tilly

Moments & textures across normandie , luxembourg , perth , singapore , beaconsfield (Last night I told my mom I wrote an angsty poem to make myself feel better and she 🙏🏼 reacted lol)

Circling back to a thought & had to change recently into 9 months ago 😳

Not the usual but just came across this storyboard of a murakami short (the dancing dwarf) for some unsuccessful application I no longer remember 🙂‍↔️🫶🏼

I guess…I am still thinking about doors 😮‍💨 (posting today bc I don’t want to post tomorrow, though let’s be real what is a birthday if not a portal)

Still making my slow way back to this format, starting with recalling what it feels like to absorb my environment as food for writing (it’s exhausting? 🙂‍↔️ tips welcome)

Trying to reawaken this dormant account 🤧 with some words written months ago (wild guess is around my birthday? lol), but which feel relevant nonetheless in this transition period~ Will she continue ~ ~ ~ big tbd ~ ~

[original prose/notes version of the silly little script exercise above hehe - haven’t written in this format for years so was quite fun 😌] - - - Last night, Ella and I riding back home from 을지로 around 22h30: ears thrumming, lids sealing over so as to watch flickering lights from a car ahead of us lick at surrounding reflective surfaces with a grin. Something I might’ve noticed years ago. We can enter the tunnel, we can try to trace a meeting point between routine and disruption (maybe that’s the secret 👀). If hunger is intelligent, what to do when I am full. Foggy broth, cheap soju, bodies to find stillness sweet within chaos and we begin again. I want to retain the ghost of friction at the place where boundaries meet. I want to stretch my voice across a dark dream landscape. I want to document the way you move me.

Drove to a 계곡 over the weekend, a car ride that took far longer than I’d expected. We spoke of many things on the road, listening to Chappell Roan: cosmic/divine belief and the agency of children, drag personas and first impressions, high school personas and red flags, science, little spoons, consciousness and getting scammed at 노래방. At some point, Bobo joked about whether I’d write about this for bad ham (tbh I had thought about it but now I almost had to). I’ve nurtured an almost obsessive habit of documenting things for years now– people watching, observing, photographing, filming, scribbling, forever capturing moments meant to be lived. Much to my chagrin, this tendency has sometimes made others uncomfortable or annoyed. And so I suppressed the urge, only to have it bubble back gently to the surface. When travelling recently alone to Taiwan, I wondered: is this for me? For posterity? If I didn’t record a passing thought or scene, does that mean it didn’t happen (if my mind forgets)? I spent a somewhat nerve-wracking but necessary hour in a hot spring tucked away in Beitou, watching my mind wander and trying to mentally archive its meanderings lest I forget later. No phone, no pen and paper, no one with whom conversation would help immortalise my thoughts. I exchanged a few words in broken Japanese with an old woman soaking in the water beside me. I watched my fingertips turn into the palest of prunes. And the sun set behind the mountain before us.

A moment in time I’d like to keep- working on my laptop with the fan on in peak summer, watching the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening ceremony and parade of nations while the boys play 화투 & cackle/groan. Soft low tones: Ella over the phone with mama next door, speaking, I imagine, of the future- some unclear window from which I will extend my fingers to try and touch this fragment again. It takes us a minute to notice that the YouTube video looped for some reason and the same countries were reintroduced- New Zealand, Ghana, Denmark…the moment choosing maybe to linger a bit longer with me.

The first time I really remember hearing a cicada sing was in Tokyo, towards the end of summer in September 2018. I picked up a dead one outside the first airbnb we couldn’t enter just yet, dazed and jetlagged, a bit buzzed from the welcome asahi my friend brought for the ride into the city. It was a perfectly preserved little being- as if it had chosen the perfect time to die. I sketched it for an hour or so, drawn by the careful architecture of its shell. I didn’t grow up identifying this syncopated buzzing (clicking? shrilling? humming? crying? suggestions welcome pls) with the unmistakable frequency of summer. Instead it made me feel so far away, flipping thru a picture book of someone else’s childhood. Fingers coated in melted ice cream and saliva, the stick of school uniforms, cooling off in mountain streams, piercing a tiny fork into a naked slope of peach. Curiosity and shame // A humid nape // not mine, but one I loved // the perfect nickname.

Late one night last year, I sat with Bobo discussing our imminent move post being essentially evicted from our apartment. Despite the shitty circumstances, this move seemed emotionally easier than the last- in which we left behind a fully furnished unit that had become our home for a year and a half. Nothing had been ours, but the space had grown to know us. Pink paisley sheets for kids washed at least a hundred times, characterless but clean tableware, licked happy by ghosts of dinners past. After all this time, in my late 20s, 16 houses into life, countless glasses broken, entire existence boxed in, life boxed out, and I still get emotional about things like cutlery. But wouldn’t you? A little silver teaspoon back home has witnessed my mouth grow, seen firsthand how my dental landscape has changed. Thin and imperfect, a delicate stem perfect for small hands and now almost too slight, with an engraved sheep and crown, and loping initials. If I can’t return to past homes, I’d like at least to hold onto the smaller infrastructure. The things that taught me how to be.

Where does one draw the line between letting go, giving up, holding on, moving on, being soft, feeling strong, meaning yes and saying no, every decision grows attached or in every whim there is a seed, is dependence, nostalgia, centre, skewed, mystery dethroned, do I cut out or grow short, sparkling water with black coffee in every dream, oh please, everything wanders, and my shadow wonders, is she bent funny (at the knees) 🤔