Here's yet another piece set in the Haze era, but it's about limestone instead.

--

We were riding north on the Plus Highway, a unique arterial road that cleaves the peninsula in two. That time, the entire west coast was blanketed in a great cloud of ash. Horizons vanished and the landscape was a blank slate, so we crawled along with our headlights in murky day. Slowly, the giant silhouettes of the hunched limestone hills emerged in the distance. One by one, they loomed over us, until we saw Batu Gajah itself, the elephant rock, with its jagged shadows and clinging vegetation.

--

I was taken into your cavernous hollow

of slow spikes and shifting cavities,

I skipped playfully across your dark streams,

and listened to the droplets falling into pools.

My fingers dried up as I ran them across

your walls of chalk, yellowed with touch

The words of love etched in. It is chalk

that glows in this strange cathedral. Pillars of chalk

that line the highways like sentinels. Chalk

that crumbles into scrawled words in the

classroom. A smear at the end. My hand on your desk.