2022

I came across the letter writing section in Tokyuu Hands the other day and was instantly struck by how magically anachronistic it felt — because who writes letters in the 21st century anyways? Needless to say, I walked out of the store with a handful of beautifully crafted sakura-sprinkled paper, a column of spring-themed cat stickers and a blossoming urge to handwrite and mail a letter.

Perhaps it’s the care that goes towards letters that makes them so charming to me, but I suspect that my natural bias for long-form writing also has a role to play — I much prefer savouring deliciously slow-roasted thoughts over taking hasty nibbles of half-baked crumby ones. Then there’s the romantic appeal, all the aesthetics associated with penning a letter — the Heian Court lady composing a Haiku in a note for a certain someone, a bipolar writer alternating between passionate confessions and charmingly mundane accounts in his correspondence with his wife, the unhinged French genius hastily scribbling down his life’s work before a duel to the death — because it’s always about the aesthetic, and I’m completely sold.

I must confess that I fantasized about regaling y’all with Odysessian tales worthy of the gorgeous sakura paper, meticulously looping the ‘y’ in all my ‘Kelly’s with a cute little heart and making regular trips, complete with braids and happy-skipping, to the Post Office. Alas, this wasn’t to be (at least not yet!). Not less because my handwriting is complete chicken scratch and is hence illegible to everyone but me (and my Tripos examiners, surprisingly), but for the much more depressingly prosaic reason of time, effort, and logistics.

But I still see my encounter at Tokyuu Hands as a divine act of serendipity. Lately, I’ve been struggling to write anything that isn’t private journal material — basically any text that doesn’t qualify as stream-of-consciousness word vomit. I’d start ‘personal essays’ but would never be able to finish them for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because of how impersonal and overly performative it all feels, like the ink-to-paper equivalent of doing burlesque girl can-can kicks into the void. Anyhow, I’ve decided that I wanted to write to my friends instead. I’m not gonna lie, I find this really scary. It’s a lot easier to expose your less palatable bits to strangers when there is no skin in the game — they don’t know who you are and you’ll probably never meet them in real life anyways — but with you lot, it’s way harder because I actually care about what you think (surprising news to some of you I’m sure). Besides, writing in anonymity is very much second nature to me; even in my bygone pre-teen Wattpad days, I would hide behind my Harry Potter fanfiction-inspired penname (sorry - not giving y’all the exact name), so forgive me if I oscillate between callous aloofness and painful frankness as I try and find the sweet spot of gently opening up in ways that I’m comfortable with.

I know that this sterile interface and the mechanical act of opening an email is a far cry from the grand, sweeping letters I envisioned, but we’ve all got to start somewhere, so here goes nothing: my first letter to you guys — or my love letter (ode?) to 2022 as I like to call it.

For the past decade, I’d welcomed every new year with a TVB countdown (that was always marginally delayed by a timid couple of seconds which made it annoying rather than comical), a very healthy (food) baby bump and the best company anyone could ask for (i.e. SAT squad and the fam). A party, to put it simply.

2022, in stark contrast, only started off with the faintest of whimpers.

I distinctly remember S and N calling in from N’s house at the cusp of midnight; they were sat around the mahjong table with the prawns — our way of referring to our very specific group of parents — with hot pot leftovers scattered on stray bowls in the table behind. Meanwhile, I was determined to nod off into 2022, all sprawled out in my hotel room bed, with no one but my stuffed koala and the Count of Monte Cristo as company. I barely even registered when the clock struck 12.

By then, it was day 18/21 of quarantine and I was delirious from my solitude. I’d reached the point where even virtual human interaction was a foreign and slightly unwelcome concept.

But the start of 2022 was never going to be comfortable — that much I knew.

I spent the last month or so of 2021 wading through the carnage of mutilated possibilities and sloppily, desperately trying to stitch back together any semi-functional remains. I was so, so lost and sad and was brimming with numbing despair. Growing pains in 2022 were hence only to be expected.

As cheesy as it sounds, 2022 was very much a year of rediscovering myself. It was a year of coming back to, of returning to my roots, of Naruto-running through the front door of my house and screaming ただいま. As a self-professed romantic, I’ve always had the habit of endowing things with undue sacred significance because symbolism (!), and laugh as you might, in classic Kelly fashion, I feel that it’s with finally catching up with AOT — my first ever proper anime, or as I like to call it, my slippery slope — after 8 long years that I’ve really come full circle.

That’s not to say that I’ve just reverted back to my awkward 15 year old self. Strangely enough, this is also the first year since high school where I’m able to look back at myself and confidently acknowledge that I’ve grown; I’ve become slightly less clueless, marginally less weeb-y and significantly more independent (but no less unhinged). When I saw I last month, whom I was seeing for the first time after our hasty COVID-induced departure from Cambridge 2 years ago, she remarked how she felt that I had really “matured into a woman”. The moment the words sank in, I could feel the truth of it deeply in my bones. But at what point does a girl become a woman? Does it occur when one finally finds a foothold that lends a certain measure of self-assuredness and grounding? Or when one acquires the jadedness and cynicism that portends a heavy heart and a set of weary eyes? Truth be told, I’m not even sure what it means to be a woman, and I don’t think the metamorphosis is complete just yet, but where “womanhood” used to slide off my shoulders and hang too loosely around my hips, it now hugs the curves, albeit lightly, of this identity that I’ve grown into.

2022 was the start of a new chapter in my life (and not just because Yuzu retired as a competitive skater — ah, synchronicity abounds!); it involved a lot of plunging back into the thicket of uncertainty and making haphazard attempts at navigation without any precise coordinates (or any general sense of a desired destination really). But that’s how life often is. It’s not a linear journey with a series of neatly branching, paved roads at various decision points, but rather a long, meandering walk through a ginormous, seemingly never-ending jungle where animals (some harmless, some deceptively so) prowl about and you can barely see what lies ahead because of the dense undergrowth. And then you’re stuck with a less than functional Google maps - and in my case, absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever - to help you navigate the twists and turns of your journey, and there’s no in-built warning system that tells you when a monkey is about to chuck a banana in your face. But you’ve also got the raw prowess of nature in full view with the lush, dream-like habitation and the most wondrously diverse group of creatures; truly the sublime, awe-inspiring, fear-instilling beauty that made the Romantics divine offerings at poetry’s altar.

I’ve also come to realise that mainstream fiction gives an insidiously false impression of how life narratives are meant to look like. It’s all — bam! bam! — key event after key event, a completely different rhythm from the peaceful monotony of everyday life (which is only very occasionally punctured with an upwards or downwards blip). I’ve jokingly likened life to reading Anna Karenina: you start the book expecting, well… Anna Karenina, complete with heart-racing tales of masquerade balls and court intrigue, but what you get is chapter upon blissfully boring chapter of Levin farming with Muzhiks. I think Tolstoy was definitely onto something though. One thing that really crystallised for me this year is that it’s the little things in life that make me truly happy and fulfilled — world domination (and Laschean narcissism) be damned! I recently wrote out a list of moments of pure joy from 2022 and have noted some recurring themes: being with loved ones, spending time doing (and getting better at) what I love and appreciating beauty. This all sounds astoundingly simple, but in our age of chronic rationalisation and deconstruction, it’s always the seemingly obvious that go first.