Anyway, I wanted to write tonight about this twisting feeling I've been having in my gut over the past two days. The idea of missed connections has come back, out of nowhere, I think, to haunt me. There's this particular person I felt that way about, in front of whom I wanted to be nothing less than me, wanted to lay it all bare, wanted to possess with this hunger. It's not something you can shake off so easily. Sometimes the ghost sits on the tip of my tongue. Now, what mostly remains is a grievous sense of pity. My God, I've learnt about romance the hard way.

In other news -- gears are shifting in my head. It's May, and it's Mother's Day. I've been talking to women about things they've done for their daughters, or mothers. It makes me reflect on my own relationship with my mother. It seems to have taken a little battering in recent times. We seem to not be able to get along as well as we used to. Maybe I've been trying to wean myself off her, in a bid to cut my losses someday.

I know quite clearly what my mother used to be. She was stern in her workplace. With my father she was a hopeless romantic. She gave in to him until there was nothing left to give. She never asked him questions. Sometimes I ask her about their relationship and she gets impatient at my line of questioning. Which leads me to suspect that in their generation, man and wife just didn't talk all that much. But to us children, she was so full of warmth and affection, so markedly different from her own mother. She gave us books, mountains of books, and still does today. She made me go for music lessons, dance lessons, art lessons, drama lessons. I've now become this cantankerous, flighty, arty-farty daughter who never listens. I've given up on her, but am still wondering what to do with myself.

Last words. My brother has a scrapbook detailing his 18 months away from home. In it he writes about a conversation he had with a friend's mother, who asked him why he feels he needs to wait till retirement to buy his dream house. She says "Why not now?" I know the excuses running through his head. They are the same damn excuses everyone in this country makes for not chasing their dreams. It makes him realise that he needs to destroy all imagined barriers to his happiness. I feel that his eyes have opened, and in the space of that one line, his desires and mine, though not quite the same, have aligned.