I haven’t written a blog post in a while. Since 2019, I took to Twitter to microblog. I think the scrutiny and algorithmic dangers that Twitter brings has taken a toll on me. Outsider perceptions of me have taken a massive toll on me. Long after the Golden Age of blogging in the 2000s, I shall try blogging again. I do pay for this domain after all.

How many spaces I have left to be fully authentic and serious – two things that ground me – I don’t know. Writing here is an attempt to rediscover what is personal.

The Lune of 2023 was very different from the Lune of 2018 that started this blog. The five years in between have simultaneously felt like thirty years and a half-forgotten series of short vignettes. They are half-forgotten because of years of accumulated trauma. I have fallen for just three people in those years. I have nearly perished multiple times in those five years. The Lune of 2018 would go on to build vast networks across writing spaces, LGBTQIA+ spaces, and civil society spaces in Singapore, and will proceed to lose more than half those networks by this time of writing.

The Lune of 2018 would never have imagined she would lose a trans sister she loved. She is still there, outside Peaches Club, in her wig that was straight from a 90s on 60s film, celebrating her trans sister’s win at the first ever drag competition in Singapore. She is there smiling and laughing, slightly drunk, making conversation with older drag queens, looking in awe at how gorgeous her sister is. Her sister wore blue that night. It was her signature color. She would book a Grab and return home feeling dizzy, loved.

The Lune of 2019 is the Lune of business. She is there in her room in the University Town, furiously typing, knowing her place. She thinks of protecting and securing the rights of other trans and non-binary students in her university. In the process she cries. In the process she finds inspiration from a younger student, just 17, protesting outside the ExxonMobil headquarters. She divines her future arrest by the police. She starts calling herself an anarchist. She starts calling herself a lesbian. She is so sure of both things. She goes onto Twitter thinking it would be just her, microblogging her life and retweeting her favorite things.

The Lune of 2020 is the forgotten Lune. The start-of-COVID Lune. The Lune that realizes how neither the State nor institution are her friends. They will never be her friends. But who Lune is in 2020, that has been erased by trauma. One thing that is clear: she wakes up one afternoon, and found her own LGBTQIA+ community group in her College infiltrated by Christian conservatives. They have created a moral panic out of a student-run educational seminar on bondage practitioners. She begins to burn out.

The Lune of 2021 is the Lune of struggle. She is still there with her handcuffs. She is there inside the Cantonment Police Complex holding cell, staring at the ceiling, the disproportionately large emptiness of the space. Inside she recites the first part of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. The one with Marie sledding down the mountains. The part with reading and going south in winter. She is preparing to recite it in a creative writing class taught by the local poet Boey Kim Cheng. When she does so, someone cries at the performance. She goes on her first ever date that year, after a long summer of depression and burnout. She is still there by the river, on another hot afternoon, yearning. From then on she learns teenagehood once more. Painfully.

The Lune of 2022 is a shell. She is still there in her room, where someone she trusts is about to betray her. She dissociates and dissociates. The Lune of migraines. The Lune of heightened anxieties. The Lune that broke. The Lune that has deep gashes. The Lune that is poorly. She is there standing at Archway Station trying to connect the new and the newer. She keeps failing to do so. She lives in another’s fantasy where she falls onto the tracks and dies due to her weakness. She tries to live with dignity. She stops calling herself a lesbian.

The Lune of 2023. There’s nothing much to say. The Lune of botched girlhood. The Lune of the long road. It is not clear if that road leads to ruination. I have stopped smiling. I’ve forgotten how to smile without wincing. I remember how I smiled in 2018. In 2021. That smile, and its authenticity will not come back for years to come. Joy became something increasingly difficult to grasp as the years go. Nina Simone sings in “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” (1967):

I want a little sugar in my bowl
I want a little sweetness down in my soul
I could stand some lovin’, oh so bad
Feel so funny, I feel so sad

There is a long road.