S C R The Eleventh Issue
I B B Horizons
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‘What are you thinking?’ the girl asked. ‘Nothing.’ ‘You have to think something.’ ‘I was just feeling.’ Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
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December 2015
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Cont
7 13 19 Hello
68 Rachel Lee
Let’s Be Still Katherine Yang
9 16 21
The Scribblers
She Eve Blondeau-Elman
Bohemian Man Jimin Kang
10 18 22 Endless Crystal Lau
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At Home Chloe Barreau
Blank Cynthia Huang
tents
24 34 38 Damage Control Evelyn Choi
Push and Pull Evelyn Choi
Days Like This Katherine Yang
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Elegy To The Black Parade
启明星
Sophia Chan
Sundown Constance Lam
30 37 43
Don’t Cry For Icarus Chloe Lee
Lessons From Noah at the End of the World Sophie Li
The Horizons Playlist
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From us to you
H E L L O A letter from The Scribbles Team 6
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Dear CIS, As the days grow longer, darker, and chillier, we turn to the things that bring us warmth: a cup of hot cocoa, the heat from the radiator, our fuzziest slippers, and the comfort of the arts — that perfectlyexecuted poem, that intricate drawing, that photograph with just the right amount of light filtered through. We hope that the pages ahead will provide you with all these things, and perhaps inspire you to bring out a notebook or sketchpad of your own... For Scribbles’ eleventh issue, we invite you to consider the topic of horizons: how can we explore different boundaries in our day-today lives, whether they be in small spaces or large ones? How do we perceive the world laid out in front of us? How should we interact with all that is hidden, unexplored, or unknown? As we get closer to a new year of new possibilities, challenges, and wonders to explore, Horizons looks at both how we break out from the walls that confine us and how we can be trapped by them, while yearning for something more. Why do we write? Why do we draw? Why do we care about the arts at all? The answers, and the accompanying proof, lie before your very eyes. The arts revive and rejuvenate — they remind us of the beautiful things in our lives that deserve to be showcased and relished; they remind us to transcend all boundaries, real or imagined. But most of all, they encourage us to explore, explore, and explore. Students, staff, and all creative minds, we invite you to take a copy, take a seat, and take a moment to enjoy. Love, Chloe, Cynthia, Rachel, Sophie The Scribbles Team would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Ms. Yeo, Mr. Quinn and Ms. Martignago for their continued support of the magazine, as well as to Ms. Lee in the Publications office and Ms. McManus in the Business Office for helping us bring this issue to life.
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S C R I B B L E 8
C B E
Writing Director
Art Director
Sophie Li
Chloe Barreau
Writers
Artists
Crystal Lau
Ailene Lung
Rachel Lee
Chloe Barreau
Eve Blondeau-Elman
Hillary Yee
Chloe Barreau
Christina Shen
Katherine Yang
Sheila Zhang
Jimin Kang
Madeleine Griffiths
Cynthia Huang
Sasha Corr
Evelyn Choi
Rachel Lee
Vanessa Cheok
Ben Chan
Chloe Lee
Mabel Lui
Evelyn Choi
Miki Chiu
Sophie Li
Kitty Ng
Sophia Chan
Scarlet Ng
Constance Lam
Layout Director
Photographers
Rachel Lee
Nicole Choi Sophie Li
Operations Director Cynthia Huang
Anne Lau Toni Suen Jacob Wong Abe Luk
Cover photo by Nicole Choi Back cover photo by Rachel Lee
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Endless
Crystal Lau, 13B2 To me, you are a rose: Something that holds great beauty, but get too close and I’ll get pricked. You are black coffee, freshly brewed, the smell radiating everywhere and attracting anyone close by. But try and consume it too quickly and the bitterness burns from the first sip to the last gulp. You are a beautiful sunrise from the top of Mount Toubkal, worth every single grueling step. You are the process of getting a tattoo; equal parts pleasure and pain. You are anticipation, frustration, sophistication, brought together to make up every fibre of your being. You are apologies, tears, sweat, and while I don’t know what I want to eat for breakfast tomorrow or what my favorite season is I do know this: I know the galaxies will move in a manner such that we will one day no longer be in each other’s orbit. I know that then there will be no bridge that can bring me close to you. The strongest hurricanes will try and wash out how I feel for you. But their attempts will be futile; my love is waterproof, airtight and long-lasting. 10 10
Ailene Lung 12P2
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Perspective by Toni Suen, 11P2
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68
Rachel Lee, 12G2 The rain takes apart these calendar pages with its tiny hands, like a cold mist gunning into the night, until the edges of time have softened into the ground and intertwine with roots at the base. It has taken me 68 days to write this letter to you. On the mornings when the grey areas devour the white, I tiptoe into the margins of your footsteps to dutifully preserve the last traces of dust your heels left on the hardwood floors. You see, someone needs to make sure that when the units of time coalesce into a single loop, nothing gets lost in the depths of silence, and the centuries don’t erode the daylight from your voice. Yet, nobody ever mentioned how internal quietude can never reach the asymptote, how the last, selfish notes of wistfulness and regret trail softly into dawn. If you have ever seen photo negatives of life without respite, they would look something like this: A film of cheese settling over a bowl of macaroni. A terrible silence sticking to the parameters of the room. White blood cells armed to plug up deluges of overstimulation. The truth is: It’s easier to think than it is to feel. The truth is: I miss you.
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Christina Shen, 11P2
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Top: Sheila Zhang, 12G1 Bottom: Miki Chiu, 13B2
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Nicole Choi 13G2
She
Eve Blondeau-Elman, 12Y2 Her laugh is the bell that tells me dinner is served, that the fried or mashed or possibly even baked potatoes are getting cold, and that the family, their steely eyes on the meal, are waiting for me. Her words wobble. I love her words. I am her words. Her bright blue eyes of the Russian sunset gleam. There are no other words (for I am her words) to describe it. Her memory has become a black hole filled with the light of me (the words), her laugh, her eyes.
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Jacob Wong 12B1
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At Home
Chloe Barreau, 12P1 There is truth all around us, yet when one is so carefully plucked to complement the painted rooms of our mind, one is so much richer than many. We have knitted strings of sentences, scraps of observations into a thick weave of assumptions and judgement we carry around our head like a good habit. Truths can be overwhelming. Silences are confusing. We can only handle one at the end of each sentence, and we create half silences to prepare for the full ones. The dust of our truths has not been shaken. We are collecting, piling, fresh layers of content to the mind, empowering ourselves with every new find, but not as hoarders do (picking up any useless thing). A color for our horizon has been picked and now we gaze at this depthless sky, continuing to tend this plant of thoughtignoring the truths we should accept until we break to dust and remain for others to sweep aside.
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Let’s Be Still Katherine Yang, 11G2
The world’s just spinning
A little too fast
If things don’t slow down soon
we might not last
–The Head and the Heart
Peter pulls at my sleeve. I keep writing, trying to remember what Mr. Lee had
said about osmosis in potato cells.
“High… high—or is it low?—” tug, “high water pote—“ tug, tug, “poten—not
now, Peter, okay?” I tell him, keeping my voice low. I don’t want to disturb Mom and Ms Anderson who sit at the dining table, engaged in a spirited back-and-forth about— well, from the snippets I catch and the documents strewn across the glass top—the McDuff shares, whatever those are.
Peter gets up and wanders across to Ms Anderson’s kid’s toy stash, which is
filled to the brim with pushable, pullable, stackable playthings. He picks the top one, a plastic gadget the colour of kindergartens and daycare chairs, and gently presses one of its big round buttons. It makes him laugh, a quiet huff that dissipates before you even really hear it.
After that, he’s quiet for a while, which I guess doesn’t really say much when it
comes to him, but at least I can get my essay written in peace. When I look up again, he’s sitting in front of six or seven toy parts and a pile of screws, aligned neatly according to their centres. Seeing me looking, he holds up what he’s been cradling in his palms: the big round button, from which dangle strands of wires that connect it to the rest of the gadget. He pushes down on the button, as if to show me how the touch of his finger brought life and light and colour and that tinny little singing voice into the cold machine. His eyes are bright and wide, and his smile like a secret to be folded up and squeezed into the corners of his lips.
Something in my chest contracts and I finger the edge of my sleeve as I
whisper, across the room, “Don’t forget to put it back together.” He hears me (why wouldn’t he?), and rolls his eyes carefully, the “of course I will, dummy” implied in the look.
I go back to my essay. He goes back to his toys.
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Jacob Wong 12B1
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Bohemian Man Jimin Kang, 13P1
There is something mesmerising about your leather bag, your scuffling feet, the crinkled white of your blouse. The green vein a crease, a fold in your earth of skin. Sometimes our earthquakes leave from parts you expect them the least. I am the rain; my sheets unravel like film, maybe there is no cure for this restlessness. A cellist told me that art is how we address the moments we fall between the cracks. Moments when we kindle this love for strangers. Love is most poetic when unreciprocated. It turns the corner and is lost.
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Sophie Li 12R2
Blank
Cynthia Huang, 12Y2 so we sit again in this familiar spot this familiar position this familiarity hesitant fingers barely touching twitching feet trying to grasp stable footing hoping that time will pass by faster through from experience we know that it never will so instead we feel the sea rushing below us with a calm ferocity we watch the sky above travel through its shades of white grey and black and feel the first drops of rain not even flinching as they become streams become torrents
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Top: Kitty Ng, 12G1 Bottom: Clouds by Scarlet Ng, 11P2
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Damage Control Evelyn Choi, 12B2
When the storm clouds arrive I board up the windows and can’t help but peek through the planks to spy the tornado swallowers driving past. I should start naming emotions like we name hurricanes: here’s hope, here’s terror, here’s love. Some people devote their lives to chasing them, racing down empty, swollen highways to break the event horizon and catch a glimpse of their windblown reflection. I used to be like that, but I’m not into devastation anymore. I’ve held enough water in my hands to know that. How can you look at such wreckage and still feel warm inside? (When I see a mirror I want to punch it.) In the wake of the storm, we repair the dock with whatever we can find: rope, mainly, but surfboards, too, all lined up straight for once like planks are supposed to be, like we could never be, and as the sun shifts over the edge of the sky, all these young hands will find some bauble in the sand, without a metal detector to speak of, just a lost promise, a ring or two; and someone might slip one on their finger and slide it off again, the ring still slick with saltwater and the polish of taking it off and putting it on again a hundred times.
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Chloe Barreau 12P1
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Hillary Yee 12P2
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Top: Abe Luk, 9B1 Bottom: Madeleine Griffiths, 13B1
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Sophie Li 12R2 28 28
Elegy to the Black Parade Vanessa Cheok, 12B1
The deer were poisoned near Minnesota last Sunday, and at last, they gave up on burying the bodies, let them lay there, still and untended on the forest floor as the geese honked returns to empty horizons. A flurry of white feathers swept to mist in the distance— gone come spring, save one or two bodies frozen beyond recognition— and you sit, in mossy dark, watching the deer as their shadows leave their bodies, as if in a trance or a dream or a glistening procession, rising out of spotted hides, where the poison blossoms, and unblossoms red carnations amongst a parade of sleepwalking antlers, so heavy and weightless floating infinitely upwards and in a cabin by the lake, a woman melts out of some forgotten dream, and tells you that you are almost there
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Don’t Cry for Icarus Chloe Lee, 11Y1
What do mothers say when they tell the story of Icarus? “Be careful, my child, fly too close to the sun, and like Poor Icarus, you will fall.” “Don’t try and soar for the stars, for Icarus has showed, men do not belong there.” “The sky is the domain of the gods and poor Icarus defied them. Darling child, stay on the earth, or you will die with regret.” Poor soul, poor child, poor Icarus. If only he’d known he was flying — straight to his death. But, really, who else but ‘poor Icarus’ has touched the gleaming sun with their very own hands? Who else has danced on horizons, and skimmed through the wetness of clouds and kissed the cold moon with their lips? No, don’t cry for Icarus, for he never truly fell. He’s just flown far away to join the stars in the sky he loves so very much. 30 30
Sasha Corr 13G2 31 31
Leftmost: Ben Chan 11B1 Center, top and bottom: Chloe Barreau 12P1 Rightmost: Rachel Lee 12G2
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Push and Pull Evelyn Choi, 12B2
aphelion, perihelion. over & over & ( ebb & flow ) & over, hands reaching
knotted
over coral rubble: just another reef, just meters worth of shoal claimed for the sake of being claimed, forever on the edge of something, ready to be lost to its home again. population: 0, & polyp skeletons. & roaring like a conch shell. a hazard, submerged, ( or not, ) trying to hold together as the ocean reclaims itself.
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Rachel Lee 12G2
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Anne Lau 12R2
启明星 Sophia Chan, 12Y1
每个人都是天上的一颗星 仰望迢迢星汉 我寻找那颗最亮的星 找到了，启明星 一闪一闪 坚定又迷人的闪耀 我仿佛听到它说， 静静把泪水埋在蓝色湖泊 不知黑暗所在 是因为 梦在现实花开
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Lessons From Noah At the End of the World Sophie Li, 12R2
1. How quickly he became the loneliest man in the world, aged bent and terrible in the desolation of a new earth cleaned empty by some god with cruel hands, how quickly kindness became the only currency that mattered. 2. And in all that mud, how small redemption looked in the crook of death’s arm — how hard the world would be now, how thankless and unforgiving. 3. Noah took a gulp of air so large it felt like air devouring itself, learned that this is how change comes: brutal and uninvited. Tonight no soft thing is left alive. 5. Chill of absolution on the tongue. 6. What there was to be said about playing emperor above all your kingdoms of silence, God, was said, laid bare and devoured. 7. To be soldiered into grief and the feel of tongue, that parchment, the dryness of a flooded life while waiting for water to divorce itself from meaning. 8. And yet, how even drowned as they were in the quagmire of themselves Noah found mercy in the shape of his wife — what consolation tasted like when they were both alone but could be lonely together. 9. Noah found comfort in circular things, in rings for which endings are also beginnings. 10. A slow pomegranate ripening on a thin branch watching the day birth itself into the slim arms of the night, the sky opens up. 11. The world is here now to stay. 12. Like so much light come home to itself, here, suddenly: all this rain. 37
Days Like This
Katherine Yang, 11G2 home is rolling mountains, still waters, six seven eight! soaring eagles, and me, sprawled head-first off the couch, bare toes tapping out birdsong, drinking in the sweet breeze and daydreaming at the open sky.
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Madeleine Griffiths 13B1 39
Mabel Lui 12B1 40
Sundown
Constance Lam, 11P1 so I watched the orange sun peek out from behind the hill leaving red behind the sky was ablaze hues of purple, red, orange set the world on fire sunrise in the smog a pink sphere above it all listless clouds of grey on your daily commute you squint as the golden light takes over your vision separate the earth from the vast, limitless sky sun, here’s a line, and you’ve crossed it should I soar above it all leaving colours in my wake.
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P L A Y L I 42
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From Eden by Hozier Pilot by Amber Run Espoir by Darius Georgia by Vance Joy St. Clarity by The Paper Kites Budapest by George Ezra Bright Blue by Daniela Andrade Simon by Firewoodisland Phantom Limb by The Shins Postcards From Italy by Beirut All in White by The Vaccines It’s Only Life by The Shins Start of Time by Gabrielle Aplin Playlist link: bit.ly/1O9HKdi
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Made possible by the Student Dream Fund and the Art and English Departments
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