From All Broken Up and Dancing, Kelvin Tan

What was real anyway?

Your first kiss became a re-enactmentof a movie you
saw last week.
Your first embrace, a series of responsibilities you were not sure
you
wanted to take.

Sometimes, you wondered how it was like to get close to
Marilyn Monroe. At
the Queenstown Library, I had looked through a book with
nothing but pictures of
Marilyn. I was dazzled... All these men who
professed affairs with her, what
were they trying to do?

Marilyn had
a smile that said, "I'm sad" and "I'm real" at the same time...

She was
so charming, most people forgot she was human...

She had to find her own
way. Her mistakes became immortalised in
print...

Somehow I found her spirit, her myth thrown into the souls of so
many
around..

hearts all dressed up with nowhere to go.. looking in all the
wrong
places for the wrong things... which right outside, but deep within them,
they know it'swrong. I've often felt that way. God knows I'm lost... That is
something better than groping in the dark ... to find you've deluded
yourself.

I saw Marilyn in so many women, and men. I saw her in Jimmy, Wah Chong, my
own mother... She became a paradigm, and I became the sole torch bearer.

What was loneliness anyway.

So far away from truth or definition