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Valentine’s Day short stories: Love Is The Bullet That You Bite
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A newly single middle-aged woman flies to Kinosaki, Japan, after finally watching the film Yi Yi.
ST ILLUSTRATION: MANNY FRANCISCO
Daryl Qilin Yam
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There were things I hadn’t known, or thought I had to know, at the time my husband left me. This realisation dawned on me only a while after we’d separated, within those long stretches of time a single woman enjoys after 30 years of marriage.
I was renting a film online: Yi Yi, the 2000 feature by the late Edward Yang. It was a film we’d always wanted to watch, but never got round to because of this or that reason; by the end of it I found myself floored, unable to speak. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, utter a word. This period of silence stretched into a week, and then two; by the third week, I discovered how little I needed to speak in my affairs, how little I relied on my voice to get things done.
