Restful Self-Portrait by Max Pasakorn
- Sep 7
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
My boyfriend, with freshly washed hair, plops down on the couch. It is Saturday in Singapore, which means, finally, we can hide from the strangers who expect us to be shapeshifters. The other days, we role-play responsible, dutiful Singaporeans. We know to bow our heads to the right people. For the right people. That is how you win in this country’s game of political minesweeper: nudge, don’t shove.
But here, we laze. We ooze. For this slice of afternoon, like a perfectly tart orange slice, the freedom to trickle is not only okay, but beloved. The laundry, which I lined neatly this morning, is sunbathing. Behind it are stacks of board games I’ve collected, poised precariously like delicate museum sculptures, for those days when rest is more activity. But today, we put our feet down on the hardwood floor. The recalcitrant dust grumbles. The sofa wheezes softly under our combined weight, a responsive pet.
I instinctively reach for the TV remote, but first my hand crosses a maze of our limbs. I press the button without expectation. Then, YouTube becomes Our Tube.
“Something we want to watch together?” they say. My other hand lays gently on their right breast, soft but firm. Full but yearning. There is always something we want to watch together.
I scroll past my guilty pleasures: James Charles; Magic: The Gathering gameplay videos; comical news about the doomed state of American society (which, yes, I know, is not mine to claim, but my partner and I are also perpetually depressed, so we get it). Nothing seems like it would whisk us into a journey we’d enjoy together.
Until we hit the cat video compilations.
And we take turns mesmerised by the lives captured on home video cams. Creatures littler than us but with guts to jump three times their height. Soft mews and shocked meows. Cats curious about the snow outside, but run in briskly after a touch of cold. Their worlds happily confined to the domestic.
I replace the remote, put my hand on my partner’s head. Stroke their mullet. There is a low, soft purring. I’m unsure who or what it’s coming from.
Author's Note:
Self-care to me means basking in the freedoms I have - particularly to go on a journey, even if I'm staying physically still. It's the opportunity to play a song or read a poem on repeat and hear different things each time, to carefully bask in the carefully curated words of others, to find new ways to engage with this vast world and the people within it. Self-care means letting the self be porous to culture, to acknowledge the instability of our existence. All that can only be done with the intention to be more than what we are today.
Max Pasakorn (he/she/they) is the author of creative nonfiction chapbook A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock Press, 2023). An alumnus of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Lambda Literary Retreat, Max has won the 2024 swamp pink prize in Nonfiction and 2022 Chestnut Review Contest in Poetry. Read more: www.maxpasakorn.works
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