Sunday 8 July 2007

a comfortable couch it seems

Wongeloid left on Friday, heading to Rome then back to Malaysia. He slept on our sofa bed for close to 8 weeks, and now the house feels very weird and empty without him. Some would feel relief, enjoy the quiet, or revel in the personal space after a guest leaves after such a period of time. Not us. Wong was too tops of a house guest and instead he will be missed. A different kind of missing too. One that is coupled with knowing you may not see them for a fucking long time. Sigh.

Some of the things Wong left behind to make room for the 25 books he ordered on amazon:

  1. a huge bath towel
  2. a huge yellow bath robe
  3. 6 packets of envelopes
  4. 10 tins of snuff
  5. books he read and gave to us (including The Young Stalin)
  6. 2 notebooks
  7. 350 zloty to send his sea-mail stash of books he didn’t manage to finish reading (the stash includes 6 volumes of Proust and Italian vocab textbooks)
  8. about 7 bottles of grog, including a 15 year old Balvenie whiskey
  9. Czech money
  10. a nice load of boxers left in the bin (he claimed the Malaysian sizes were too restrictive)

To fill the gaping wound created by his departure, we will be having a new guest to stay with us as of tomorrow. For 6 days. Her name is Sarah, and she is the girlfriend of a guy who is the son of my mum’s neighbour friend from the 70s who lives in the States. Sarah is from Texas and is doing a thesis on Polish poster art. She is not Polish. I wonder what she will leave behind…


Wong - the man of many cakes

1 comment:

Michael Wong Thye Seng said...

Stynky, while 'claimed' is bracingly, stingingly accurate, it was the novelty Chinese New Year briefs that were too small, not the boxers (they were just old). If you had investigated your rubbish more carefully, you would see it had about 6 pairs of undies in it.