Hi friends,
It's been a long time since I’ve arrived in your inbox. Today is New Year’s Eve and isn’t that insane? How serendipitous that the end of the year falls on the day I send out SALVE. It feels like yesterday that I sat down to write the first dispatch in April. I won’t wax on about how strange this year was. You all know. I’d like to thank you for keeping me company throughout it, though. Writing weekly has been a pleasure, a pain, and a distraction. Hunkered down in my home with spare thoughts and itching fingers, I’m glad to have found a community of readers who are invested in my work.
I chose the newsletter & email medium because it felt intimate and ephemeral. It’s like with each issue I’ve brushed up against your hand in a club, squeezed it, winked, then disappeared into the crowd. The immediacy of hitting send every week has taken the pressure off creating something worthy every time I sit down to write. What I’ve collected, in retrospect, is a mass of small wonders—espresso shots of essays and recollections that I can repurpose or leave alone. I started this project with a specific purpose: to bring levity and comfort in a chaotic time.
The world remains chaotic and terrible and scary, but I think by now we’re familiar with it’s particular dissonance. The virus is like the drunk aunt who ruins Christmas every year by reigniting a familial drama from aeons ago. She’s causing trouble, but she’s been doing that for a while now. We know this trouble. SALVE has outlived its purpose—I’ve got no more levity and comfort to deliver. I think you don’t need it now, either.
Why does writing this feel like a breakup? Lol. It kind of is, because this is the last issue. I want to start a new project in 2021, something that’s more thematically cohesive and consistent. I’m not exactly sure what shape it will take, but it’ll probably be another newsletter. I’m not done brushing up against your hand in a club just yet. SALVE has been messy, colorful, and inconsistent––much like the year we’ve all had, and I love it enough to leave it behind.
I’ve still got this mailing list, though, so you will definitely be hearing from me in January with a new project. You’ll be totally free to opt out of that, if it’s not your style, but I hope you’ll stick around. It will be decisive, urgent, and considered. Probably some more literary stuff and less chatty cheeriness.
I’m ending this year with a bad back. Some unfortunate combination of exercise has angered a joint in my lower back. The surrounding muscles have tensed up in retaliation. The painkillers aren’t working. Before I went to a physiotherapist and deduced this was a real problem, I visited the place where all my aches and pains were cured as a child.
It’s a TCM clinic that specializes in acupressure and reflexology, in an old part of Singapore that hasn’t changed much since my childhood. The walls are lined with yellowing diagrams of the pressure points representing each internal organ in the body on the sole of each foot. The management had painted the walls in garish blue a decade ago. That’s the only modification I noticed.
The receptionist greeted me wearily. She knows me, but she’s upset that I haven’t visited in a while. “You seldom come now,” she said disapprovingly, consulting the ancient client book that predates my birth. I told her tales of my time overseas to explain the absence. She nodded amiably. “So what do you do now?” I paused for a beat, unsure how to explain my vocation, “I tell stories” I replied. She nodded and sent me into the massage room to wait for a therapist.
The therapist exclaimed when I saw her—shocked that I had grown so much, that my body was so long, that my muscles were so tight. “This was much easier when you were little,” she said with a chuckle as she dug her forearm into my shoulder blade. “You have grown so much, it’s hard for me now, much more work,” she said when the massage was over, after she had poked and prodded me until the tension gave out.
The massage therapist urged me to take care of myself: drink hot liquids, use peppermint oil, buy a specific medicinal herb. “I’m so happy to see you and make you feel better,” She declared with sweat on her upper lip—evidence of the fact that it was easier to relieve my body when it was smaller and more complicit. The release of the massage was brief, the pain came back after a few hours, but the feeling of being taken care of in a place that has not changed since I was a child was evergreen.
I hope, for myself and all of my readers, that in 2021 we approach novel challenges with tested remedies, and try to access the familiar in the extraordinary and uncomfortable of this new year. Thank you for your time, your emails, and your support in 2020. I’ll see you soon.
Xoxo,
Z
Singapore, July 2020