The Writing of Norman Tan

here’s another.

Guy: let’s go out sometime.

Girl: out?

Guy: yeah. you know. read a movie. watch a book.

Girl: isn’t it the other way around?

Guy: nope. think about it. read the subtitles. imagine the story.

Girl: ….

Guy: admit it, i’m right.

Girl: ….

Guy: so. which movie are we reading?

so is this bit confusing? what do you guys think?

i have too many little scenes scribbled on random pieces of paper.

A few months ago, I wrote this little ditty.

At 9:33AM I met a shower, a change of clothes, a tricycle ride leaving my village. At 9:56, I met a jeepney ride that will take me 1/3 of the way to my current workplace. Then I thought of something nice to hear. Maybe even witty.

I’m writing this while on a jeepney, traveling at 500 words per hour.

The handwriting’s horrible, by the way. It gets better at every stoplight, and worse immediately after. There’s a girl wearing red in front of me. We lock eyes. She looks away. I continue writing.

Just some stuff I found written down.

I woke up covered in cold sweat, my whole body shivering. But not from the cold.

I had a dream.

It was the strangest dream I have yet (or so I remember), but it freaked me out to no end because it made sense. Bare feet touches cooled wooden flooring as I make my way to the living room. My feet had other ideas, though.

I continued on to the kitchen, where I found myself grabbing a mug and filling it with my own mixture of cold and room-temperature water from the water dispenser beside me. Raising the mug up to face level, I took a deep breath before gulping it all down.

I shivered, but this time it, at least, was partially the cold.

I went back to the living room and sat down on one of the couches that surrounded it. On the coffee table in front of me lay a pad of yellow paper and a pen. Hmm. somebody must have left it there.

Danny and the Dreamers. (a real, un-finished, recurring dream)

note: this has just been slapped together this morning. Draft 1.

I had this vague, recurring dream where I was running around a mall trying to find “the light”, sometimes referred to as the Lantuse in my dream. She’s this pretty red-headed girl with a green coat and beret.

In this dream, I’m also flickering in and out of a dream-state where I’m in the same mall, but I’m calm and walking as if I knew where I was going.

I pass by the arcade, meet a pretty, dark-skinned lady who works there. She accompanies me up to the top, to a cafe that overlooks everything. I tried flirting with her along the way, but to no avail. For some reason this struck me as odd, as I’ve never flirted with this character before.

Anyways, she had already left. I remember that the cafe felt like a street, that there were street lamps behind a guy in a suit. Apparently, he was waiting for me.

He greets me with his devilish smile that just knows something more than I do. “Have you found her yet,” he asks. “Found what,” I reply, having no idea what he’s talking about.

He fiddles with the coffee cup on the table, something I didn’t notice before. “Ah. Well then, you know what you’ve got to do.” He says this as he tilts his head, and the glare from the street lamps behind hits my eyes. They subside later, the lights hidden behind a red-haired girl with a green coat and a beret.

I hear a faint whisper in my ear, saying “Find the light, leave now.” I suddenly find myself filled with an overpowering urge to run away. Find the light. Something so important depended on me finding the light.

So I find myself jumping off of railings, running down stairs, and barreling through people. Looking for the light, not knowing if this was still the dream-state, or I’m back in my regular dream.

Suddenly I realize that I’m on a balcony, preparing myself to jump. A market was further away, a covered, dimly-lit, open-air wet market for grocers and such. I saw a flash of red and green, and I knew that it was her.

I don’t know what happened, really. Much more than the earlier urge to run away, now I’ve become a man possessed. I had to get to her, and tell her something. Do something. I felt like someone’s life was at stake, and it had to do with her.

At that moment, I believed with all my heart that I was supposed to save her. Or, for some reason, I thought that she’d save me.

So I jumped off the balcony, slid on a canopy below, and ran towards the market. On the way there was a carriage one would normally find being used in parades and such. It blew up, sending large pieces of wood and steel everywhere.

One such piece of shrapnel lodged itself in my chest, and I knew I was dying before I even hit the ground. People surrounded me, calling for ambulances. I felt my strength waning as more of my blood left me. It’s the last thing I remember before everything was just white.

Text started forming in front of me, reading like a book or a page. “Hello Danny,” it said, “I’m Marcus. Obviously you don’t remember our discussions here and why or how to find the light. The Lantuse. So I’ll tell everything to Greg, and he’ll write it down for you to find. Hopefully, this won’t happen again. Like the last few times. And Danny? Don’t trust anyone. The others are taking over.”

Then, I woke up, and I just had to write this down.

Aside from my photography, I like the idea of writing.

So I’ll dump all my writing-related stuff here, ok guys?