Shu-Ling Chua

On the train home tonight, I continued reading Andrew Sutherland's  Act Cute . Specifically, I continued reading 'Act Two [you stop me at the airport and tell me that you love me]'. It is a long-ish prose poem. I started it as I rode the long escalators at Parliament Station. I stopped while walking to work because I didn't want to be hit by cars. And Andrew's words deserve  one's full attention. Anyway, the passage that caught my attention on the way home, which I immediately turned back to, on finishing the poem: I held onto that for a long time . It must have hurt; a lot, even, in the moment. But I had to have known there was nothing secure; I had generated this fantasy as it happened. Nothing promised. I knew you had a boyfriend, or it became clear to me you were with someone, and that was fine. You stayed with me as a missed opportunity, a time -too-short, but also, more obscurely, a disembodied hope for the future; a future impossible to pinpoint or plan f...