I’m feeling rather dull tonight; it’s not a good night. It’s just one of those nights when scattered pieces of frustration wedge themselves slowly between the gaps of your consciousness, and you’re left feeling slightly worn-out and useless. Motivation, where are you.

We just sent off my sister as my dad drives her to university in the capital – and it’s a very coherent feeling that you get, when all of this finally settles in – she’s not going to live here anymore. It’s one of those things that live in the background of the stage as the drama of life plays out in all its vibrancy and vivacity, one of those things that you never notice, but when it’s gone, things don’t feel right; smack right in the middle of Act III and the trees, the birds and the haunted castle disappear.

There’s a sickeningly permanent feeling; of knowing that I now have a thirty-three percent chance of guessing who’s at the door. that there won’t be a girl blasting The Band Perry late at night, that the third floor is now empty. 

People often look stunned when they hear that I underperformed, because you’re supposed to achieve a certain level of nirvana where you can do no wrong. I have no excuses, because I think that I’ve finally realized something today.

Suhaimi once told us, when we were walking back from the afterparty with the bass line of the music slowly pulsating in the distance, that he thought that this was a good year. I snorted a little, because in which parallel universe, by whose standards, did I do well? I kicked the pebbles around my feet and tucked my hands deeper inside my jacket as the Dutch summer winds rushed in our faces. He continues anyway. Learning to grasp disappointment is one of the biggest lessons you can learn, he tells us. I wish I could have learnt that earlier on. And he’s right; because I’m gradually learning to take the hit of disappointment straight in the guts, so that I can get back up; because I’m gradually learning that dragging our feet around and welling ourselves up with self-pity doesn’t help at all. And you learn, too; every time you get back up, you learn, every time you’re wrong, you learn.

And boy, did I learn. I’ve finally realized that I’m a very weak person psychologically; when I get stuck on a problem, I panic; when I hit a dead end, I sweat. And then it sparks off a whole plethora of silly things – many, many miscalculations, ignoring the obvious, or just wasting the time away worrying about falling short of my goals. And I’ve always wondered why I can never perform to the standard I normally do while taking competitions, why I keep falling short of what I’m capable of. It’s because of this, you see. Experience counts in everything. I just haven’t learned to perform well under pressure: when the clock tick tocks the final minutes, when I don’t seem to be getting anywhere, when I find myself wondering more about how bad this is going to look than the problem at hand.

And this why I like the idea of the AMC – it weeds out the mentally weak like me. 75 minutes is certainly enough to complete all of the problems, but for many people, we fall into the same trap. Underperforming in the AMC doesn’t mean that you’re weak mathematically, but it was a definite slap to the face. It feels painful, but good.

It’s rather funny, then, that my fondest memory of the day would be getting a vinyl of these four Bach Overtures – Ying Hong brought me to this quaint little shop on the side of the street as we headed toward dinner. A rather elderly man was packing his things up into his van by this time, but we ran up to him and asked if we could look at the vinyls. I’ve heard the first Bach Overture, and it’s a glorious, uplifting classic of a piece.

It was fifteen minutes before closing time at Petrosains, and fifteen minutes before we had to leave. A distorted female voice was making an announcement over the speakers, and a nice young lady told us that we should move on to the next exhibition. I nodded, but didn’t seem to hear her entirely.

We wandered over to a booth where a young woman was inviting us over to – she spoke incredibly coherent English, with a natural swag that almost everyone lacks, dragging the syllables at all the right places. She was showing us this momentum-based mechanism, which produces diagrams like the one above. Friction causes if to converge to a single point until its momentum dies out.  We laughed and made off-color jokes as my drawing slowly came together. “It represents your character,” ”Well, what does it mean, then?” ”See, it means that I look simple from the outside, but deep down inside, I’m really complex.” 

I don’t know, maybe it was the fleeting feeling of impending finality – that it was all going to end. All these few months of joy, acceptance, jubilation – it was all about to end. Then she asked us why we were here, and we nodded in unison and replied, some math camp. She smiled, and somehow, that was the most coherent memory I had at that time. I don’t know why it took me so long to find this drawing again, but it strikes me as a little silly; how we seem to take the longest time to realize that these little things are somehow rather special to us.

I think that a part of growing up is the process of making sense of the things that didn’t seem right to us when we were young. Time flies, and it’s no longer just a hackneyed, teenager existential crisis statement anymore. I’m fifteen now, but all those evenings spent bicycling down steep roads seem like yesterday. People grow out of things; you grow out of your favorite Pikachu shirt, out of the things that seemed so important when we were young.

This auntie was telling my mom, that she doesn’t get why I’m working so hard.

Truth is, sometimes it’s me who has to do the reality check. Because once in a while, everything that’s supposed to be on road A suddenly crisscrosses over to road B, and then everything seems spiraling out of control. Our priorities get messed up, doubts begin to surface, and point A seems so insuperably far away from point B. You don’t know it, but the people around you will: passing, fleeting comments dropped here and there saying “Hey, remember to get some rest,” or “Hey, you’ve gotta relax sometimes.” But I can’t, you see. I know where my feet are taking me.

Sometimes I wonder if I like who I am, if I like the way my life is going right now. I like that I’m very much my own person, that I’m gradually learning that Newton’s Third Law of Motion holds in the journey of life too. I’m tired of trying to please everyone at every possible second, and I’m tired of this nagging, constant fear of saying “No, I’m quite busy right now,” or “Can you find someone else?” And I think that I’m proud of myself, and suddenly you realize that there are people willing to respect your decisions; because once you stop trying to spin your life around this axis of human influence that’s being pulled in a million different directions, you start to gain perspective. You start making decisions that you actually want to make, and then after every one, you hold your breath and wait. And wait – but hey, there’s no one screaming at me, there’s just a constant silence.

I think that I know where I’m heading, and I’m planning to enjoy the scenery every step of the way.

It’s six in the evening, and I am in my room, a disgruntled array of crumpled papers littered across my desk. The remaining rays of sunlight stream inside, obstructed by the sepulchral shadows of the old green trees outside. Gusts of wind sporadically whoosh in through the open window and whoosh out through another. I’m facing layers upon layers of geometrical constructions, of wildly scribbled symbols of tangents and arctangents, cosines and arccosines, hastily written in pencil in a fit of joy. None of those paroxysms have worked, and I am stuck in the liminal realm between problem and solution, between joy and disappointment.

I am so close.

I can almost feel it! And it is on days like these where all the nebulous doubts and insecurities come creeping in like the timorous puffs of evening wind through the window, secretly, quietly. I’m not good enough, they say, this is all just a sick, sadistic joke. I’m tempted to believe these seductive thoughts of nascent surrender and defeat. Frustration and confusion clamps onto the air and envelopes the atmosphere in a suffocating veil of viscousness. Inspiration! Why is it so evasive, so sporadic? It’s at times like these where you have the time and the complete ignorance to commitments and deadlines that you start to think about how ironic it is to think of a solution after the final tick tock of the clock strikes and your pen leaves your hand. Tick tock tick tock. I sometimes think of screaming at the invigilator in exams – for why in hell don’t they get a clock that doesn’t make your heart pulsate, the strict rhythm of the seconds ticking off as you grab at your hair in absolute frustration.

This is it, I tell myself. One decisive day stands between me and a ticket to Amsterdam, for the chance to bond, the chance to meet and talk to people who can solve triple integrals in their head from all over the world. I keep telling myself that I won’t make it, that I’m not good enough, that this is as far as my tired legs will take me. But these words haunt me in the night in a prevalent sense of deja vu; weren’t these words the exact ones which passed my lips for the last three shortlist decisions?

And it always begins like this.

There’s something very captivating about the way people splutter these words, holding exam papers marked with a striking 90, circled with red ink. “It’s your culture!”, and it is always at this moment when I quail inward and smile. “I’ll do my best”, I say in return, politely darting away from all these unanswered questions that they have yet to bombard me with. The absolute zenith of the conversation is when they start feeding my voracious ego with reassuring statements, saying “You’ve never got a B in two years!”, “You got a 27 for your last essay!”, and of course the prevalent, above-all-rationale reason of “You attended a vernacular Chinese primary school!” Evasive action is always the easiest way out. I thank them for their kind words, then shuffle away quickly, clutching a maudlin exam paper, with a tiny 76 circled at the top right corner.

“You can do it!”

But how do you know? Since when have results been predetermined? With me it’s like entering a lottery with thousands of odds stacked against me – a complete crap-shoot. Everything is nebulous at this particular moment in time, and results are secondary. I can’t even understand why people have the temerity to bring up this clearly clandestine subject in otherwise perfect conversations, insisting that I take it up in the first place, this dastardly paper with an absurd level of difficulty. I scrape through exam papers holding barely acing grade point percentages – and it’s not even out of love for the language. I can’t understand this. It doesn’t even stem from a fear of holding a result paper, counting A’s from the top down and hitting a B somewhere in between. It’s just because I don’t have that passion for those complicated characters anymore. I’m tired of writing essays and belligerently trying to squeeze some eye-catching proverbs into an otherwise dilute essay as a veneer of byzantine assiduity. It’s not just Singaporeans who’s kiasu, sure, but it’s not even about marks anymore.

Don’t I have free will? I have a choice to choose what I want. But at this juncture, words are useless. Power is lost, the battle is over, deadlines have passed.

And it is at this very moment when I wonder why in the world I let words influence me when I re-took Chinese as a subject.

She is at the market.

She is engulfed in an inferno of emotions, as eddy after eddy of familiar noises burst out from the hustle and bustle of the market. The colloquial shout of “Auntie, cheap fruits here!” makes her reminisce of the times where she was the one telling people about how fresh these apples are, or offering people free bites to convince them into buying some delicious oranges. She gazes at the young girl shouting behind the fruit stall, drops of sweat dripping off her forehead, and was instantly filled with a silent despair.

“Grandma!” Jane squeals, running over and giving her a bear hug. “I’ve missed you!”

She misses her granddaughter too; misses the days where she would bounce over and help scream “Lelong!” with her shrill voice. With a pang of sadness she realizes that it’s been nearly ten years since she’s heard that little girl’s laughter. She should be twenty years old now, perhaps blossoming as a feisty academic in some university, far away. Perhaps she misses her too?

“Ma.” Her two sons John and James call, with plastered smiles on their faces. She meets their languid greetings with hugs and kisses; their wives sit on the couch, counting the seconds until the visit ends.

The sweaty atmosphere of the market reminds her of the ripples of her muscles and veins as she set up the stall before the sun rose, carrying the tables, arranging the fruits. She gazes at her arms now, seeing sagging flesh; her forehead, scored with deep canyons of wrinkles. And suddenly she feels so frail, so fragile!

But wait! She spots a familiar face. Is that Nam? Nam was her best buddy at the old market. “Nam!” she yells. “Nam!” Nam whirls around and lets out a jubilant shout. In a second, she is enveloped in a gleeful hug.

“Auntie! Where’s Jane and John and James?” he asks cheerily, glancing around.

She stops, but tells him slowly: “I really, really don’t know,” staring at him in an infinite gaze of surrender.

She stands in the midst of a busy Saturday market, but she is alone.

“Cikgu,” I said. “Jadi, pengajarannya ialah ‘Kita perlu bertindak sebelum berfikir’?”

I saw her smile, and all of a sudden, I immediately forgot about the silly point.