Transition

 Transition

A Life Formed Too Early, Briefly Met, Then Lost in Transition

Loon grew up poor.

Not in the way poverty is later retold—cleaned, sharpened, moralised—but in the way that compresses time. Childhood shortened. Adulthood arrived without invitation. Curiosity was not guided; it was simply exposed.

The Singapore of his youth—late 1960s into the 1970s—was a country tightening itself into order. Independence was recent. Industrialisation accelerated. Housing blocks rose. Factories multiplied. Discipline, productivity, and survival were the virtues taught openly.

Private life lagged behind.

Parents worked long hours. Oversight thinned. Childhood protection was assumed rather than designed. The language of safeguarding had not yet caught up with the speed of modernisation.

At the same time, a quiet revolution entered homes.

In the mid-1970s, video cassette recorders arrived. First Betamax, then VHS. The format war mattered less than the effect: moving images left cinemas and entered living rooms. Watching no longer required a public space. It required only a machine and a tape.

In Singapore, this coincided with rising wages and consumer aspiration. Industrial progress brought televisions, cassette players, refrigerators—and soon, VCRs. What had once been regulated by theatres became unregulated behind curtains.

An underground economy flourished.

Ports are thresholds. Sembawang shipyard brought sailors from elsewhere—men who stayed briefly, spent freely, and carried objects from worlds less supervised than Singapore’s emerging state. Alongside cigarettes and liquor came videotapes.

X-rated films.

They were traded quietly. Hand to hand. Copied, redubbed, resold. Machines hummed late into the night. Profit was quick. Oversight was minimal.

Loon’s uncle saw opportunity.

The process felt technical, neutral—work. Tapes spun. Images repeated. Loon helped because help was needed, and because helping meant belonging. No one thought to ask what the images did to him. No one imagined that what entered the eyes might rewire the body.

Some tapes were pornography—already too much, too early. Desire arrived without containment. Intensity without meaning. The body learned arousal before it learned boundaries.

But some tapes belonged to a darker category.

They were whispered about as snuff films—alleged recordings of real violence, circulated as proof, not fiction. Whether widespread or partly mythologised mattered less than belief. Exploitation cinema of the 1970s thrived on claims of authenticity: real, forbidden, uncut. Rumours travelled faster than facts.

For adults, this was transgression.
For children, it was terror without explanation.

Loon saw things no child should see. Not always clearly, not always fully—but enough. Enough to learn that cruelty could be casual, recorded, replayed. Enough to understand that the world was not merely indifferent, but sometimes predatory.

This was not a single trauma. It was ambient trauma.

The body learned early that safety was provisional. That vigilance mattered. That intensity was normal. Fear and arousal braided together before language could separate them. Sleep shortened. Stress became baseline.

Years later, something else arrived.

Writing.

Writing did not demand his body. It demanded attention. Precision. Care. His short texts illuminated rather than overwhelmed. They did not shout. They paused. They allowed space for the reader to arrive on their own terms.

This was how I met him.

Not through institutions. Not through necessity. But through sharing.

On Facebook, I was posting watercolours—one each day. Nature, light, wind, moments caught before they settled. I wrote alongside the images, not explanations, but attentions: what the air felt like, how light moved, how time briefly aligned.

Loon responded with words.

Short texts. Illuminating fragments. Sentences that did not claim authority, only presence. His writing and my painting began to echo each other—image and language circling the same stillness from different sides.

We met.

Not ceremonially. Just two men recognising something familiar in each other’s work.

He bought one of my paintings.

It was from Fort Canning Park. A piece that captured the wind just before rain arrived—the swirl, the pressure, the invisible force made visible. One of my finest works. Not dramatic, but exact. The moment before weather declares itself.

He took it home.

Later, I helped him publish his writing. Nothing grand. A simple book. Clean. Honest. Words allowed to stand without ornament. For him, this mattered more than acclaim. It meant coherence. Proof that his inner clarity could exist outside his body.

Then the stroke came.

Half his body fell quiet.

The devastation was not only physical. It was existential. The body, long overdriven, finally set a boundary. In his private reasoning, it made sense: too much sex, too much stress, too little sleep. Essence depleted. Systems overloaded.

After that, everything became transition.

He tried to work. Could not persist. Each attempt cost dignity. Driving a taxi restored motion without exposure—a tolerable compromise. He navigated the city silently, delivering others while carrying his own unfinished story.

When the car was taken back, the last workable identity collapsed.

Rehabilitation followed.

Institutions are places of suspension. Progress is measured. Meaning is deferred. Identity waits while the body relearns basics.

Contact faded.

Not out of bitterness.
Not out of rejection.

But because he had been overexposed too early, overdriven too long, and now lived in a body that could no longer sustain the pace demanded by the world.

This is what it means to be lost in transition.

Not lost to death.
Not lost to madness.

Lost to legibility.

Yet something remains.

A book on a shelf.
A painting holding wind before rain.
A memory of words exchanged without urgency.

I can't save him.
I can't fix him.

But I met him—at the right altitude, for a brief stretch of the journey.

And sometimes, that is all that continuity requires:
that a life, even one that later fades, was once fully seen.