I want my dad to work again because he has the most beautiful leather shoes. Shoes that he does not wear now, not since he was retrenched and had to work as a taxi driver.

It's more comfortable to wear sport shoes when you work a taxi, you see. Comfortable to walk around in, less ostentatious, more befitting to his driver role. Red, black, white shoes - the standard issue for all Singaporean NS-men.

His old shoes were leather - chosen not just for looks, but comfort too. Not stuck-up, in-your-face pointed oxfords, but a boxed toe, smooth supple leather, often conditioned and cared for. Black, a soft black. My dad has always been picky about shoes.

To see his current shoes now, and recall those old shoes carefully packed away; shoes awaiting to see the light of day again, and go work, is a thought that hurts.

the mechanics of intimacy, or not-

A drizzle in the city, a long kiss, a nestling-of-head against your shoulder, a sense of time stopping, a world of our own.

Standing there, in a paradoxical land of sparse greenery among tall grey buildings looming over and covering the world in shadows, in a world of stranger faces, walking by with hurried footsteps, there's you, and there's me, and arms locked around each other and...

There is something different between imagination and reality. The penning down of imagination are fickle flights of fancies, - they are inspired-by. The penning down of reality is something entirely different - for all the flimsy abstract words which embodies them, they are real. Are angels any less miraculous by taking on air? Are experiences any less real by taking on words?

Yet still, flimsy, flimsy are the words that tries to prop up these experiences.