The Pavlovian response

There are things that have been irreversibly imprinted, the tripping of a line inevitably 

Setting off an alarm in the spider’s web, that trapdoor gaping under my feet connecting me to you one heart-stopping fall later. It goes past every logical improbability. It goes, a tunnel through the Earth emerging on the other side. In the sharp thrill of adrenaline I must have become a vacuum packed bag of feathers squeezed into the wrinkly prune, the arrested heart.

It is about escalators (it’s always escalators) and having to listen to words that I cannot say back and trying not to panic. Escalators have been ruined and I always go back in time on the descend. It is about mrt stations I white out in my mind, under construction forever and out of sight behind those sound proof walls. Go past that basement I wish I did not have to walk through cutting the crowd and the smell of puffs or the thousand wafting aromas of basement food, straight to that moment of dread. I apologise each time in my mind.

It is also about the type of sunlight on certain evenings slanting in all fiery and warm and bringing out the best of what it touches, promising a dimness after it slips away. The way I burn in that setting sun. That happiness which fills me each time I fall through the trapdoor and emerge on the other side of memory. Feeling young and immature. Staircases. The dullness of old rooms. Bus rides. I tie the end of those lines to my fingers so I can call for them with ease and hope it rings a bell.