In Continuum.

Porcelain

We've got the afternoon
You've got this room for two
One thing I'm left to do
Discover me, discovering you

If the haunting music of Emilie Simon's album "March of the Empress" and Sigur Ros' "()" album represents the winter, then "Quiet is the New Loud" and "Riot on an Empty Street" by Kings of Convenience are representations of spring. It takes away much of the chill that the winter brings, but at the same time hints of the warmth that is to come in summer. Albums like that are especially comforting on lonely bus rides to school on Monday mornings, fresh from the excitements of the weekends and the looming dark clouds of the rest of the week ahead. I cleared my thoughts in the corner of the bus, dominated the last row and stretched out my legs and thoughts. It was an empty bus and an empty morning, if the latter makes any sense to you. But that was how I felt like, a sense of emptiness somehow, as if something was missing on the five lane road that morning.

Nodding my head to the mellow sounds of guitars, I mouthed the words quietly under my breath as the bus rolled on. The train from Malaysia crossed the road overhead along the bridge that got so close to the top of the bus that I almost ducked my head when we went under. The black iron railings on the side of the bridge made bright triangular lights on the sides of the train, as if passed by with invisible passengers inside. Seeing a train gets me excited, and I was reminded of the time when my parents used to bring me to the airport to see airplanes. As the train rumbled pass overhead, the bus screeched to a sudden halt at the next stop, allowing passengers to alight and board.

One mile to every inch of
You skin like porcelain
One pair of candy lips and
Your bubble gum tongue

My father and I were talking about art the other day - however improbable the last sentence may have sounded. My father is perhaps the last person you would expect me to talk about art with, but there we were sitting next to each other in his car talking about the art of driving a car. To some, there may not be a lot of artistry involved in crying a four-wheel car, but that is the case for him - he claims. He likes the feeling of being in control of where he is going, which lane to take and which care to overtake. He likes the sensation of the car swerving in the direction that he dictates, or the choice of music over the radio although he seldom listens to them at all. That is the kind of art he is talking about, the kind that involves a certain freedom or liberty in life. However, I suggested a different sort of art, one that involves a vehicle that is out of your control.

Bus drivers dictate the route that he takes, and you are probably not going to find a driver being persuaded by somebody else to take a different route because it saves more time or avoids heavy traffic. That alone is bad, I agree. However, there is a certain satisfaction involved in bus-taking that is not found in driving your own car. To me, though driving your own car is indefinitely more satisfying, it becomes a very selfish act when compared to sharing a space with a total stranger on the bus. That is because of how we are when we are the drivers of our own car, and how we live and breathe in the space within the vehicle that is not shared by anybody else. I like to watch people do things when they think that you are not watching, and those are the things you cannot see if you are in control of your own four-wheel drive. From the looks of my father, I think he lost my point somewhere after the first line, but I blabbered on anyway.

And if you want love, we'll make it
Swim in the deep sea of blankets
Take all your big plans and break them
'Cause it's bound to be a while

You see, that was the kind of thing that happened on Monday morning yesterday, while I was on my way to school, feeling turquoise but not quite blue. As the doors opened and the people boarded the bus, there was a girl in a brown sleeveless top that occupied the seat before me. Her hair was let down, and they covered the most part of her neck. With the hair band that was wrapped around her wrist, she raised both her arms to the back of her head and attempted to tie her hair into a bun as the bus jerked off to an unstable start from the bus bay. I watched from behind, forgetting how she looked like when I took a glimpse of her as she took her seat.

Her slender arms were raised above her head, her fingers wrapped around the bun like a web would over an insect. The light from the outside shone through the windows, casting a faint line on the outer edge of her lower arm, and from there I saw the tiny hair that covered the skin like a million needles. With a swift move, the hair bun was tied up. Like the curtain that hangs before a stage, it was drawn as the play began and the set revealed. Her neck was radiant in the morning light, exposed to other passengers' scrutiny, naked and bare. Her hair line on the back of her neck trailed off as they grew shorter and softer, almost like the musical notes at the end of a song. It was, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen - on a bus, that is.

Your body is a wonderland
Your body is no wonder I'll use my hands
Your body is a wonderland

Her head was bowed forward, falling quietly asleep to the gentle vibrations on the bus. Oblivious to the scenery outside, her eyelids remained close throughout the journey, holding her cellphone close to her stomach and her bag in her laps. The maroon colored hair band shimmered the way her lower arm did in the sun, and the light became a sort of outline of her neck. As if somebody drew an outline of her neck with a glow-in-the-dark pen, the right side of it was lighted up to reveal the beautiful curvature of it all. It started under her ears, flowing down her neck like a cold spoon spreading over soft butter, then sloping down towards her shoulders until her skin ended and the fabric of her top began. In the hollow of her neck, the gentle pulsation of her heart, so subtle and fragile somehow. Anything could have broken the continuum, or at least that is how it seemed like from where I was. And with the music stilling playing with my ears, I turned it off to take it it. To take it all in.

Her sleeveless top was like a wrapper of some kind, concealing the prize underneath. But she wasn't a prize, not for me anyway. She was merely a person - a stranger - sitting on the bus in front of me, on her way to school. Yet, there was a sense of artificiality to her, almost as if somebody molded her. Her skin was almost like porcelain, yet not nearly as fragile or brittle. The slopes of her neck were like the sides of a snow-capped mountain, smoothened out by wind and preserved by winter's chill. Reaching upwards to adjust the air-conditioning, the goosebumps on her skin interrupted the beauty, and revealed her frailty, her dainty.

Something about the way the hair falls in your face
I love the shape you take when crawling towards the pillow case
You tell me where to go though I might leave to find it
I'll never let your head hit the bed without my hand behind it

It must have been merely five minutes or so when her stop arrived. It was a stop before my own, and the doors were almost closed when she woke up from her slumber and pressed the bell all over again. As she stood up to alight from the bus, her cellphone flew off her thighs and clattered to the ground violently. However, she seemed to care little for her phone, nor the fact that the bun on her hair was falling out. She shifted away from the reach of the lights from the windows, and disappeared around the corner as the bus sped away down Clementi Road and towards myself.

To say that the above was an 'Observation' would be too crude. After all, I don't think you observe a person such as herself, so delicate and beautiful at the same time. The way the hair was raised to reveal the neck underneath, you start to wonder why it is a tradition for Japanese Geisha to have their hair tied up. Japanese men felt that - more than a woman's breasts - the neck and back area of a woman is the most attractive. From the encounter on the bus, I began to understand and agree with that claim. It was so ordinary and special at the same time, and it took a while to come up with the correct words to describe the mental image that I still have. The porcelain skin like a terrain of snow, that was how it felt like to me in the corner of it all, admiring.

Your body is a wonderland
Your body is no wonder I'll use my hands
Your body is a wonderland

There are times when you want to reach out, while other times when you pull back, reserved. For you are afraid to taint the innocence, to spoil the beauty. As if the slightest touch of your presence could break the porcelain. Like water to paper, like a gust of wind to a dead leaf, everything could be changed in the slightest touch. So we sit back and we watch, we have our hands tucked into our pockets and we hold back. Because there are things never meant for your hands, things that are meant for others.

The touch of you may burn your skin, may have the pain penetrate too far and too deep. It may be an act of self-defense, like rolling up a newspaper as you witness the crossing of a cockroach. But that is how I am now, always too far to reach and too close for comfort. The distortion in physical distance, a close proximity from a million miles away.

Damn, baby
You frustrate me
I know you're mine, all mine, all mine
But you look so good it hurts sometimes