I have not lived yet.
I have not been able to say, with regret
that this is a life worth that much death.
I have not been spared
your democracy, your exercises in dramatic impunity —
your bundling of my clothes into a bag
and sending them back to my family
miraculously intact.
Am I not worth more than a pile of beautifully preserved rags?
Am I not deserving, Madame President,
of your attention, your prayers, your Facebook post, the closed and restricted stacks
where you discuss other matters of national interest, other ways to engender progress—
other ways to forgive and forget?
Am I not deserving, supposed champions of Singapore-to-be,
of your beautifully edited TikTok and Instagram stories?
Am I not deserving of a second chance at liberty?
At being seen?
At being told, carefully and politely,
no
with all due humane compassion and empathy
that our founder claimed was the pinnacle of sovereignty
is this now how we demonstrate power and authority?
Is that what I am to die for:
a show, a farce, a trying mockery
of human individuation, of the power and potential of you, and you, and you, to say
you are sorry?
You did your best, with your vested authority
but in the end, the population spoke with one voice,
with a sense that this was equality.
I woke up at 4am.
I could not sleep.
I am not religious,
and this drives the fury in all the more deep.
I know your pattern.
I know which students, which teachers,
which ministers you could have been.
I know that I will never unsee the things that I have seen.
In the end, the universe looked out in wretched choice,
and said, they will take your heart, and mind, and soul, and body
but they will never deny you this:
the simple fact that in dignity and uncommon, atrocious death
you added one more tiny, blazing number to an eternity
of reckoning that will one day,
I promise you,
you who I never got to teach in my classroom:
one day will become a living, peaceful reality.
One day I will not wake up in fear that tortures me in its immensity.
One day I will actually be able to say
Singapore has finally come through for me.