Ruo Wei Lim: “How to Be a Failure by the Time You Enter the Prime of Your Life”
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ONE.
As a child, you cut your teeth on words and other worlds, remember your life in a meaner tongue. At least possibility then was a numerical function, neither mythic nor utilitarian. You learn the piano, like every other Singaporean child whose parents believed in the promise of a good life. You learn to draw, you learn to write, you learn that it is not enough to act on a desire. You remember the barbed arrow of discipline—when the lessons become too hard and the tutor wishes you could (softly) fucking sight read already—the way it lodges and twists inward like a thorn.
TWO.
If they don’t ask about the wound, let it bleed dry.
THREE.
you step into, a world of skyscrapers and grey streets pressed into your heart
as hand to clay. There’s no version of you that’s invented,
only ones you’ve found scattered around your feet.
Here are your new friends—
here is the beginning and end of ache—
here is an intrepidness that will (surely) never come again.
If three years can be anything,
they are city lights blurring through the car window—
anime with Chinese subtitles—
生煎包 in the first bite of winter—
the fading embrace of a mother’s
hands as thorn and arrow.
FOUR.
be the reminder of tender beginnings
in the body.
FIVE.
back
to the piano room,
the unchanging heat,
the rest of your life
pressing on the wounds
of a different era – the thorn
dislodges.
Years of silence begin at
the end of possibility the end of language
as you’ve known it: neither mythic nor utilitarian.
Nothing can save you
from ruptured friendships, the formula that predicts
your departure
from the narrative.
Be so afraid of numbers that
you’re doomed to eternal repetition;
be so afraid of words that
you may never dream again.
You will never understand
what it takes to be
an unbroken sentence
a perfect parabola
a prodigal daughter
whose body spells an ascent
whose arrow instead
plunges into the skin of a life
unleavened
the probabilities of another universe
dashing through the stillness
like scars.
Ruo Wei is an aspiring critic and part-time poet from Singapore. Her work has been featured in Aster Lit and longlisted for the Lucent Dreaming Prize. You can find her nursing an iced latte at a café, or wandering Kinokuniya thinking about how we can be brave through the literature we read and write.
