Two Lucky

Stream of consciousness

I have not written for ages, so it feels a little strange to come back to this. Tonight, I feel compelled to write because lying in bed, I experienced a sudden chill I have not felt in a long time. I wondered again how life for me would change if Rusty died.

I’ve replayed this in my head a million times. I’ve heard the phone ring. I’ve seen him on the hospital bed. I’ve taken his hand, and cried and cried. I’ve tried to mourn. How I will live when it happens, how I will make the decisions I have to make every day, I am not sure.

The mechanics of living will go on, naturally: the waking, the eating, the working, the sleeping. Life, I think, is not as complicated as we make it out to be. In its own way, life streamlines itself for you. The world whittles down to a more manageable size. You start out with 10 big dreams, and then you end up with one.

It’s not that you “settle” (because that’s an ugly word), you just make the best of a given situation. You hold on to a few things. The rest you learn to let go. For the next two months, Rusty will not be undergoing any form of chemotherapy. The doctors say his body needs to rest, to boost his red blood cell count, which have fallen dangerously low. I am afraid his going off the chemo will give the cancer a chance to spread. (But honestly, how much chemo can a person take anyway?)

A random note: I have (more or less) given up trying to feel at home here. Those feelings are too rare, too elusive, too obviously absent to me in this place. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Rusty does not live here with me. That is something I wonder if I will come to regret one day.

The second - and it is a popular one among overseas graduates - is that although Singapore is generally a comfortable city to live in, I have become accustomed to greeting with delight the oddities that burst out onto the sidewalks and in the subways of New York almost every day.

On 42nd and Lexington: the hobo with a 32-inch plasma TV and a knack for origami; across the street from my old apartment: Tico, the Mexican sushi chef from Tijuana; and once-a-month Mrs Kim, my Korean manicurist who, on occasion, will give me “insider” tips on how to snag a Korean man while deftly applying my top coat.

It may not be fair to say this, but I do feel life is less vivid here. It’s as if someone’s put too much bleach into the laundry and washed the colour out. I started thinking about New York again because Rusty was recently back there to see his oncologist. In about two weeks, he will start a new form of radiation therapy, radiofrequency ablation, for his four lung tumors. It is not clear what effect it will have on the cancer, if any.

Over the telephone, and 11,000 miles away, he asked me if New York would be a place I’d like to “hang out” with him for the rest of our lives.

The city was our match-maker; I said yes.

I feel more strongly now that I will return to New York one day. Even if it were without Rusty, I think I would still go. I would make the trip for the both of us. Sometimes the decisions you make in life are simple like that.

As the rest of Singapore fret over our apparent lack of deft in the use of the English language, I want to consider a different lack of expression here.

This Sunday, thousands in New York City will march again during the city’s annual Gay Pride parade. I remember my first gay pride, and I will always remember it. It was my sophomore year in college. I had just come out, and there I was, standing by myself (yet not alone, but squeezed alongside what must have been all of Gay New York) on Greenwich and 4th on that warm, humid June 24.

I remember as the parade started, feeling somewhat embarrassed, as if I shouldn’t have been there (see what Singaporean Paranoia does to you). But what happened only seconds later… it marked such a fundamental development in the way I saw and understood myself.

The first wave of pride washed over the crowds as the parade opened with its shiny fleet of Dykes on Bikes - all 12.5 women strapped in leather vrooming (yes some were vrooming more than others) on their newly polished Harleys. As they sped past me, and as the crowds’ cheers yanked my own from my throat, I experienced the most incredible sense of being “home”.

Not that “home” was a new concept to me, but in that singular aspect of sexuality, it had filled a gap I had actually systematically taught myself to dismiss as unimportant. I must not forget to mention the section when some gay parents filed down the street. Two men pushing their baby daughter in a delicious pink pram wore matching white T-shirts with the word “DAD” emblazoned on the back. For me, that was another nugget of a wild fantasy played out in simple reality. I thought I was going to cry.

As the seconds dragged into hours, the parade would lose its novelty for me. But it had made its impact, and I believe that impact would speak most powerfully as the raison d’etre of the parade: This is why we march. Every community needs a parade to call their own.

It’s walking out in the sun, with your head held high for the world to see. It’s affirmation, respect and recognition that you can be who you are, and take to the streets without fearing for your very basic human rights.

Here in Singapore, we must consider our fortunes and take comfort in that at least, it is only the clubs we frequent that get stormed. At least, all our detractors do is make boorish jokes and stare, or frown. Our legislature discriminates, but not so much that we cannot live comfortable, silenced lives.