The Forgottens
We all feel it, as we ride on buses, trains and automobiles. This sense of the unfamiliar eroding the edges of our consciousness. A collective malaise. I pass by the places I once knew, the windows of the bus framing the scene like postcards.

My memories of space seem like one of those yellowed out postcards sold as cheap nostalgia along the road beside the river. Soon those cheap relics and the people who sell them will be sepia tinted forgottens themselves.

As I see our old house, 367D torn down, I wonder if this was how our forebears felt when their kampongs and shanty towns were destroyed in the name of economic progress. In the past, at least, it felt as if we were moving forward.

Is this how my senile grandmother feels? As she looks out of the hospital window to a horizon shredded by steel and concrete. Where am I, who am I, what am I, she must ask herself.

We tell her she is in the hospital, she is grandma, she is mother. But she doesn’t understand. To her, she is at home, she is daughter, she is wife, she is all the things to all the people who do not exist anymore.

We do not exist anymore.