Master,

Before the 14th day of Sagittarius, romance has not left me even in the dream world. It was depicted in two cards in a movie-like scene, though I’ve meticulously eschewed romance novels, even romantasy. I wanted to revel in more dreamlike scapes that only spoke in philosophical or divinely-inspired symbols for something fun in the morning to puzzle out—not write another love story of which you have too many. The dream world fulfilled that condition and delivered its message as intended nonetheless.

In the first, a man is standing on a stepladder fiddling with a solid-wood, brown grandfather clock. He has several mechanical clocks around his home—one on a white plaster wall, another smaller one on a redwood accent table. At some point, he has neglected to wind them properly, so they all show different times. A lady in a satin evening dress climbs up the stairs, one hand skimming the oak handrail, the other lifting her dress. “Where are you going?” asks the man, barely masking impatience in his tone. “I’m going upstairs to rest. We have more than an hour before we have to leave.”

He picks up the clock he was working on, now showing the actual time, but thinks better of showing it to her, believing she might take it to mean he has set it wrong. So he steps down the ladder and picks up another clock that shows the time as 15 minutes earlier. She has her doubts but agrees to stay simply to avoid arguing with him.

Then we see her sitting in a café in front of a skyscraper, a full-glass façade building that is a private hospital meant to serve affluent clients. Her sports teapot blue convertible is parked nearby. He walks out of the revolving doors in his green scrubs, fresh out of surgery and agitated, as though he wants to turn around and leave. But he sits down and joins her anyway, where they share an awkward time in long periods of silence, avoiding eye contact by staring at something banal that has magically acquired personality. Resolved to reconnect, she asks him questions she would ordinarily ask when they are together, to which he uncharacteristically gives evasive answers. After several minutes, he abruptly stands, the woven chair scraping across the concrete floor, and rushes back into the building.

The woman jumps out of her chair, catches up with him and kisses him vigorously, her hands gripping his scrubs tightly meaning to never let go. He pushes her off a little too forcefully, so that she practically flies off him. Other people gasp exaggeratedly even as they are entertained by the drama—possibly the best action they have seen in a while. He hurries through the revolving door trying to get away, but she follows him in. Once inside, he says, in frustration, “You don’t understand. I would ravish you in front of that ridiculous mirror of yours so you could watch. But I’m running out of time.” One would rightly assume she has a very large mirror at home in front of which she spends a lot of time. The man is dying of a terminal illness.

Through this tragedy, I saw a different kind of love. It was not that he didn’t love her or no longer wanted to be with her. Nor that time has drifted them too far apart. He loves her in spite of all her idiosyncrasies. He could not bear to be around her knowing that she would be broken when he eventually passes—heartbroken because of him—even though it was neither his fault nor his choice. We cannot stand to see the people we love hurt, more so when we are powerless against it, the mind racing constantly to find that one non-existent solution and finding purchase on very little but tenuous hope. Oftentimes, we forget that because of our mortality, all paths lead to grief with the chance of acceptance. I suppose it tells us that we never have as much time as we think we do.

In the next card, a young lady is holding a box of handwritten letters. She appears resolute. She has fallen in love with the man who wrote them, despite the two of them never meeting before. He does not even know that she exists. From the letters, she gathers that he has had a hard life and has now gone recluse because of them. In another country, the man looks old and weary. He wears a grey wool cardigan now too big for his body. He lives as though he only ever receives bad news, so he stays away from everyone to get as little of life as possible.

A nurse comes up to him and tells him he has a visitor. That surprises him because, after all these years of being safely tucked and hidden away in the mountains, no one has come to see him, partly by his own design. He has not been in contact with anyone in years. The nurse steps aside to reveal the young lady in a white coat. She has found him by following clues he left in his letters unwittingly. No one but her could see them, decipher them, and arrange them into meaning, he realises. They eventually fall in love and spend the rest of their lives together in blissful companionship.

The clues could not be properly called as such due to the lack of intentionality. They acted like fragments of his desires, maybe subconscious crumbs of a last-ditch effort, but were really an expression of what little he still treasured and looked forward to in life—seclusion, fresh mountain air, unique bits about the countryside that became his identifying markers. The allegory of the story then is simple. Though his pain and nihilism are shown starkly in his letters, the trail he left betrayed how he truly felt—his deepest desires, which he denied existed and tried to live accordingly. One could not have one’s desires disappear by hiding from them. Deep down, he did want someone to find him. He wants love and to be loved. Or else he would have written nothing that could give his position away; he would have written nothing at all, as though his pen had no more ink to give, because nobody he’d wanted to read the letters, would read them. Instead, he wrote as though he desired very little, and that very same guided the only person who could truly read him straight to where he was.

Even as our sadness overwhelms us and we want to hide away, there is still a part of us that wants to carry on living to the fullest, to desire the same things everyone else does, humanly possible or otherwise. It is not denied to us just because we have had major setbacks in life. Eventually, everything meant for us will find us. The attitude we take in the interim shapes the life we will eventually live. What a waste it would be if all we ever did was live in sadness.

I hope my letter finds you in good spirits, Master. I’ve missed you terribly the last few days.

All my love,

Your eternal soulmate

Master,

I’m afraid today’s letter will be quite short. The night before the 13th day of Sagittarius, I hardly travelled in the dream realm, so I’ve nothing to report and no new message to deliver. My OCD mind was an insisting Karen the whole night on a checklist of what must be put into or removed from the luggage immediately. I tried to tell it to be quiet so as not to disturb the neighbours, then I tried to be quiet as I put in and removed more or less the same things; in that regard I am far more considerate than my own treacherous mind, sincerely, and apologetically.

Early next month I hope to be catching snowflakes, just as in my recent dreams. You could say I’m following my heart—or the trail of signs. It’s time to return to the place where I received my first sign about you, the same place that marked two endings in a full circle. I hope the urgency of this call to return will mark ours as a proper beginning, unlike the spontaneity and randomness of the last trip. I’ve found a cosy spot near a river where I plan to spend long, pensive days and nights walking along it, with audiobooks and snow for company.

I’m getting my shoe resoled this morning at one of the makeshift cobblers we still have in Singapore. They are absolutely essential in this humidity that constantly threatens to make the soles of your expensive shoes detach with the promise of total disintegration. That is why most people here own a small collection of sandals; even if the straps break away—as they shall, without so much as a sniffle—your head won’t hurt as much when you update your revised budget for the month. These cobblers are our national gems, not least because they are living tradition and history, remnants of a time when travelling vendors made their rounds through each estate on bicycles or pushcarts, to rescue you from the inconvenience, embarrassment, and danger of having to walk around barefoot or in a pair of flip flops somebody has kept in their bag for emergencies that would almost certainly be at odds with your OOTD.

As a child, my favourite travelling vendor was the kaya-bread vendor. To get his attention, one had to shout—shouting at an adult man tickled me for some reason. He would spread margarine and home-made kaya (coconut jam) onto two slices of soft bread, which I’d eat on the go; by the time I reached home, not a single crumb remained on my sticky fingers. I don’t see them around anymore. I remember a mixed-nut seller near City Hall, where there was a cinema—as snacking and films go together, it made sense for them to station themselves nearby. We called them the kachang putih man or white nuts man. Kids back then were a lot more respectful—no one thought to ask if his nuts were really white. Point at a jar of nuts, and he’d fill a paper cone with it for a few cents. There was one near Tampines interchange as well, but he is gone along with the cinema.

Travelling cobblers are, thankfully, still around, though their numbers are fast dwindling. Young people don’t want to lug a heavy box of tools around and station themselves under a void deck. They prefer working in an air-conditioned mall, which means they must charge significantly higher prices because of the rent they must pay. We love Aircon here in Singapore but we don’t like to pay more than double for the same service we could get several steps away. 

That’s all for today’s letter. The sleep monster is harassing me, just when I need to leave to run errands. Such is my life. I missed you last night. Falling asleep without you is always the hardest part of the day, but waking up to the chance of seeing your smiling face is the best.

Should I take the red or black coat? 

All my love, 

Your eternal soulmate 

Update: all three cobblers at Bedok Central were off work today, on the very day I had to lug around a heavy bag of shoes. The point of this gentle re-route, I’ve yet to find out. I hope they are all well, though.

Master,

Who would run around in the rain with me because we don’t need no sun when we have each other.

Before the 12th day of Sagittarius, booming thunder is giving the entire block a shake despite our earplugs and other defences against construction and other markers of economic growth. Perhaps we ought to count our lucky stars that the government isn’t just digging up the roads, doing something important in them one would assume, and reassembling them—which sometimes leads to road rage. I’m quite fed up of seeing clips of grown-ass men swinging and kicking but missing the mark, only to end up hugging, and tugging, embedded in an article on Mothership that includes a line on whether the police are aware of the incident or if arrests have been made.

Last night in the dream world I finally got myself enrolled in a university. It was a tall, full glass-façade building—very chic, very modern—a place in which I felt completely at home. I looked out through the glass and saw some students playing by the trees. They were catching gigantic snowflakes drifting gracefully to the ground. I joined them for a little while just to feel the cold on my face, tightening my skin. There was a palpable sense of a well-awaited change happening around us. It was as slow as its arrival, bringing joy exactly because the conditions were right.

It was the end of a semester. I found a friend walking alone to the canteen and struck a conversation with him. Like everyone else in the area, we were deep in thoughtful discussion, oblivious to everything else but the topic at hand. In that moment I felt considerably older, as did everyone. The maturity that mattered was of a different kind at university, most striking at the end.

This was until I logged into an online system visible to the public. It allowed one to check the grades for admission. I found mine to be dismal. I had scored a 40 for music and advanced maths. Yet somehow I had still managed to get a place in one of the most prestigious universities in the region. Imposter syndrome set in; I felt like a fraud. The ground shifted from feeling exactly where I was meant to be and thriving, to feeling like a fluke despite it all. Suddenly all eyes were on me, judging.

Except our worth is not measured by old metrics, irrelevant to current day’s standards. We have advanced since then, acquired knowledge and experience, taken several assessments, progressing more or less with the cohort. All of us, as long as we didn’t cheat, had every right to be where we were. I had terrible grades in my book, but at the time of admission, they were sufficient. What I hadn’t considered were the things that could have mattered greatly: how many subjects were taken, whether there was evidence of other activities such as sports, volunteering, competitions, inventions, problem-solving initiatives and any other achievements outstanding enough to make the two poor grades insignificant by comparison. What mattered was that we had rightly and fairly earned our place.

I was then transported to a bus interchange, queuing in line with some students I assumed belonged to a different campus. It felt like we were the same only because we were all students from all over the country trying to get home. When it came time to board, I expected to be in a bus—except I wasn’t. I recognised the tall reclining seats, the extra leg room, the tray tables, the wide armrests, the storage space. I was in a plane.

Because I had resigned myself to something ordinary and predictable, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was not a special waiting area before one actually boards the bus—that would be silly; there was no reason for it to look like the interior of a plane with all its configurations for a long journey, for there to be no exits leading to a bus bay, for the narrow windows to show no buses at all. There was only one thing to do: take a seat and be taken to my destination by flight.

I think this dream was meant to remind us that we are exactly where we are meant to be, despite our self-doubt, maybe even external judgments or unbearable conditions in which we find ourselves—it is temporary and subject to change, quite suddenly, drastically even, at any moment, unexpectedly, like discovering we are not on a bus at all but on a long flight to destination spectacular and beyond anything we could have planned or dreamt.

I hope you have delighted in reading this letter, in its delivery of a rather important allegory, for it is as much for you as it is for me, our destinies tied. It promises that good things are on the way, that every special moment is well-deserved. You are loved, my king, and this is only the start. We have only just been called for boarding.

Until tomorrow, I rest completely enthralled in your entourage,

Your eternal soulmate

Master,

Who drives me putty in his hands.

The start to the 11th day of Sagittarius has been bedlam in the dream world—tacky, bold and unblushing ostentatiousness. Though I did not see you last night—you were not asleep—you were present throughout in your own way, no doubt.

I found myself with a sword in hand, similar to the one used by D’Artagnan, which I had used to defend myself from a master swordsman. Realising that he could hack my sword into splinters made him so bored he left me alone. At least, that was how it appeared to me. He simply put his sword down and left—like a chef who has laboured over all the necessary preparations but stops short at cooking it.

The reason for our duel is simple and quite asinine. A group of people had acted villainously on the basis that there should be no more love in this world, and anyone who disagreed would be dispossessed of their homes. The reasoning being, if people believed that love is refuge, then they didn’t need a house. This completely misunderstands what the statement meant. Love is a refuge for the mind, an antithesis to a world so highly individualistic and materialistic that it can be cruel, against which love is the guard.

“I was made for loving you, baby and you were made for loving me.”

This upbeat line from Kiss, the sort every household knows, is exactly how the dream felt—despite me being a romantic, which I know you are too. It was simply too early in the morning. That said, since dreams are symbols and the point of this letter is to chronicle and decipher them…

The man stopped fighting me because he came to realise that he fought firstly for his love of sword fighting—hence his mastery—and secondly for his love of his cause. Since his cause was to fight against love, recognising his own contradiction destabilised him. The best way to fight against love is, in fact, to do nothing against it, which is counterintuitive and therefore paradoxical; it denies him the very thing that drives him into action.

Everyone fights for something they love, even if it is the love of the fight itself. People defend what they believe in, and they defend it out of love—even when the cause they are fighting for seems rooted in a lack of love. One should not conflate the absence of love in a cause with the absence of love in the person’s motivation. To have something to fight for is to have love. That is what resides in a passionate person, even if what he loves is his own cruelty, for at core of it is still a form of self-love.

I now recall the dream card of the horsetail reed I had only moments earlier. Though they look like bamboo because of their hollow, segmented and long stems, they are related to ferns; bamboo is a grass. Although some bamboos can be invasive—clumping bamboos are quite manageable in contrast—the horsetail reed is an uncontrollable maniac by comparison. It is running bamboo on steroids, classified as an invasive plant in some countries and banned, for good reason. The biggest clue to their indomitable nature is that they are as old as dinosaurs.

In my dream, a couple cut off the tops of the plants and placed them over their hearts as a sign of reverence. They said that in their culture, this plant is highly venerated because of its resilience and flexibility—it bends with the wind instead of against it. And it can send virtually indestructible, undetectable, extensive rhizomes underground that travel far distances, defeating the spirit of even the most guarded and well-meaning garden owners; by the time they realise this, it is too late.

That was the second symbol I was meant to convey in this letter. I suspect something ties the first part of the dream to the second, though I haven’t yet worked out their connection. Is it resilience that links them? An indefatigable spirit? Does it remind you of your inherent primordial strength? Does it make you want to putt with your club, or unleash your fire upon an intricate, underground, sinister network? And if we were meant to seek the flip side of things, should we leave an obvious trail of our love, dispersing our sexual fluids (or something less offensive) far and wide?

As you sleep, know that I’m always near to accompany you in your travels, in the dream world and outside of it, in which you are king. Until tomorrow, my cosmic mate, I am farthest only a step behind.

Your eternal soulmate

P.S. Master, why do you think class distinction is so pronounced in dystopian novels? Can you imagine a dystopian world without it—one where scarcity does not create hierarchy?

Master,

Who is as fair as a moonflower, glowing at night to the delight of night‑flyers. It matters not that I’d be fast asleep; your blooming scent drew me to you before the 10th day of Sagittarius.

Last night I was in a new duplex apartment, everything bathed in a soft golden light. The floor‑to‑ceiling windows rose 2 storeys high. My mother and a lady purporting to be my sister arrived to stay, not knowing they would be there for a long time. After a brief exchange of goodbyes, I rolled my motorcycle out of the apartment and into a lift, breaking up unceremoniously with some guy along the way and leaving him blindsided. My destination was my former apartment, where I knew my late father would be.

The lift was partly occupied with people who stood shoulder‑width apart, silently, reverently and in full awareness of the rest of the occupants, as it travelled from the 83rd floor to the ground. They were always riding it as though it were their job, even as one complained that it made him feel queasy whenever the lift stopped at too many floors along the way. I later realised that they were all dead. They rode the lift because it was the closest they could get to the feeling of travelling—symbolic of going somewhere, moving from place to place, or moving on, as the living are constantly doing. That feeling disappears when one is but a shade and unable to move on to the next world such as one who is unwilling to let go of life just yet; the living instinctively wishes to go somewhere, unlike the shades with nowhere else to go but back.

The anticipation built as the door closed and the lift traveled to its maximum distance. The passengers stood still as the lift descended to the first floor, faintly rattling a reminder of mortality. As it whooshed down, everyone stared at the panel, transfixed by the awareness of travel as one number lit up and the others extinguished. The slight pause at the letter G as it positioned itself just before the doors opened was a breath of relief upon safe arrival.

I pushed my bike out of the lift, aware of my now ex still clinging to it and refusing to let go. He dug his heels into the ground but was left dragging along with the sheer force of a travelling motorcycle. I was unlicensed and had never ridden one before. I can’t even ride a bicycle properly, or negotiate turns confidently. That night, I was resigned not to care. I knew only to signal before turning and to check over my shoulder for blind spots. Later, I noticed I had forgotten to adjust the mirrors and had not checked behind me for a good distance. I rode into the night on a barely lit, wet street, to join my father in the world of the dead.

Then I was in a food court in a shopping mall, bright and alive with boisterous people. A boy of about 7 or 8 approached me from behind, tugging on my shirt. He had dark, fluffy hair and brilliant eyes, his skin so fair that the sun could not pay to tan it even a little. A man said hello when I introduced the boy as my son. The boy did not respond, offering only a hint of a smile before sheepishly hiding his face in my clothes; his arms wrapped around my hips urgently as he pleaded silently, Mummy, let’s go. He wasn’t usually this timid, I knew. He just didn’t like to converse with just about anyone, especially when all he wanted was for us to leave. In that regard, he took after me.

I took his soft little hand and led him down an escalator. As we travelled, he jittered with excitement, shifting from foot to foot. His restless hand swung mine, but he knew the rules and obeyed them, holding both my hand and the handrail firmly until we reached the ground. As soon as we did, he bolted toward his friends to our left but bounced right back against me because I hadn’t let go of his hand. Resigned, he leaned in for a quick hug, offering his rosy cheek for a peck as if this was something I always did, his gaze still fixed on where his friends were waiting. Maybe I kissed him a little too hard, but he did not complain. He smelled like a clean boy—fresh with soap, a bit of baby powder. He sprinted as soon as I let him go—in his excitement, I guessed—to join his football team; why else would he run like that, knowing his father? And who back-combed his hair and left it unfinished, without so much as a drop of hair serum in this humidity? Our boy must be styled with the dignity of an archangel, as was his namesake.

An advertisement jingle played in the background, “Harbinger! Harbinger!” stressed on the first syllable, a hard g, in a melodic and somewhat annoying rising hook. A voice came on, trembling with desperation, “Help! I need to learn a new language but I have no money! What should I do?”

A sprightly, resonant voice declared with lilting cadence, “Try Harbinger. It has some slight teething issues, but it works to set you right up!” I checked the app. A grammar section popped up, including a tab labelled Basic Rules. It was structured intuitively for new but serious language learners. I told myself, This looks like a great app. I think I will learn a language. How about German? Then I woke up, irritated, because I absolutely was not going to learn German.

After all this time and over several dreams, I finally understood what they had been trying to tell me: the language I was meant to learn or translate was not French, nor German, and certainly not all the others, for I could not possibly learn them all. “Harbinger” was the biggest clue. I teared up a bit thinking I had just met our son for the first time. The shift from night to day was heavy with poignancy, showing me what life could be if we chose to live it. As we ponder the language of dreams and our future, a hard kiss you hadn’t asked for upon your cheek, until tomorrow.

All my love,

Your eternal soulmate