It was a Sunday afternoon and I was aboard the MRT when I saw the sky on fire. I didn’t know if anyone else noticed, but there it was — a menstruating heaven, sunset gone mad, God’s bloodshot eyes.
This must have been the very sky Sylvia Plath had seen when she wrote in her journal: “When the face of God is gone and the sun pales behind wan veils of chill mist, she vomits at the gray neuter neutralities of limbo and seeks the red flames and smoking snakes that devour eternally the limbs of the damned.”
So I went home and also wrote about this fiery spectacle as seen from the train window, these skies that quaked with their deformations, skies that gunned me down and christened what I was feeling at that moment: loneliness.
Just keep writing, I said to myself, just keep writing. Conscious of my own heart beating and then breaking, my fingers kept tap dancing across the keyboard. It was way past midnight and I skipped sleep to enumerate my lamentations. I was hoping that if Sylvia Plath’s words could make her heartache sound like a prized possession, maybe mine could, too.
I was determined to write a story about my disheveled past the same way that Sylvia did when she was consumed by longing for Richard Sassoon even after he left her, and when she saw her husband Ted Hughes holding another girl’s hand.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath serves as a tabernacle of woes — violent testimonies from this terrifyingly intense Cambridge student. She pushed the fake promises out of her body and her journal entries erupted like red-hot lava. The death of someone’s love was the birth of her verses, beautiful writings that could only be seen as redemption, the consolation in this tormenting loss.
When my ex-boyfriend left me for an older woman, I wrote as often as I cried. I was churning out bad poetry, with Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” as an inspiration: “I fancied you’d return the way you said/ But I grow old and I forget your name. /(I think I made you up inside my head.)” What I went through was more than a breakup; it was a degeneration of the self. I felt myself shrinking, my heart going atomic, reduced to an insecure pea-sized contraption. I shied away, like a snake burrowing under the mud and hibernating for days.
I kept going back to Sylvia Plath’s journals, downed her words like vitamins and wrote in my own journal. I was counting on the same thing, hoping that my writing could perform miracles and bring my life back. I filled my journal with exclamation points, angry words in bold letters. I even wrote a letter to the children my ex-boyfriend and I would never have. It was a ridiculously mawkish scheme but it marked my struggle against limping from one second of loss to another. My silent cries were inked in every piece I wrote while everyone else was asleep: “Here’s a toast of tears for the pain that doesn’t go away.”
Then, one day, the pain went away.
It was as if I slid from the cocoon, dusted myself off and walked away from this emotional riot. It was the catharsis, I figured out. I wrote about it so many times that the pain had become no more than a concept, an old conversation piece, a writing material. His departure became just another excuse to write personal essays and conjure up plots for a potential short story. No longer was I writing because I had to placate this tortured lover; it was simply because I must keep the fire burning and write as I always have ever since I was 11 when I discovered it was what I wanted to do with my life.
It was no longer about the heartache, but the efficacy of words in warring against it. What mattered was I made, yet again, writing a talisman to protect me from indifference, devour everything with the most inexorable passion and, as writer John Shirley once said, eat everything with the eyes. Writing meant guzzling down every pint of emotion, with the senses alert for every movement. It was always about feeling too much, seeing more than what was laid out before me, hoisting memories whether they were as tender as the first date or as brutal as goodbyes.
Not a thing unsaid, not an event undocumented, I made souvenirs out of every encounter and stretched a minute into a lifetime by jotting it down. Sylvia Plath wrote as if every incident were as vehemently moving as a tornado — I followed suit. I thought, as a writer, there could never be another option.
Alive at four in the morning, I cupped words and let them fall onto the pages, hoping that I could perfect the description of a toothy stranger I met down the street or justify the splendor of the rain that dropped like pickup sticks from the heavens. I paid attention to details and rummaged around for magic inherent in any occurring event. I looked at the sky a thousand ways, made up stories from observing the passengers boarding the MRT, cried too hard, laughed too loud, analyzed and sat on every pain and carried love as gigantic as the ocean. I succumbed to obsession and the awesome madness of grabbing life by the scruff of its neck and shaking it until all its truths and treasures emerged out of its pockets.
Even when I was brooding over my failed relationship, I knew that I was going to make a beauty out of this disaster by writing it down. I knew that art was always larger than pain and more lasting than a moonlight kiss. But there would be times I would still get sad, especially at night when the whirring of the electric fan was more enthusiastic than the subdued thumping of my heart, when it would just be me, a blank computer screen and the memory of his steady hand.
This was the necessary misery and Sylvia Plath stressed this as she wrote, “My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time...Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide.”
Indeed, writing is an act of bravery, a self-flagellating experiment and as I learned it firsthand, it could be really lonely. But it’s a different kind of lonely — it’s a beautiful kind of lonely.