Truth is an addiction, a drug, a sin, the kind of quiet confession that takes place in between despair and hopelessness.

Some days, when it is too beautiful to live, existence is a matrix of curling cigarette smoke. The burning embers that do not lie, the moist marks of parted lips, the rise of smoke forming wisps that dance and weave and speak in shapes and shadows.

 Other days, when sustenance is wholly expected, demanded even to come in complete forms -be it a person, music, art or books, existence is simply the dull shine of dirty coins. It is nothing more than having to come to terms with the unknown.

4:02 am

to choose someone is to uncover a whole life. It is also an invitation to be slit at the hairline and peeled back by strange fingers.

coffee rings everywhere i am still, pages devoured by the glow of a dusty lamp, every word to undo the last  - anything to keep from sleeping.

Nirvana’s Lithium.

Dinosaur Jr’s Little Fury Things.

Alice In Chain’s Would.

Pearl Jam’s Black.

4 in the morning.

I am thinking of thick warm fluffy soft chocolate chip pancakes and what I’d give to have been around as I am now during the 90s Grunge era, living in Seattle in the basement of a butcher. 

The immediate reality is of course pretentious Bangsar, excessive caffeine in a house almost always virtually empty of all things edible, too many more words to churn out, twenty four safety pins holding together my  bag, a lifelong clearly established fetish for scruffy lonely long haired deranged characters and an undisturbed state of easy happy complete with dirty feet. 

I just want to be a vagabond writer.

Milk.

  Both my daughters take great delight in hearing true tales from my own childhood. I’ve spent the last thirteen years conjuring up old heroes and bitter ghosts in a room with stardust ceilings and purple pony duvets. Layla turns 16 in two weeks and it is source of great hysteria within our household. In between listing down the great many gratifications the universe owes her, she wants to know the important things as she calls it, about my own life. She wants to know when and how and to whom I lost my virginity, she wants to know what I did that I haven’t already told her (a great much I’m afraid), she wants to know about boys and love and heartache and heartbreak. She needs to know she insists, to prepare herself for the grown up world. I tell her the grown up world is a lurid human carnival and doesn’t invite you beyond its heavy brass doors based on your age. I tell her Mrs. Richmond from across the road still doesn’t belong to the adult world and the woman is forty-five. She doesn’t appreciate my dry humor and shakes the house with her slammed door in a fit of rage at the secrets I keep from her, only to creep right back in twenty minutes later and attempt to trick me into confession with bulging eyes. I worry her veins will pop and tell her so over my soy chai latte and the first draft of my next novel.

  It isn’t that I don’t want to tell my curious daughter the very things I puzzled over at sixteen and conjured up conspiracies for in way of answers, it’s the sheer gravity of these memories. Its all very simple to tell my wicked six and four year old stories about how I pretended to be a vampire on the first day of grade school and chased all the kids around with my teeth bared and arms thrashing wildly. As they got older, it became stories about mummy climbing out of windows and over steel gates only to crawl into the backseat of a junk of a car, whizzing the streets at midnight for the debut of a stellar band at a club with age old professions of love carved into its mahogany walls. Or stories about the time I convinced my entire graduating year 12 class to skip school and instead march down Main Street in protest of David Hicks being detained in Guantanamo Bay.  Stories about the train rides I’d take at seventeen with Plato’s the Republic in hand and a stack of self created zines I’d leave at random places in the city for people to find, stories about the nights I held vigil in the house I grew up in, with my best friend trying to summon the dead in dark spaces with only red candles burning and dark secrets traded while we waited, stories about the music and books I wept and danced and lived to as well as the songs that changed my life and healed my adolescent soul, of the lunchtime rallies I organized standing on a chair and yelling out facts about child labor and feminism in a world that objectified women. Funny stories about sliding halfway across the field in my first rugby match after being shoved on the shoulder right after I’d reassured my team I had been working out all week and having a peculiar man professes his love for me in my junior year of university five minutes into meeting me and claiming he’d follow me to the ends of the earth only to do exactly this as I left the bar to his footsteps chasing me for half a block with breathless cries of the sheer audacity of my beauty. Stories about their mummy skipping school to go to the zoo on rainy days by herself because the animals always looked sad in a downpour and that had always made her feel enthralled. Stories about spilling cups of water by accident into the laps of patrons as a waitress and spilling cups of water into the laps of patrons for the sheer hell of it. Stories about the collection of songs kept in an old biscuit tin collected from various lovers written specially in pinnacle of their devoted worship. That one story they begged to be told over and over again about the woman who had four dead husbands and a cat that lived longer than all her men. The same woman who also gave me my first tattoo of a feather at sixteen, at which both would knowingly glace at its location from the corner of their eyes. Stories about trips down to the cemetery after convincing best friends that this was exactly what I needed to be inspired only to literally jump at every sound after declarations of being able to save all if things were to get mad.

  They loved my stories, loved it even more when I had my own girlfriends over, girlfriends I’ve had for longer than either have been alive. On those days, they beg to be allowed to climb into my bed with all of us, limbs and toes and giggles everywhere to continuous input into their bedtime story by grown women who were once exactly as they were. Women who had reoccurring roles in their bedtime adventures.

  My daughters learnt to love the power of words and the wonderful world they opened. A world always far more exciting than the one they rose to. A world where giants blew dreams into the bedrooms of sleeping children and gargoyles rubbed their eyes awake at night only to break into bakeries and steal cupcakes to eat on the tips of trees. They were unusually radical in their imagination and while my girlfriends attested this to my own personality as background to their worlds, I knew they were special and special entirely on their own.

  Ours was a world strung together by words to express, illuminate, enhance, reassure and protect each other. Which is why Layla took it rather personally that I hadn’t readily spun stories her way. That, and well she was my resident teenager after all, strutting around with assumption that the world revolved on her own axis and set to the rise and fall of her hormonal imbalances. There were many things I didn’t tell my girls, things about my own mother and the parts that weren’t larger than life in the best sense of the phrase. They had never asked, for the other parts of my life had always kept them shell shocked with delight and bewilderment, and there were plenty of colorful characters from those to clutter up the spaces where their mummy’s own mummy should be. They had never expressed a need for family beyond the one I had chosen, the girls I had literally grown up with and to, their special aunts whose adolescent to adult faces were hung on the walls of their home, and my odd mix of friends who came by all year round and belonged to various parts of my life. I had created a world that was enough for them, one of great women and much love and silly laugher and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to trade a slice of that for knowledge they didn’t already have.

  In order to tell my soon to be sixteen year old about the boy I lost my virginity to would be to tell her about the very first man I loved and the beginning of the end of a great many things I then didn’t know could end. It would be to tell her of my first taste of the real actual world and how alone we all are even if the ones who love us best will love us forever. It would be to summon up people I had never spoken of and whom they had never seen. Not in my voice not in my words not in my eyes.

  It would be a great many fragile stories blown in wake of each other. I didn’t know if she would understand, and what would the understanding of a sixteen year old be in the retelling of events that have been long buried under the timeline of life. I was a year younger than Layla when the moments that would lead up to an eventual saga of ticking bombs unfolded. At forty-two now, I am truly appreciative of all that happened, it wouldn’t have lead me down the path I had taken. But I say that with insight and the conviction only age can make rightful claim to.

  I learnt to speak and write in Arabic long before I mastered any other language. Growing up in a household where God championed everything, decisions were to be first solely based on the books He had sent down from the Heavens to help mankind with. At thirteen I openly refused to allow the great religious scholars to make my decisions for me with their many verdicts. I had great respect for them but I wanted to have total control over everything I did and wanted to do. My father blamed my mother for letting me run like a loose canon in spaces my presence was forbidden in. I suppose he was referring to my years as a child I would spend in Medina of Saudi Arabia where guest rooms were given strict gender codes. Rooms I would shoot in and out of, skipping circles around grown men with prickling beards and fresh rose petals delicately arranged on the surface of each gold-rimmed cup of hot tea. In order to do this, I would have to send myself shooting through the trap doors built at eye level after successfully dragging a chair to hoister up onto. They were small rectangular doors meant for women to pass food to men when they weren’t appropriately dressed to receive guests, or when it was a gathering strictly of men. I’d stumble and fall to the ground only to pick myself up and cartwheel in between thick carpets, triumphantly gleeful. My father wasn’t always as amused, as the other witnesses would be. He knew I did it simply because I knew it wasn’t allowed to. My little feats of deathly acrobatics sometimes paid off if my uncles or cousins were part of the congregation. I would be chased after, caught and lifted off the ground in a single sweeping motion and allowed to sit on lap of the man who had caught me. Sometimes passed from grasp to grasp, sailing through the air in great delight. This was of course the better moments. If the men in the room were older and none of who knew me personally, I would be called a very naughty child but blessed with a splattering of Masyaallahs, a supplication of faith used commonly when in awe of God’s creation of beauty. I eventually outgrew this, more than anything else because the men spoke of things that did not interest me; they spoke of nations and finances and the government and health care.  Once at nine, I had sighed heavily with my palms under my chin only to the amusement of my uncles and male cousins. My uncle who had then only just returned from university after his first year had asked me what the matter was. I told him I hadn’t any money so it didn’t matter which corporation and organization was making some since none of it would be mine and that it was all really quite boring. He had lifted me out of the lap of my cousin and asked what I would like to have them discuss instead. I asked him what he had done while he was away and with a twinkle in his eye he told us the most marvelous stories about the pranks he had pulled with his college friends and the nights they had stayed up playing soccer underneath the starless dessert sky well into the first light of dawn. And of the professors who had bizarre distinctive traits, and especially one who always had his voice wobble when he praised God, as if about to dissolve into a self-pitying mess of tears. We had all sat there listening and laughing till the call for dusk prayer was heard and the skies had begun to turn dark. My father had walked in then, returning from a talk given by his friend at the state university and had wagged his finger at me and threatened to sell me to the collector of djinns (evil spirits) if I didn’t behave the way a proper girl should. He had waved away the good natured protests of those in the room and plucked me out of my uncle’s lap only to announce to the whole room: this one’s a little force of nature, she’ll be trouble when she’s older if i am not careful.

  Years later at thirteen he sat with his hands rubbing his chest after being told I’d sprained the arm of a boy by accident (not entirely, the tyke had mocked me and pulled at a lock of my curl). Telling me he had always known I had too much fire and that he should have never allowed me to attend karate classes even if I had stopped talking for eight days in bid to initially convince him. At fourteen when I started to hide my compact disc albums in between my books, my mother would find them in her many raids of my room and my father on cue waged war on Marilyn Manson calling him Shaiytan (devil) and threatening to completely cut off my weekly allowance if I bought, played or listened to anything that the religion had forbidden. This would then equate almost everything I was listening to. I reasoned and wrote him a letter explaining Manson’s music and how it gave a voice to all the things I couldn’t identify within me. I explained Nirvana and how the song Rape Me didn’t actually refer to being forced into unwilling sex but was in reply of the great obsession the world had with the individual identities of the band members, leaving the band feeling as if everything that was theirs to rightfully claim had been taken without choice on their part. It was a song about the desolateness of having loss an identity you never though to acknowledge, robbed by the very same people who believed in you. I didn’t even try to explain Black Sabbath; I knew a band that called themselves Black Sabbath wouldn’t go down very well with my father. Needless to say, he pulled the plug on my allowance for three months that very night he read my letter for the mere fact that I had disobeyed him. I wasn’t allowed to stay over at the houses of girlfriends, wasn’t allowed to see any form of living breathing existence beyond the gates of school and certainly wasn’t allowed to leave the house unless it was burning down and even then, only if it was going to kill me.

 I learnt to show only the parts of me that weren’t a sin before both my parents, the parts of me that were damned to hell I kept to myself.  Three months before I turned fifteen, I was sent home from Religion school and told that my parents would be notified. The grotesque shame of having his only daughter kicked out of religion school, especially one that catered to the elite of the Muslim Arab community, was one that almost killed the poor man. He had been told that I asked too many questions despite being told to ‘hold my tongue’, all of which were though provocative in the least favorable sense of the word. Within three weeks my bags were packed and my best friend and other girlfriends were the definition of muted postmodern Greek tragedy. They promised to write and to never lose sight of me and I in turn promised to never replace them. I could love other women but it was agreed that I must always remember that they would always have been there first and to this day, wonderfully still are. I didn’t want to leave for various reasons. For the universal fact that at fifteen your entire world really does exist within the pinkie promises of your friends. Also, there was a special boy whose attention I had attracted. A Japanese boy with long velvet like hair and whose band had managed to create their first punk rock album that was actually being played on airwaves. A boy who had been giving me drumming lessons on Saturday afternoons for the past eight months while my parents assumed I was down the street, locked in the bedroom of my best friend’s house.  I had been fourteen and him, seventeen. We had met on a dusty afternoon in the aisle of a corporate giant music store. He had wandered into my aisle with a Judas Priest album in hand while I listened to Alice In Chains with closed eyes. He was my special secret and while we weren’t in love or even remotely hovering over any sort of significantly deep emotion, we were crazy about each other in the lurid way adolescents who’d discovered the other gender to be as interesting for the very first time as the gender they’ve always been accustomed to, can only be. We were convinced we would have been childhood best friends if we’d lived next door to each other and with him I discovered the wonderful state of being adored by someone for whom you’ve great respect.  He wrote me my first song and recorded it on a cassette in his bedroom with a message at the end telling me he’d never forget me and would return to marry me after he’d made it as an international musical act. At fifteen nothing breaks you the way being parted from people you need as buffer from the world does.

  Melbourne was a dream, they were years spent growing up and filling in a personality created to the limits.  I felt a lightness in spirit I had never known of and when graduation came around, my parents once again reviewed my life and decreed it unsatisfactory. This is where the thorns creep up and begin to puncture ragged holes into the story. Packed up and hauled back to leave behind another necessary world, I hadn’t envisioned living together after four years to be this impossible. First, the red hair had to go. I fought this with a great resistance. I threatened to shave my head bald by my own hands before they could have it colored ebony against my wishes.  I won. Islam forbids self created androgen and baldness fell under that category. I was turning nineteen and couldn’t fathom the idea of being told what to do with one’s own body, one’s own pores.  And so my bags were packed again and it was off to the Middle East for me till university started.

  But something changed while I was there. I found a calmness that my years raising myself hadn’t given me. Maybe it was being around women of such great strength and such genuine love for me, or maybe it came from being around women who mothered me in a way my own mother had failed to do. I had been without an adult for so long, it was a refreshing change to be able to honestly discuss my decisions by someone who wasn’t nineteen and fearless of death. Their devotion to the faith was humbling. University started and it was back to motherland soil, but I wanted to keep this great comfort that belief in a force greater than humanity and science proved to be. And tried I did, but it just wasn’t for me. My belief in God was one of personal conversations and neither cemented by way of repeated worship nor orders.

  I’ve never fought a cause I didn’t believe in and this entire concept of God and the brand of Islam that swirled within the my home and the back of my eyelids didn’t wield together as seamlessly as I wanted them to.  I didn’t want any part of the world my father possessed and ironically, it didn’t matter very much to him that I didn’t. The truth was a reason to pack my bags again. Only this time I was older, unbearably tired of mandatory academia, without financial funds or a clue about what should happen next. Two cds: Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk by Jeff Buckley and Silverchair’s Diorama, my copy of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy that used to belong to my favorite English teacher in high school and given by way of initiation into the rest of my life after graduation, black eyeliner, my Macbook, my pencil case, three writing pads, a couple of t-shirts and two pairs of jeans balled into a fist and slung into a bag zipped behind a door I would close forever.

  The next few weeks were spent living in the bedrooms of various girlfriends till the term started and I resumed communal living on campus. There isn’t quite an expression that would be apt to describe the emotional incompetence that comes with having the people whose flesh you were formed by disregard your individual self and declare it to be not good enough.  You instantly learn to pour melted steel over your heart and grow up faster than it is able to cool. You learn to gather all of yourself, knot yourself dead at the seams and unconsciously begin to create distance between the people who care about you beyond your life choices in an instinctive need to protect yourself.

  They were months that were too long and too lonely. I was never alone but I couldn’t and still can’t imagine being lonelier than I already was. I walked right into my first job completely by accident and was hired on the spot. I would spend the rest of my undergraduate life working my only constant job at the tattoo and piercing parlor that hired me after just asking a single question: Why do you want to work here? My reply: Because the pain it takes to puncture skin must mean there is something worth being optionally in pain for after all.

  I worked a million other jobs to get by.  My youngest daughter had had a job watering our neighbor’s bonsai plants last spring while they vacationed in Spain.  She’d told me one morning over cold blueberry waffles that she had begun to start channeling her energy into keeping the plant alive through the night while lying in bed, to combat the anxiety of them possibly wilting and dying on her watch. It made me remember my undergrad jobs and the state of fatigue they left me in. I had been a waitress by night at a Mexican restraunt brimming with people whose wallets were a lot fatter than their personalities, a camp counselor for children with learning abilities that taught me to never belittle a child’s tears for they hurt in ways they haven’t learnt to heal, a face painting story telling talking head for lavish birthday parties where the design of the cake had obviously been given a lot more attention to than the little one whose lips would eventually blow out the lit candles, a private music instructor  for young teenagers who paid me by way of doing chores around the apartment when money was not viable but their burning desire to learn was undeniable. Life was a continuous routine of doing splits over crates of varying sized dynamites. Those were the years to both break me and begin to form me. I tried not to scrimp on personal joy, the jobs were necessary for money, but like school, they weren’t the bigger part of my life.

  Love was: the things and people I loved the best. There is a terrible danger in telling a sixteen year old that the love of a brilliant man will salvage your soul more than redemption ever could. That there is a great vulnerability even in acknowledging the love another has for you. I met Conrad at a point in my life when I wanted nothing more than to be the only crucial person in my universe. I wanted to depend on no one else but myself. In between waking at 8 for classes and dual jobs that started at four in the afternoon and lasted till three in the morning, every day was a battle to leave my lungs from closing in on me. I want to explain to Layla that he wasn’t perfect and that love is a choice, that people come to each other with accumulated baggage and to love them would mean to store their baggage right next to where you stored yours.

  Six foot two with large rough hands marked by too many injuries, skin the color of talcum powder and long dark hair that curled at the tips after a shower, he was soundlessly beautiful and saw the world mapped out in a constellation of images and violent color. I want to tell her that we were deliriously happy together and broke plates above the sink and behind table lamps when we weren’t. I do not know how to tell Layla all of this without great difficulty on my part.

  So this is what I will tell her: I was twenty-one and he was three years older than me. We were both each other’s first sexual partner and each other’s first loves. We knew it would happen when it felt right, and had left it at that. Nine months and eight days after we met, six months and 4 days after moving in together, it did happen. Three in the morning, sitting in silence side by side in the middle of   on the day after the completion of his seven-day exhibition.  The stereo had Radiohead’s Creep playing in the background and the room was dark save for a light installation that made our skins glow. To me, very few moments have been able to match those of that night in its sincerity. I hope I am not setting my little girl up for an expectation she might fail to surpass. His eyes had shone like the surfaces of marbles in the dark and left tear drops in the shape of jewels clinging to his dark lashes when I reached up to touch his eyelid. The floor was ice cold and it felt like the world had combusted itself dead, forgetting to take us with it into oblivion. The works of art still hung up on the walls were silent declarations of celebration for us. They had been created with me in the room and his hands in between canvas and my wild curls.

  I can’t make it any simpler than that. One day, when I am less prone at being misunderstood, when my girls have truly fallen in love and formed every part of their lover in the shape of a star, I’ll do what I’ve always done. I’ll tell them my story.

*fiction. 

I am back in Kuala Lumpur and despite having been violently ill while home in Singapore, I was very much spoiled rotten. I say that now only because I am no longer a breath away from going up in great hellish feverish flames. The aftermath is always a detachment with the glazed irony of waking up to damp sheets hung out to dry with great discipline. Under the stars and the shower of rain you never catch, in between your twilight dreams and sunday mornings. 

I have the most amazing friends, and while this is not a unique state to claim, they are women to temper the edges of my spirit. 

I live on a sleepy little street, it is so still and calm with hardly any form of explosive life. All mortal sightings come in this form: leisurely walking by cultured aged individuals with beautiful shaggy dogs that lick my toes and rub their noses into the palm of my hand. The homosapien will wear matching colour coded outfits, possibly assembled with great care and complete with clean crisp little socks that end perfectly over the ankles. If I am home writing and sitting cross legged at the dining table with the sliding doors swung wide open, individual and canine will tend to stop at steel iron wrung gates and politely extend a greeting of sorts. Always the inquiry of what I am working on and then an invitation to tea or lunch if I am to be home. Always the same charming little man and the dog that will one day devour me.

And so I put some pants on and try not to say anything too wicked, seated in between him and rose scented little wife, over lil cups of masala tea. Its all very endearing and sweet and they tell me cheeky stories from their youth. It means a lot more to me than I possibly let on to them, this time allowed into their worlds where I am curly haired stranger with inked stained palms in tshirts that come down to my knees. I burn them cds of mind friendly music (smiths, the cure, the distillers thrown in to shake things up, eliott smith for rainy days and radiohead for cloudy ones) and they in turn try to marry me off to their grandson the surgeon. We speak of all sorts of vile things, deliciously strange things and I offer them parts of my mind to shock and thrill. Of men and writing and money and living and leaving at one’s own chosen speed. 

I have been doing absoulutely nothing but work for two days straight now, the sort of work that stems from love (ie writing) but comes with a price tag (undoes any form of love really), one that is crucial in order to stay two steps in front of the nightmare that is Debt.  

Three articles due in.  

I am slave to the grind. Rejoice.

I am procrastinating.

I am also sitting in the dark now.

Oooh la la.

Radiohead : Street Spirit.

Does creation provide relief? Perhaps only if it is no longer a tangle in my head but lined in a sweet row. A fearless firing squad of order, assembled at my command. Like shot stars of Rorschach test ink blots, held to light by sandpaper hands.

I am told sanity is the border you draw in the air. 

Finger to lip, lip to skin, skin to sunlight, sunlight to shore, shore to anchor, anchor to lover, lover to sea.

What then?

Human desire is the selfish troll with green spots on his nose and twenty-seven jealous glassy eyes on a tongue that sees everything. It isn’t very different from money made off the genius of the dead. Cold, rotten and food for fat worms happiest in the dark. Lovers want only the best for each other; our bathwater hums down the drain. Say no to sunlight, say no to whiskey kisses and half-truths, say no to other lives and foreign kitchen tiles. Say no to the strange boys who want you in between your stride and sphinx smile. Say no to the things that take the longest time to kill you and say no to nights away from me. Say no to everything that glows in the dark and say no to grown men who dream of your attention in a room filled with goblets of water. Say no to pens that do not belong to me and unfamiliar hands that draw you on napkins. Say no to devout palms that wish to worship you and say no to cartwheels that do not end in my lap. Say no to barefoot walks down empty roads alone and say no to philosophical discussions under streetlamps without me. Say no to races around the block that leave only your heartbeat wild and say no to escalated fights of great madness if my voice is not the one you’re trying to drown out. Say no if the pills to kill you won’t kill me too. The damned and the saved are very much the same, my dear.  

Dear delusional angel, put my heart on a studded leash tied to your voice while you go about your day, but walk it often on rainy days. He does not understand that leashes snap and hearts do go missing. They run off into the night to burrow graves under bushes too deep to be trampled on by feet. Freeze my heart in a block of ice and keep it safe in the chill compartment of the refridgearator, then. But careless drunk hands will reach for anything cold and drop it almost instantly on touch. A splendid smattering of blue chips will indeed leave me smiling, but frozen splinters of red will only turn to red pools on the kitchen floor if I try to brush them into a pile without tainting them by human touch. Lying on the floor with bare legs, my cheek against the cool tiles and a green straw in between valentine lips to suck at your heavy gift of watery heart will only make me feel better while I am trying to fall asleep with sweet liquid goodness of fermented love warming up my belly. It will leave me with pores that shriek for space to breathe, when morning comes. Pores that pierce the silence with high-pitched instructions for foreign objects to evacuate the body immediately. Wild child, do you not want my heart at all? Silly boy, what good would a whole complete heart be to a curious girl like me. Wrap it carefully in foil and sticky tape a wish around it after it has died a thousand times over before you’ve died, and I shall stitch it within my own, to guard with my life  

I want to be you. Do you want to be me? Rim your lids black with sin and compel yourself under my skin, shooting along my vicious veins. Within the tendons that clamp my palms around your jaw and between the ligaments moving my legs to rest against your spine. Slit me at the hairline and peel me open like a tangerine. Force yourself into flesh, bone and vein. Dig your heels deep into my feet and wrap your steel arms around my disintegrating liver. Refuse to let me die. Tuck my heart under your chin and sing it a lullaby. Then bite hard into it as it surrenders into sweet slumber. Sink your teeth in and drench the waiting taste buds of your tongue. Slam a fist into my kidney and remember that this is the only way to command me yours.