before everything went absolutely shot mad i stole this unreleased photo from work imagined a dimension in which gardens by the bay was walkable from the clock tower where the merlion had full view of the star ferry the climate was undecided and my world was a holographic truman show our governments were always resuming always talking and our bodies ready for takeoff taxi and landing just yesterday one of your ministers makes a point about bubbles being fragile by nature and i hold the former truth up to my face like a .zip file and think about rooms arresting cities fate falling ill just to breathe your air i wonder if they are wrong about SQ and CX and such non-sentient shorthands about the fidelity it is average at best because i wonder about prata & mee sua & kueh though people only ask me where i'm from when i open my mouth to speak a language that belongs neither to you nor to me and i am told that i have very good mandarin until i go to the kopitiam and my tongue courts the lozenge of gah feh dim but the man there is uncle as is every man of his bearing and he doesn't like me i have trouble memorizing the algebraic formulas for my coffee & tea he disapproves so i opt for the singular yuan yang and ponder the logistics of mandarin ducks of making love and thus neglect to say the rest of my rehearsed line da bao, bing de, fang bei zi li he explains with as much niceness as he can muster that i am holding up the line and i realize that you are slowing down the earth's orbit is different when i explain it to you and your eyes widen rudely mid-sentence soft as midday rain wincing in the ridiculous heat like me when i remember asking you about the ontology of void decks and what they're void of that flat evening we passed by one draped white with tables and i aloud thought wedding and you ahushed said wake and i felt grafted like new skin in the rotten morning a half-globe away my parents say that i should summer in britain because it is home and something growing inside screamed open like a frozen beer can and was great within me the incantation of o, yes, and amen for home is nowhere therefore you a kind of dwell and welcome song after all and free of any other eden we can name