by Amanda
Leather jacket, metallic scales, the tip of a sharpened dagger gleaming in the moonlight. Silence. It’s midnight but that’s not why the air is as cold as ice. A mind abuzz with estimations and calculations, for one intent. Heels digging deeper into the earth, narrowed eyes, white-knuckled fingers strangling the weathered hilt. Liar, she breathed.
A couple months ago I spontaneously purchased more than a kilo of couverture chocolate and tackled the entire stash armed with an infrared thermometer and the steely resolve to perfect the art of tempering chocolate after a tragic first attempt at bonbon making, the evidence of which I refuse to retain in any form, mentally […]
I didn’t mean for two months to lapse since my last post but so much has happened in between. I decided to move from Tokyo back to Singapore permanently after days and nights of deliberation and was occupied with the logistics of it all for the past several weeks. Up till the point I boarded […]
Amidst the treacherous whirlpools of poison and bitter medicine, I have always found, no matter how minuscule, a kernel of light – a lonely but brave survivor casting its warmth through ashes and shadows. Over time hope feeds its strength. It swells up like the envelope of a hot air balloon starting to take flight, […]
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) – Sylvia Plath
Finally the most torturous 365 days in recent history can be referred to in past tense and humanity has stepped into what one can only anticipate to be a more smooth sailing chapter. In short, happy new year! In conjunction with the new year and the accompanying notion of a fresh, clean start to old […]
The re-questioning of personal style seems to be an annual affair at this point. It’s hard to definitively say if the broadly sombre atmosphere of 2020 and the somewhat shaky prospects of the upcoming year play a substantial role in this shift, but my stylistic preferences are becoming increasingly monochromatic and very much less sunlight […]
I watched the hazy morning glow streaming in through the windows give way to tiled rectangular shadows on the wall like the black and white keys of the piano. I counted the seconds as I watched them slowly and gradually grow fainter. …seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… and they were gone.
Occasionally there are moments where my eyes land upon an image so strikingly beautiful that it feels like its beauty is collectively crystallised into a long, slender icicle, gliding through the air seamlessly, like an arrow through the heart.
What makes night within us may leave stars. – Victor Hugo As I backspace furiously on abandoned half-written sentences from prior fleeting strokes of inspiration, filling the newly bleached white spaces with matte black text one character at a time at 1.22 AM on a Tuesday morning, my first immediate thought is that I needed […]
Music at midnight, being bundled up in an oversized blanket, a slice of sweetness, the motion of a fork gliding through, the sugary warmth of spiced caramel – a perfect moment in time.
I hope you are blessed with a heart of a wildflower. -Nikita Gill
Mentally I’ve written and re-written the introduction to this post a thousand times. Inspiration has never felt so desperately out of reach. It’s like curling your fingers into a fist in the air and hoping to capture a butterfly – in a room where there’s none. The cure can only be fresh air and freedom, […]
There comes a string of seconds during the day when the still transparent air transforms into a fog of shimmering gold. The moments are fleeting, evanescent. If only you could twirl in circles on tiptoes with an opened glass jar held in a hand outstretched, fill it to the brim with the twinkling light and […]
It occurred to me as I was handling the mandoline slicer – a nifty godsend of a kitchen contraption designed to transform (or personally, magick!) homogeneously tracing paper thin slices out of some fruit/vegetable/hard cheese? – that in an alternate dimension without said device I would be having dramatically less fun making this tart. These […]
Happy holidays! I know it’s a few days past Christmas but I wanted to share my first ever gingerbread house project because I’d like to think that it was a major success, and also is there really ever an inappropriate time for Christmas content? Shout out to Pinterest for the ingenious window hack – gelatin […]
She wore a dress that was dipped in the colors of a bonfire – streaks of orangey-yellow melting into a gold so bright it looked white. The air around her was a shimmering pale gold, and her dress twinkled in the late afternoon light with every soundless step she took. She walked head down on […]
I imagined a world in gradients of pink. A dusty rose, a powdery faded pink, sweet pastel, an electric fuchsia bordering on cherry. I imagined them all together, like roses planted side by side in a flower bed.
For the longest time ever I visualized the epitome of truly living to be hopping on a flight to an unexplored destination when the urge to go somewhere struck. Definitely somewhere with stunning blue waters running parallel to the whitest softest sand. Someplace where the locals spoke a different language, or at least speak a […]
“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, […]
Sun rays on bare skin. Cloudless cerulean skies. Crickets punctuating the muggy summer air with their unwavering high pitched cries. Afternoons so blindingly bright that everywhere you look is an overexposed picture. Flushed cheeks, floaty cotton dresses, long hair swept up in ponytails. Leaves a verdant green. An occasional breeze whooshes by. Sighs of relief. […]
The popularity of the simple chocolate chip cookie baffles me sometimes. From a baker’s standpoint they aren’t the most exciting things to make, but they elicit such dramatic reactions in the people I gift them to in the best possible way.
To be embraced by the warm aroma of caramel and butter and the music that is beautiful, reposeful silence – that’s my happy place, my dream world, the dimension in which my consciousness resides that is hazily tethered to reality solely by a strand of silken thread. It’s where I go to disconnect, this crystal […]
There was a time when the overzealous student I was thought that the more complex the vocabulary and more convoluted the sentence structure I could use to articulate my ideas, the more intelligent I would seem. Then there was a time when I admired the clarity in my peers’ simplicity of speech. And then there […]
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future… …What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility […]
Some days I lapse into moments where there’s a thunderstorm imprisoned in my mind and lightning bolts surging through my veins. I can’t sense anything above the chaos of dark thoughts churning and seething – not the sound of a Steinway piano played by angels’ fingertips or the perfume of a vaseful of ivory gardenias. […]
The first year of elementary school during an English class, my teacher posed us students a question that went something along the lines of, “Which is most important in discerning a person’s true feelings when he speaks – his body language, his words, or his tone of voice?” Majority of the class picked ‘body language’. […]
I saw a jumble of thoughts unravel into half-finished sentences in my head then suffocated the mental delete button before they could even materialize into black spots of digital data juxtaposed against the bright white of the wordpress editor. “Going back to basics…”, “I’ve not updated this blog in 5 months but hey how’s it […]
