today, your forgotten painting hangs proudly on the corner, always tilted more to the left than the right. it wasn't much: just a table of fruits and a vase of plants.

i asked who painted them, and you nonchalantly replied it was by you.

where are your painbrushes?

"Oh, I threw them away after I started work," you said.

the only painting you do now is on your aging canvas, drawn and re-drawn to perfection everyday. but makeup doesn't stay on like the watercolours do once upon a youth.

-

yesterday you asked me the difference between a h and a 2b pencil.

i said, you are the artist, shouldn't you know?

you said, i gave everything back to the teachers after i graduated from nanyang arts academy. i can't paint now, not now, never now. perhaps later, you'll say and smile as though trying to recall something, an erased harried-sketch between lectures perhaps, or the smudged ink printed at the recesses on your mind.

so what's the difference between a 2b and a 6b pencil, you ask.

i can't reply. somehow i knew, in the midst of stiff formal print and tax invoices, you had long forgotten the sharp flick of the rish when tracing the spike of the durian, the smell of paint and the swift, feather carress of pencil on paper. you no longer look nor admire how pencil traces the paper; you are more interested in what it can do, what it says. then you are off, away in the flood of telephone calls and office meetings.

i look at framed photographs of a past and -


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True story.

I really do know an artist who has forgotten the difference between a 2b pencil and a 6b pencil. While this may seem trivial to you, well, it is the equivalent of a scientist asking you the difference between an electron microscope and a normal one.

These are our tools, our escape from life, our layout of ourselves, our way to forget and remember things, and to breathe life into our imaginations. To forget something like this is indeed a painful thing. Painful to watch, that is.

I hope I will never be like that person, but you know what they say, never say never. Someday I will look back on the works I did and quietly admire my genius, because I had forgotten how to write.

I'm afraid of that day coming. But I know, it is imminent. It would be a very great shock, certainly, as writing is now not only an art form, but an integral part of my life. Taking it away is the equivalent of pulling off my tongue or depriving me of one of my senses. It is infinitely precious, and I will do anything to protect it.