmen') We know how it sounds to you non-Malaysians. We are aware none of you talk like this. So we translate. We speak 'Ang-Moh'. We're careful to give more emphasis to 'tog' instead of apportioning it equally to 'pho-', 'gra-' and 'fee-'. We make sure to include the 'R' in 'international' but somehow can't help phrasing 'in/ter' as staccatos, as if trying to isolate it will help us really nail that crucial second syllable. But then we're stuck, because we can't adopt these new voices wholesale. We can't overwrite our cadences and rhythms altogether. There's something grating about hearing a Malaysian say 'fuh-toh-gryph-i' instead of 'foe-toe-gra-fee'. It just stops the conversation dead in its tracks. You want to say, 'ooooh look at you, Mr. Fuh-toh-gryphi - you stahdee overseas is it? Action lah.' It reeks of trying to be something you're not. It's not Malaysian to speak Ang-Moh unless you have to.

My grandmother studied abroad in a British boarding school and used to teach etiquette at a country club to nouveau-riche families who wanted to appear a certain way. Around the house, she would correct me if I said 'tree' when I should have said 'three', 'rubbish bin' when I meant 'wastepaper basket' and 'hAah??' instead of 'pardon me'. It's probably thanks to her that I grew up with two voices, two registers in my head, and an understanding that there's nearly always more than one way to say what you mean. That there are many names to refer to the same thing and some are simply more accurate or appropriate than others. (My paternal grandmother couldn't speak a word of English and spent her afternoons lounging around in floral patterned tai-tai pajamas, watching cantonese soap operas reclining against the differently-floral-patterned sofa cushions.)

But with opportunity comes cost, and the cost of choice is consequence. I'm particularly cautious around 'photography', because it comes up the most when talking to people. When I'm talking and it dawns on me that I'm going to have to say the word at some point, I have to quickly decide - how do I want to say it? And why? And is it not too late still to try and cobble together an elaborate circumlocution to get me out of this? Neither option is 100% authentic, and neither is 100% phony. You see, the more you acclimatize to 'fuhtog-graphy', the less 'fo-to-gra-fee' sounds plausible. Maybe there's an easy solution to all of this. Maybe I should throw caution to the wind, rip off the straitjacket of conformity and just say 'Foe- tuhgrafé' from now on, and hope they understand. Throw in a little pantomime, maybe. Malaysian sign language. They'll know what I mean.

fascinoma / personality disorder

In the end, empathy - it is one of the most useful social glues and one of the most wonderful things for us to behave rightly towards each other but it’s nothing without political systems that function, without a kind of exercise against injustice, which is slightly more active than ‘I read Middlemarch and I felt so for Dorothea.' You know, there’s a limit to that kind of empathy and action. And I think the novelist should always be aware of that. You can fool yourself writing novels that you’re saving the world, you know, one by one. Opening the hearts of people so they become better. But people’s hearts can be opened extensively and they can do nothing. You have to be careful with that idea.

[...]

I just think that the English tradition of the novel as represented, the kind of apex of it, by Eliot, doesn’t always recognise that people are perverse. People are profoundly perverse. The French understand that very well. But the English, they tend not to look at things which are… certain parts of human nature they’d rather not think about.

- A Conversation with Zadie Smith

---

'where did he cut?'

'both his forearms'

'which parts?'

'the uh, here. outer-'

'so the outer aspect, not the wrist or inner forearms.'

'yeah.'

'so he doesn't want to die.'

'... no I guess not'

'I'll take that. Where is he?'

It might seem cold or callous but the consultant's attitude was simply pragmatic, and he was kind enough to be frank with me about a referral that wasn't very sensible.

It turned out that my gentleman had attended A&E multiple times following intentional overdoses and other forms of self harm since the age of 16.

Medical school taught us that previous episodes of self harm and attempted suicide were indicators that they were capable of acting on their intentions and carrying out their plans, and therefore higher risk of self-harming or attempting suicide than someone who had never done so before. What I didn't understand was that if someone had been in and out of A&E a thousand times with the same presenting complaint, chances are that they will survive long enough to continue the trend. Chances are they aren't in imminent danger of dying. What are the odds that this day is unlike the other 100000 days they have done the same thing?

Patients with borderline personality disorder are characterised by a pattern of behaviour, and specific coping mechanisms which are learned, and maybe can be unlearned. This episode of self harm, probably like many others in the past, was one such coping mechanism, and wasn't an indication that his mental health had suddenly deteriorated. It was simply how he had learned to express himself - to get what he needed - which was release, and then someone to provide reassurance and care and empathy afterwards. Me calling the mental health liason team was like activating the major hemorrhage protocol for a patient with a papercut.

This wasn't an isolated incident. I have an unfortunate history of overreacting when confronted by unfamiliar situations -- especially when dealing with dishonest patients. For example, just the day before I had seen a 49 year old gentleman with a drinking problem, who had, according to him, had a seizure two weeks ago and since then had lost sensation in a small patch of his leg, and that he had cut down on his drinking for a week now. He was desperate to be admitted, to be seen by the alcohol liaison team. When I explained to him that alcohol related seizures normally occur after the detox, he changed his story, saying the seizure happened only a week ago. And that he had hallucinated his dead brother during it. "That's impressive," said the consultant. I didn't realise what he meant at the time.1 There were a few other signs, visual field defects, abnormal sensation, diplopia - all subjective, come to think of it. All relying on the patient to be faithful with his reporting. The consultant didn't think it would show anything, but I pushed for it and we treated him to an unhealthy dose of radiation via CT scanner. I even added on B12 and folate levels. The next day I looked him up on the system. On the stroke ward where I'd put him. CT was normal, and so were his bloods. Plumb normal. I'd been duped.

Common things are common, is the adage quoted to medical students as a rite of passage, and yet I managed to complete medical school without fully digesting the aphorism. Instead I felt in my bones, without any sense of irony or mistrust, knowing my luck, all the uncommon things will happen to me. And so I spent most of urology, most of general practice and now the first two weeks of A&E being hypervigilant. Dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's twice. Being unnecessarily meticulous. Trying to spot zebras in a herd full of horses.

Afterwards I sat in a corner, ruminating. Trying to construct some kind of argument that would justify my referral, but I gave up halfway, realising all I was doing was trying to collagen-adhese together my lacerated ego. Maybe the system was the reason he kept coming back, I thought to myself, seething quietly (which even if it were true, doesn't justify a mental health review). But I knew it wasn't the mental health team's fault that the patient kept coming back. I knew they were doing everything they could. Sometimes if a student fails, it isn't necessarily the teacher's fault. Maybe this case was the exception to the rule, an anomaly. Maybe in this particular case, as opposed to the rest of medicine, the pathology was in fact the patient's fault.2

How do you distinguish between patients who self harm the same way some people compulsively masturbate and patients who self harm because they are on the brink of ending their life? The answer is: you can't always, but it helps to appreciate that there is a dichotomy - and also, if you've heard enough horses, chances are you'll have a pretty good idea of how their hoofbeats sound.

That's the value of experience. Once you've witnessed enough chest pains that aren't heart attacks, you'll stop believing that every one is. That's also the curse of inexperience - that until you've witnessed enough, you will continue to believe.




1. When the consultant said 'that's impressive,' what he was implying was, 'you don't get visual hallucinations with the vast majority of seizures, and even when you do it's not of dead relatives. The story doesn't make sense.' At the time I understood this. I was aware that this didn't fit into my medical school diagnostic framework, but I doubted myself more than the patient, thinking, 'but what about the tiny minority of seizures? But what if it does?' I've never been any good at being skeptical of patients. I think of them all as victims of misfortune, who can only be healed with good intentions and a pure heart.

2. I still find it hard to grasp - thanks to my coddled, sheltered, middle-class upbringing - that there are people who will leap at every opportunity to take advantage of the people who are trying to help them... and even then I find myself wanting to excuse them by saying - this is the only pattern of behaviour they know, and if they were lucky / privileged enough to have formative experiences that hinted to them that there was a different way to live, they would be able to choose it over this manipulative and selfish and despicable version of themselves. If they knew there was another way to be, they could stop being this way. Maybe.

If you were raised on cocaine, how could you ever desire - how could you ever believe in anything else?

Monday, April 16, 2018

nova scotia girls

"you can usually tell from the kid, what the mom is gonna be like"


---

i don't recall ever being as wholesome as these kids are...

---

the effectiveness of the wholesome meme movement depends / relies on a kind of fluency and familiarity with the unwholesome memes that predominate. The original memes were conceived as a spin on a trope, some of which have now become so widely recognised that they have become tropes in their own right, and thus ripe format, fertile ground, activated substrate for subverting convention, parody, ironic variation etc. What i'm trying to say is that the wholesome meme was created in response to a need to oppose or resist the prevailing culture, the status quo. While outwardly it resembles the wholesomeness of dogs and babies whose loveliness is innate, effortless, unintentional, it has more in common with the deliberate benevolence of the holocaust survivor, the veteran social worker, the mother of a child with a disability. Their wholesomeness owes its existence to the unwholesomeness of human nature, but it manages to both acknowledge and supplant this. These memes don't offer us a cute fuzzy distraction, they don't try to sugarcoat the way the world is - they only ask us to try shifting paradigms. They offers us a different way of thinking and feeling in response to familiar set ups. It operates not by skirting the issue but by actively addressing / countenancing / confronting the patterns of thought we have grown used to. These memes were the result of a conscious decision. It's the result of us collectively staring down our cynicism and biting irony and unhappiness, folding our arms and saying, we can do better than this.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

alone in the night










Hey there,

I don't know when you'll get this or how long this will take to reach you. To be honest, I don't even know where you are right now. People move so fast, they move around so much these days. I have a question: do you ever find yourself out late at night, listening to music, just walking aimlessly - no one to meet, no place to be? I suppose it's dangerous nowadays, to be alone like that.

When the sun sets, the city seems like a different place. Some nights are so still, so quiet, you become conscious of how much space there is, above you, beside you. You begin to understand on an emotional level all the implications of the word 'void'. You begin to feel extremely small. I think it's because we're used to being surrounded in public - we expect to have people constantly near and around us - so to be out at night is to find yourself alone when you're not expecting to be. Alone in the night, you are liable to find that your familiar places now house constellations of memories, a galaxy of silence, a new identity.

Where I'm from the nights are quiet. The streets are wide and empty. The stores have lights out front that glow like a tired person's smile. If it's April there's a bridge in the park with water flowing underneath, and a cool breeze will come from nowhere to kiss your cheek. The branches are bare and withered. They hang overhead like bony beggar's palms, reaching, not daring to touch, asking, not expecting to receive.

Are your nights like this too? Can you feel the April wind against your cheek? Can you hear the train carriages rattle like great metal skeletons in the distance?

I wrote this song thinking of you. Thinking maybe one night, you'll be out walking, listening to music - with no one to meet, nowhere to be - and if you are, maybe this song will come on. And when it does, maybe you'll feel the wind against your cheek and hear the trains in the distance and look up at the same night sky as me and see a lost universe hiding in small spaces. Maybe you'll find the cosmos in shop signs and streetlights, in the way the wind kisses your face, maybe on a page.

I hope you find this. I hope this helps you feel less alone in the night. Who knows - maybe someone else out there feels this way too.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

torches of freedom




There is a yin and a yang to city life. In some ways it gives to us, and in other ways it takes from us.

---

consumerism is the new liberty

---

my boss used to smoke
her breaks on the roof.
a smoldering
immolation, burning herself
for fuel

#lowkey #twentysomething #midmillenial #angst

source: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/204

---

chill is the new black

Monday, April 9, 2018

prime

maybe heaven is a do-over. a world where everything happens as it should. where everything goes according to plan. Where the pen drops and the right two people reach for it at the same time; where there is a mix up with the coat check and he returns it to her while his cell phone is still in the coat; where the heel of her shoe breaks just as the two pass each other on the street allowing her to fall into the arms of an attractive bachelor, who just so happens to share her same warped sense of humour, her same obscure taste in music; where the improbable conspires to bring the right people together instead of tear them apart; where every misstep leads to a prayer answered; where every accident is actually an opportunity.

---

eventually, all the pioneers become predecessors

---

disappointment comes in many flavours, and so does joy

---

whosoever shall seek to purchase their sound shall lose it, and whosoever forsakes their sound shall find it

---

"Do you remember a lot about being 25?"

Gerald thought about it for a while.

"It was okay. You feel wiser and smarter than you've ever been before and you also know this is as young as you'll ever be again. It's a good time to be alive."

The cars shone in the afternoon sun, their bodies waxed to perfection.

"So how should I make the most of it?"

Gerald turned around and squinted at his nephew.

"You're asking me?"

"Should I not?"

"Here's my advice: don't listen to my advice."

"Why not?"

Gerald stopped walking and put his hands on his waist.

"Look, I know a couple things about cars and interest rates and politics, but that doesn't mean I know everything. I made a couple of mistakes when I was younger. I had... a very different experience of life compared to you."

"How so?"

"You're really not giving up, are you?"

"Nope."

"I... wasted a lot of opportunities. I pushed away the people who loved me the most and spent my time chasing people who decidedly did not love me at all. I was selfish, arrogant, destructive, cynical."

"So what changed?"

---

25 is the age of hedonism. Of laughter and thrill and distraction. The age of borrowing before lending, of spending before earning, of leaping before looking, of knowing before learning, of doing before dying, of winning before trying, of being before becoming.

---

"We've front loaded life. We've filled it with so many trinkets and goodies and surprises that it's completely possible to go through your twenties and thirties without having to feel lonely. We've designed it to be full of accomplishments, goals, achievements, education, romance, adventure, distractions. There's no space for loneliness anymore; it's wake up, achieve, do this, do that, feel this, try that. Improve yourself. Go to the gym, read books, date girls. We think we've escaped it, but all we've done is delay it. Young people nowadays have no idea how to be lonely without romanticising it, without turning it into a monument, another feather in their cap - or thinking there's something wrong with them. Why do I feel this way? And why does nobody else seem to? And when they're older, and they can't achieve any more, when they've run out of dreams to pine for - they keep dreaming. The chase for them is no longer a pursuit, it's an evasion. They live the remainder of their lives as fugitives from themselves."

Thursday, April 5, 2018

solidão



---

 and living exactly like everyone else

---


She's walking east to west, and I west to east. It's a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about  myself, and ­ what I'd really like to do ­ explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled  the world.

After talking, we'd have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

- Haruki Murakami, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning

Monday, April 2, 2018

nothing steal my joy


Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.

- John 16:20-22

---

perfectionism can be malevolent, malignant if you let it fester. It can ruin you if left unchecked.

The thing that haunts me the most these days and probably has been haunting me for years is this insidious perfectionism that tries to justify itself by saying 'you're getting better because of me! you have such high standards, and look where it's got you!' but really, it's killing me - this feeling like I have to live up to this ideal or standard and then worrying about how apparent it is to everyone around me that I fail to measure up to it, my inability to fulfill this self-imposed mandate.

---

I have passed up on so many golden opportunities for fear of looking foolish

---

Whenever you share something you risk rejection. No matter how good it is. Maybe it's time I understood that being foolish and delusional and prone to error and just plain wrong from time to time is part of being human, and that there are worse things than looking foolish and being misunderstood/rejected, for instance, being too much of a coward to share anything real/that matters to me and thus never connecting deeply with anyone.

---

the great thing about forgiveness is that it allows for failure -- expects it, even

---

related: http://www.happletea.com/comic/real-talk/

resurrection

Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, "Who do the crowds say I am?" They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life." "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?"



---



So, tell us, what really happened? You have told the story nearly a thousand times by now. But it's a good story, so you tell it again. 'When he raised me from the dead,' you say, 'I heard someone calling my name, but I did not know who. Then a bright light pierced through the dark, and I heard him say Lazarus, come out! I followed the voice and found myself again in the land of the living.' Sometimes they ask, 'But what of the stench? The smell of rotting flesh?' You recall that there was indeed a terrible odour, but to your surprise it came not from you, but from the grave. Once the grave-clothes were stripped away, people were amazed to find your skin and flesh were not withered or rotten, but soft and smooth; brand new, like a baby's.

The news spread like wildfire. People flocked from all around to see you. You hear them gasping as you make your way to the well, camping outside the house to catch a glimpse of you opening the shutters. It became somewhat of a nuisance really. The first few days you did your best not to leave the house. Eventually Martha pointed out that you couldn't hide forever and you'd have to leave the house at some point, and the sooner you satisfied their curiosity the sooner you could all be rid of the crowds. They no longer camp outside your house, but their curiosity doesn't seem to be diminishing at all. Almost everyday you get some awe-struck man or woman approaching you in the market, and you oblige, of course. It's not everyday you get to talk to a dead man. Still, you can always tell a kind of disappointment in their eyes once they have met you - and you know it is because of how ordinary you seem. They seem to expect rays of light to shoot from your eyes and gold to drop from your mouth. Even Mary and Martha were a little estranged at first, weren't sure of how to act around you. Even you at one point, after having made sure the house was empty, standing at the edge of the bath, tried to see if you could walk on water, which did not go very well. It hasn't taken much time for things to go back to normal, with Martha continually pestering you to help out around the house. 'Woman!' You feel like saying. 'I was only dead last week!'

The question at the front of their minds - that is always on their tongue is, naturally, 'what is it like to be dead?' And your answer never fails to underwhelm them. 'It's not like anything, really. It's like being asleep. A sleep with no dreams.' 'Did you meet God?' 'No.' 'Did you see Moses?' 'No.' 'What about my grandfather, was he there?' They are always expecting flames, clouds, harps, cherubim. But the honest answer is that if there was anything of the sort, you don't recall it. All you recall is a nothingness that seemed to have no beginning and no end, a darkness that gave way to light, no memory or emotion or experience of time or even space. Total silence, an absolute void, and then his voice calling your name. But they aren't interested in that stuff.

The other thing you have noticed is that members of the Council keep giving you dirty looks in the market and the street, as if it were your fault that you died and were resurrected. As if you plotted the whole thing just to spite them. The townsfolk have by now begrudgingly accepted the fact that you're basically still a normal human being. But it isn't true that you're exactly the same. When Jesus raised you from the dead, it seems, he didn't raise all of you. Some of the old, the unworthiness, the guilt, the unkindness and selfishness it seems, remained in the grave. Sometimes you catch yourself going back to the old ways. Falling into old habits. But when you first emerged from the grave, you discovered you were still yourself, but also that you were different. You saw the world with new eyes. With a sense of wonder. You carry with you this inner peace. You no longer have any fear of death. When you read the scriptures, the words seem to hold new meaning. And they stay with you throughout the day. After the resurrection, whenever you prayed or read the word, you felt connected. Cleansed. You felt joy.

You think of the nights afterwards spent with Jesus, and how he treated you no differently. He acted as if he had simply loaned you a shekel, not given you new life. You think fondly of that last night with him, talking and laughing, breaking bread with your friend, conqueror of the grave. You wish every night could be that night again.

And yet you know you owe him an immeasurable debt. It's not true that you don't remember anything. You remember being very ill, and that they had sent for Jesus. You believed, without doubt, that he would come to your rescue, even as the life drained from your lips. 'Do not be afraid,' you told them, even as your sisters wept. Even as the sickness caused your tongue to be dry as sand. 'Do not bother with the funeral arrangements,' you said. 'Do you not trust in Jesus to rescue his friends?'

But where were you when it was him who needed rescuing? You listened to the crowd screaming 'Crucify him!' You watched as the nails went into his hands, you watched as he hung there dying, as he breathed his last. Mary says that Jesus wept outside your tomb. And now it is him in the grave, not you.

The next morning, the skies were clear. You listened as the birds sang their song and green leaves rustled with the wind, oblivious to your grieving heart.

When you first heard about the empty tomb, of course you had to see for yourself. You didn't even think to doubt her. You had never run so fast in your life, tripping only twice. You ran like a madman. You stopped at the mouth of the tomb and stared into it. You hesitated, reluctant to go in, fearing that death would recognise you and claim you again. But eventually you dared to enter, and seeing the linen and the cloth lying there, you dared to hope.

And now Mary claims to have seen him. If not for the empty tomb, you would assume she has gone mad with sorrow, but she is not sorrowful in the least. In fact, her face glows with joy. And not just Mary but the others as well. They claim to have met him, to have shared meals with him. They say they have felt with their own hands where the nails have pierced his. Can it be true? A man claiming to be the son of God, put to death by sinners, and now risen from the dead. They say that he appears to disciples in houses, in the streets, in prisons, by the lake. And what if it is true? This tale as ludicrous and preposterous and impossible as hearing a dead man speak. The question remains, what will you believe?



Long Revision

 夕食後、ベアは湾のパノラマビューのために4月をエスプラネードに連れて行くことを申し出たが、彼女は翌朝早く空港にいなければならないと言って断った。代わりに、4月は金融街を二分し、川の河口を横断して少し上流のMRT駅に到着できるルートを提案しました。そこで彼らは手入れの行き届いた都...