everything else .. Issued 9pm.
dear internet,
i am obsessed with the twitter account of singapore’s national environment agency. i love their fragmentary half-sentences, like some kind of meteorological sappho, and their almost-ellipses which always stop at two dots. my heart constricts at this account whose only job is to tell me it’s raining, it’s cloudy, it’s fair; or what the weather outlook is for tomorrow ..
i used to joke that the tweets were made by someone in a bunker, sending us messages from the future. this is less funny now as i think of a future in which there is no weather, or in which weather updates are a grave necessity. this future is already present: i refresh my air quality app to know whether i will be able to walk from home to station without my sinuses inflaming. i wait for a good reading, like unhealthy, or very poor, so that i can go outside.
maybe one day we will hold on to the memory of weather updates that were benign. running outside at the first monsoon rain. my grandmother saving me a hailstone in the freezer. a friend holding onto my legs as i crane out of her 21st-floor window to take a photo of a rainbow. the first time i saw snow.
my favourite recurring tweet from NEA is “heavy rain warning: the heavy rain has eased”. i don’t know if i think it’s so ridiculous it circles back round to being profound, or if it’s something simpler. but i do know it’s been two years since i’ve left the country and i still follow that twitter account, waiting for it to tell me, with delightful, consistent vagueness, about a sky that is no longer mine.
love,
t