Over a Bowl of Thai Beef Noodle Soup

Block 183, Toa Payoh Central, Singapore. An old man, with silver mustache and beard trimmed to an inch long, spilled out his beads of wisdom at the hawker centre. It was him and his audience of only three, and then there was me seated at the far corner of an eight-person, elongated table, across, one seat apart from a young man, overhearing their discourse. They were done with dinner. Their mess all cleaned up save the man's cup of coffee, half-full. Black coffee it must have been, spelling a whole lot of luck to a much-needed goodnight sleep for the aged.

I had just started with mine, a Thai beef noodle soup from a newly-opened stall. This one's better than its Vietnamese brother at Block 177, I confess.

It was half past eight. Really, I was starving and could concentrate less on anything, except for food, of course. But I had my ears pricked up, anyhow.

And now the host was on a roll.

Old man: I started smoking at a very young age. It was in my secondary years. I am cleaner now, hopefully. Finally, I bid goodbye to smoking.

Young man: Did somebody tell you to stop smoking?

Old man: No one did. It was my body who did it. It almost gave up on me. And, oh, dear God, the Holy Spirit struck me in the head!

Young man's mother picked her excited hands, clapping several times. But hands barely touched each other. Such discreet hands.

Old man: No cigarettes for 10 years now.

Young man: Wow! After 50 long years! What an achievement!

Wife, sitting beside the old man, kept on smiling with beaming eyes.

Then I started with my mental calculations, wishing I had the sharpest of concentrations.

Stranded in a Beginning

Chants storm their way out of dog-eared pages of books, and succumb to being every inch sensitive to ear. No way loud, no way muted, they are nothing but the seraphic hums that fill the soft air, in frequencies that calm the tempest raging inside a restless warrior. They are a prelude to a chorus to be repeated a thousand times over, like a prayer, and it knows no folly forever. And finally, the prized hope plucked from the very core out to the mantle of skin meets its beginning, a new life set before its cold feet.

The long journey resigns from its countless twists and turns. It now rests at the bosom of comfort, still, but discards stagnation. Drafted at the onset of a willing mind, it catches up with freedom brought forth by the red machinery riding on the crests and troughs inside the left rib cage.

Called upon through the silence of intention, attraction, charm, fascination, and trance, contour the landscape of a soul moved to finding its sole pair. The soul is made kinetic, knocked down by its own medicine, where doubts and reservations are cast to a thousand folds of oblivion, tossed upwards, and disappeared.

As soothing as any word uttered by your first kin, and as dulcet as the song on replay, the sweetest emotion forms out of mouth and is frozen in delicate time. It is the force behind the present state of the soul.

The future is up with bounty hidden in the garden of optimism. And will it ever be found in this lifetime? There begs to be no definite answer.

Luck compares itself to treasure buried beneath the deep trenches of the sea, or washed up on the unguarded, empty shore, shining under the harsh sun, on the loose, awaiting to be seized or repossessed. May it be found, may it be stranded, in the soul’s new beginning.

Image: Phuket, Thailand