This piece was written over the winter break, as the writer was moving out of Tembusu for the semester.
We live within caverns of chalk. Walk down the corridors, and vibrant palettes of dyed calcite will inadvertently capture your attention, for every occupied room is enclosed by an entrance embellished with scrawls and scribbles. Your eyes flicker between grainy illustrations – of suppers and Fenders, of shuttlecocks and bouldering rocks, of Twin Fantasy and jamborees, of Sanrio, mahjong tiles and idiosyncratic styles. And they surround bubbles, boldly forming the name of its effervescent but ephemeral occupant.
I stand on the tail-end of this semester, gazing retrospectively at the shimmering sunbeams of memories from these past fifteen weeks. This temporary end heralds a sad inevitability – the wiping of our doors. The pathways have been made barren once more, every door locked shut.
In times of loss, we tend to comfort ourselves with truisms. Oh, when one door closes, another opens. But don’t you find it equally true, that walking through an open door closes a million others?
Branches
Sylvia Plath’s words lay the foundation of my contemplations. She said, “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.”
Welcome to a Home of Possibilities, where time beckons to be adorned. The doors of lounges and common spaces, bereft of mullions and bevels, enclose activities helmed by ardent advocates. They periodically shift in occupancy, from astronomers to arborists, then to athletes and artisans. As a fledgling Tembusian, eager to take flight, the plenitude of potentiality ruffles your feathers. This tree bears so many alluring branches, each spreading in divergent directions. But you know that there is no time to venture down every arboreal arm. In the beginning, where investments of energy have yet to be made, the sheer breadth of it all is daunting.
So, you stay in your nest, fearing that following a certain branch will bring regret. Decision paralysis, stuck behind the plethora of shifting doors, for entering one means shutting a million others. The concomitant reduction in airflow would be asphyxiating, wouldn’t it? There is comfort in remaining stagnant – after all, you would know what to expect. No alarms and no surprises.
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
– Slyvia Plath
Yet, if you never stride to the end of a branch, you will never take flight. Tembusu is the tree that first bedazzles you with its infinitude, but the world is a forest; if you never spread your wings, you will never perch on the boughs of unfamiliar trees. Some doors only open when you step through others – every decision is a trade-off of opportunities; the simultaneous closure and opening of a million different doors.
Inevitably, you will choose to enter doorways that bring about restlessness and regret. There will surely be doors, that you have chosen to shut, embellished with a renewed appeal by rose-tinted retrospect. Disappointment is an inadvertent consequence of having the courage to navigate through this labyrinthine complex. We are earthly beings, not Laplace’s demon, so charting the intricate causality of the opening and closure of doors is an impossibility for us. We can never have perfect information, we can never lead perfect lives. Excessive rumination clips our wings with excessive forbearance and fetters our feet with the manacles of defeatism.
It is the fortitude to take the leap of faith despite this knowledge that deserves commendation.
Canvases
The doors in Tembusu are made of wood, trunks of Plathian fig trees felled and polished into perfect cuboids, fitted within jambs. But the process of craftsmanship and commercialisation, turning the natural into a furnishing, has endowed doors with a secondary purpose; a private space.
Your room is a consecrated space, square meters of walls and flooring made available for your choice of embellishments. Whether your room contains but the bare necessities, or has been festooned by additions, baubles and curios is a choice made possible by the privacy granted by your door. That, is your personal, inward perspective of your identity.
Then, a few weeks into the new semester, a feathered friend swoops in, perching onto your branch of the tree with a white, sedimentary rock in their beak. As they greet you, the peculiar lithic gift falls out of their mouth, one which is left behind when they take flight once again.
A piece of chalk; and with its introduction, doors are transformed into canvases. On the blank slate of your door, passing residents conjure up their image of you, claiming a spot on your door with sticks of powdered carbonate. A fragmented conglomeration of a dozen imagined versions of you become the welcome sign to your room, your private space. If you leave your door ajar, the juxtaposition between the different brands of pandemonium on the canvas and your room becomes jarringly apparent.
As your eyes repeatedly shift from the door to the layout of your room, subtle differences surface. Perhaps, the burgeoning interest of a newly-cultivated hobby takes up more real estate on the door than you feel warranted. Or, something entirely unrelated to your personality, or so you thought, now occupies the lower left corner of your entrance.
The discrepancies may leave you unsettled. Pastel hues of lavender, rose, teal and gold seem to upend your understanding of self. The dissonance disrupts your equanimity; between the two sides of your door, which depiction is more accurate? Well, both have their merits and their pitfalls.
In your own carefully curated realm, there is fragmentation in those relics of disparate memories. Your depiction is not whole or truthful. After all, who wants to be surrounded by reminders of the matte, less shimmery segments of our sense of self? This subconscious dishonesty is human! But it necessitates a secondary perspective.
Contrastingly, the contributions in chalk are based on perceptions of your decisions. On which doors you have chosen to walk through, on which branches you have chosen to take off from. A passer-by, glancing at that mélange of conflicting ideas, will not know much more than the persona you have constructed for your neighbours. Regardless, this performative aspect does not make it farcical, but merely another aspect of your personality. In its inaccuracy, there is coherence, and it is that congruence that may serve to reassemble the fragments shattered by excessive introspection.
This perception, however, brings up a pertinent consideration – are we merely products of our choices? Are we anything more than our ability to choose? Within the scrawls of chalk, you may invariably uncover reminders of the choices that have bogged you in a quagmire of disappointment. See, I’m not too sure of the answers to those questions myself, but reducing our lives to calculated risks removes the fun of experiencing the vicissitudes of life. This I know for certain.
Perhaps, it is the symbiosis between these perceptions of incomplete perfection and complete imperfection that paint the most accurate self-portrait on our canvases.
Nevertheless, as much as the practice of chalking may serve to elucidate, it may similarly serve to obfuscate. There is a responsibility we must observe when wielding our brushes and pens of calcite. After all, communal living is only as pleasant and beautiful as the community makes it. Do not disparage, do not demean. It is the precedent of good-faith actors that upholds the sanctity of our powdered means of expression.
Snapshots
A hundred days have elapsed. Moisture seeps from a rag into your fingers as necessity bids your palms to vacillate horizontally, preordained precipitation plastering pastel onto polyester. That drizzle washes our wooden slates clean, and it dampens your wings, forcing strides back to your nest, where it all began. Here, you are forced to come to terms with the ephemerality of our canvases, and of our identities.
External judgements are transient and mutable; they alter based on the recency of decisions made. These doors take snapshots of how its occupants are perceived. They immortalise the momentary, producing a treasure that allows for reminiscence and future growth. As you recollect the verdant expanses you have encountered, something within your heart shifts, moved by the lessons garnered from possibilities ventured. In having the mettle to shatter that decision paralysis, manifesting something out of the infinitude of Tembusu’s potential, you have given people something to depict on your canvas. Appreciate the garlands you have chosen to accessorise the semester with, for they have changed you, allowing you to grow.
And this snapshot will never be replicated. Not when you next decorate your room, not when your door is next chalked. That, to me, is enthralling and amazing, for it reminds me that no matter how many decisions we choose to make, no matter how we choose to mould our characters, there will always exist billions of unexplored, unopened doors for us to venture through. Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.
No mizzle is eternal. When your plumage finally dries, this sojourn will begin once more. New branches, new canvases, new snapshots; a renewed era of decisions and of identity sculpting. But once you return to a Home of Possibilities, you will be immediately presented with two doors – leave your door open or keep it shut? I ask, for in spite of its fundamentality, that decision is one that invites judgement too.
Stand here, perched before the first divergence of branches. Peer down the hallway; whose doors are ajar? Perhaps, with a delicate knock, there lies an opportunity to illuminate those caverns of chalk.
About the Author
Jeron Sia, a Year 1 Pharmaceutical Science student, loves running because it gives him an excuse to listen to more music. He would like to implore people to listen to I Know The End by Phoebe Bridgers.