Pandemic 2020

 It’s Friday night and we’re at home on the couch. Radiohead is playing in the background and we sit under nanoleaf lights emanating a dull yellow hue, slowly oscillating in brightness like embers of dying flame. 

We sit perpendicular to each other, his head resting on my shoulder. Both of us are on our phones; I’m reading a long article about the rise and downfall Silk Road and he’s surfing Reddit. Occasionally I look up from my phone and laugh at something I catch sight of on his screen, and it is in one of these moments that I realize that life is really, really good. 

Why did she break up with you?

I don't really know, I guess she didn't know what she wanted, and she wanted to know what it was like to be single...

What did you want?

Her time...to be closer to her.

ENTP & ISTJ

I had envisioned a wonderful future with the ENTP. Our first meeting was initially slightly disappointing, but our conversation gave us a glimpse of how much alike we were, and that was incredibly exciting; his strengths were mine, his weaknesses were also mine. Perhaps he was a little more extroverted and more manual, but we still felt like kindred spirits. He mentioned that an ISTP would make a good pairing with an ENTP, to which I dismissed the idea by saying an N-S would never enjoy the connection of an N-N couple. We spent two weeks exchanging a flurry of texts, coffee breaks that lasted way too long, squeezing drinks with him into my December schedule (if only he knew how special of an act that was) - the way he would pull my coat's hood over my eyes and kiss me, his enthusiasm for taking our conversation in any direction but the current (and maybe a tinge too much of self-talk) - our time together was as bright as it was brief, and after the fizzle I'm left in the dark wondering what to do with myself.

The ISTJ was so gorgeous I didn't actually believe we'd go out on a date, let alone more. It felt rather amusing to not be the pretty one of the pair and to get cut-eye from gay men. He was courteous, straightforward, extremely attentive to my physical needs - he paid for every meal, every cab ride, every drink - it's hard to remember the last time I felt so well taken care of (probably the last ISTJ). Conversation with him however felt a bit interrogative at times (he wanted to absorb every detail) and I started to worry about how challenging it could be for us to remember to accept our differences, especially after a long day at work. Having thought I had him all figured out, he surprised me with a spontaneous comedy bar invitation, a questionable midnight gym session invite, an adorable late night offering of fruit - getting to know each other has been a slow-burning, yet lasting process. After two dates, we established friendship; but yesterday when he coaxed me into our second gym date in a row, his steady gaze on me with those light blue eyes - the same look in that diner at 3am after a night of dancing, as he observed me eat my chicken alfredo - I wondered if it really was just that.

Please tell me that the night is darkest before dawn.

Please tell me you're still around, and that you still hear me.

Please tell me that the night is darkest before dawn.

She died on my birthday.

My mother said that maybe she and I were connected.

My mind can't remember much -  a few memories - it wasn't as if we talked about our hopes and fears (all she ever asked me was pretty much if I wanted to eat), but it's almost as if my body remembers all those times she bathed my infant body, the birthday cake she fed me as breakfast for weeks on end (she couldn't let food go to waste) until I got sick of it, the wad of money she tried to slip in my hand as a send-off to university, so I end up in sudden fits of tears, gasping, my emotions heaving themselves to the surface, but I can't quite comprehend why. It's almost like a gut reaction.

Cachinga.

This week was a combination of getting my period, being sick, and getting dumped (after approximately three weeks of seeing each other) by some jerk via text. Well ok, after a bit of reflection I realize I can't quite consider myself the benchmark of saintliness, having casually dated three other guys while seeing him (oops) and then visiting my ex while I was out of town (double oops), amongst other misdeeds. If anything, I probably win the asshole race by a mile. But amidst the mess, I couldn't stop myself from having the tiniest bit of hope that we would be together. And when I saw what he wrote to me, I ran for the covers, curled up, and cried a little. Oh, hormones.

And he wasn't a jerk. He was just weak of mind, texting a girl supposedly scant in emotion.

ISTP after all.

I met his aunts; his family, the people that were important to him. By chance I had opened the door and they were there, and they were happy to have met the girl in his life. He had a party in his (and his roommate's) house that night, and when we had the room to ourselves, we cuddled. It was as if all the sensuality in the world resided in the bed we lay on, and we were enveloped in it.

When I woke up, I was back in the world where our lives no longer intersect.

I cared deeply for him, and I know his affection for me was genuine, but at the same time I couldn't be with someone who found it so easy to isolate himself from the world, isolating himself from me, and who ran for the hills at the first hint of commitment.

20150214

Dear god,

It's exactly 9.30pm. He has two and a half hours to write to me, my last ultimatum before I give up on all the effort I've invested in trying to make things work. If he doesn't write to me today, and if he's gone online, that's it. He's already fulfilled the second condition. I'm just waiting on number one.

Maybe this is a learning experience from you to me. If so, I'll embrace it. I'm not afraid anymore. I've already cried in bed once, thinking everything was over. I can do it again and then never look back. I deserve better.







He replied at 10. Why have you introduced him into my life? His presence pries open the cracks of my inhibitions. Do I follow him into ether or is this a test of resolution against whispering temptations?

Dreams.

I was running at night, running with someone, but I can't remember who. At one point I was on a bus with my brother, and in an unfamiliar city with a group of friends, but that was before this. Here I was, running along a straight and narrow and moderately lit dirt path, both sides veering down into the darkness, and I suddenly look down and realize I am looking at my bare feet. I must've forgotten my shoes somewhere. A while back, the road was muddy, and we had to slow down and job with a little more care. Maybe it was there I took my shoes off? Maybe I took them off passing through a gym. I remember the gym was very nice with foam floors. I told my friend that I would catch up with her later, and began to retrace my steps.

Running alone, everything was so quiet now, so late at night, I was adjusting to this solo journey that I suddenly had to embark on. I didn't even know how far I have to go to find my shoes, I had no recollection of taking them off. The uncertainty made me feel a bit afraid. I kept running, eyes alert and on the lookout.

Running alone, I stared off into the darkness, then stared in front of the long path - there was a tractor working late at night, kicking up dust. I closed my eyes and held my breath.

Suddenly I looked down, and I was wearing shoes. A pair of dusty, but still white, running shoes.

ISFJ.

Our first date and he made my head spin. I couldn't think straight for an entire week, such was the degree of my infatuation. He confused me with his lack of initiation, I felt like I always had to push to get him to set dates. Maybe he wasn't that into me? Maybe all that sweet talking was shared between me and every other girl he could find? And then just when my heart and I would close up a bit, just when we'd finish a crying session in bed on a Friday night, he'd draw us out with his wonderful acts of care: making me breakfast tray of PB and honey sandwich, cut up apples, and lemonade at 5am - I told him I couldn't sleep because I was hungry, filling up my near-empty soap dispenser with water and shaking it, purposely losing in billiards (something he was really good at) like a gentleman, grinning at me from across the table because I knew he was doing it on purpose.

Slowly I realized he acted that way because he was shy. So I opened my heart up to him, ready to accept him unconditionally, despite the obvious risk. Soon he was calling me after my texts.

Dreams.

I dreamt of a man last night. I didn't know much about him (quite mysterious, this one), except that he seemed really wealthy and influential. He seemed like someone calm and reserved, not expressive in his emotions. He was always dressed in a suit every time I saw him, but maybe it's the type of events we find ourselves in. Never alone, he seemed to always be accompanied by another suit. Colleague, or bodyguard perhaps.

I expressed my love for Japanese food and we made plans for a lunch date. He alluded to some Japanese restaurant, the kind that looks like a geisha house with zen gardens and ikebana out in the reception. The expensive kind. I was working that day but I made sure I had at least an hour to spare. That morning, he suggested that I should take the afternoon off, because we were flying to Japan for lunch.

Perspective.

I recently read about the definition of feeling lonely vs. feeling alone. One is a state of mind, the other is a state of being. I found this observation really interesting, that and how feeling alone is apparently seen in a positive light, because it somehow implies being comfortable with oneself. I was inclined to list myself in the second category at first, but I guess I am in both? I truly enjoy my own company, yet from time to time a feeling of loneliness creeps in. Perhaps it's the result of a diet change, I get rather blue when I try to control my food. Or maybe it's the weird way in which INFPs function; we love people but yet they exhaust us after a while. 

The Arranged Marriage That Ended Happily Ever After: How My Parents Fell In Love, 30 Years Later - by Mira Jacob

There are things you tell yourself when you realize your parents are not in love. Love probably isn’t necessary past a certain age. Maybe the way your mother and father go about their daily routines like professional ice-skaters—a careful distance always held between them—is what real love looks like. Whose parents are really in love, anyway?

Growing up in New Mexico in the 1980s, I took it for granted that my parents’ marriage, which was arranged by their families in India in 1968, would last forever. True, it lacked the palpable electricity I saw between some American couples, but so what? Who said all that hugging and kissing was a good thing? Too many of my friends’ once-­affectionate parents were splitting up. My parents, in contrast, were remarkably solid, a well-thought-through match of religion, goals, and socioeconomic standing, clearly in it for the long haul. 

“The problem with the Americans is that they get so wrapped up in this who-I-chose business,” my father, a surgeon and regular confidant of the OR nurses, told me when I was thirteen. “They will say, ‘He has changed’ or ‘She isn’t who I married.’ Indians never say that. We have no idea who we married!”  

His logic was simple: When you don’t have passionate feelings to glaze over your partner’s flaws in early marriage, you are less likely to be undone by inevitable disappointments later on. True, I’d never seen my parents look dreamily at each other, but I’d also never heard them threaten divorce. 

It was a karmic trade-off that I planned to make myself someday. Never mind my habit of falling for brooding musicians. Whenever I imagined the future, I saw myself in a version of my parents’ marriage—tied to someone I loved an acceptable-but-not-overwhelming amount, heat and heartbreak nowhere in sight. 

By my mid-20s, I was well on my way, living in New York and dating a very lovely young man. We were kind and careful with each other in a way that felt grown up, if all too familiar. While we were still too young to discuss things like getting married without being tipsy or ironic, it seemed to be the end goal we were moving inevitably toward, like groceries down a conveyor belt. Then I went home to see my parents for a long weekend, and everything changed. 

I was 24, and deeply absorbed in my own dramas. I barely noticed how close my mother was sitting to my father at dinner at our favorite restaurant. They watched me with giddy smiles. Poor parents, I thought. So lonely when I’m not here. Then I saw them playing footsie under the table. 

That night, after we’d all gone to sleep, I woke up to the sound of them laughing. “You!” my mother squealed. “No, you!” my father insisted. I’d never heard them speak that way to each other in my life. Were they . . . flirting? The next morning, just as I was beginning to think it had all been a strange dream, I walked into the kitchen, and my parents sprang to opposite corners, blushing. 

Something was definitely up. I called my brother, Arun, in a panic. Four years older than me and deeply in love with an Indian woman, he was the closest thing we had to a relationship expert in our family. “None of that is happening,” my brother replied calmly from Seattle. “You’ve lost your mind.” His voice was full of the kind of conviction I’d had myself just days before—a certainty about who our parents were and what they were capable of. 

“Come home!” I said. “You’ll see!”

Arun was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Are you sure?” his voice edged with wonder, and we were young suddenly, younger than we had been in years, punted back to a time when our parents were larger than we could imagine, their actions mysteries that could change the course of our entire lives. Forget that we were grown-ups ourselves, that our lives were being lived elsewhere. This felt seismic, a shift so big it threatened to alter the way we looked at everything.
The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The television was on in our living room. In front of it, my father sat on the couch, my mother cradled in his arms. She was fast asleep, her cheek pressed to his chest. 

I went inside. Though I hardly made a sound, my mother woke up. She blinked quietly, than sprang up with the realization that I was there. “I was asleep!” she said, as if I’d accused her of something. Then she got up and took herself to bed, disappearing down the hallway. My father gave me a funny grin and followed her. I stood alone in front of the television clutching my heart, which I suddenly realized was not a mere figure of speech.

Flying back to New York, I could not stop thinking one thing: Why now? Why this sudden attraction to someone who had been there the whole time? Sure, it’s a plot staple in American movies, where clumsy, high-cheekboned beauties regularly realize their “best friend” just happens to be Justin Timberlake, but in real life? In real life, my parents had bypassed that kind of irresistible attraction with almost three decades of houses, children, and pets. In real life, their marriage had proved to be a patchwork of incongruities, the kind that were bound to exist between a cosmopolitan girl from Bombay and a small-town boy from outside Madras.

If on the surface they had been well matched, temperamentally they couldn’t have been more different. My father was mercurial, charming, intuitive, a man who liked to say “I am not sentimental” and then cry during commercials. He moved through the world with open arms, and for good reason: He demanded love and gave it easily.

Not true of my mother. I don’t mean to make her sound cold or cruel. She’s the opposite: bright, engaging, and quick to laugh, a connoisseur of politics and gossip. But she doesn’t tolerate emotional scenes easily. When I was young, her deep reserve left me frustrated, and, as I grew older, occasionally furious. Later, once I realized she couldn’t help it, it just made me sad. I worried for her and for my father, who sometimes seemed to want more of a connection than she could offer.
“Who knows what goes on inside her?” he had said once after a movie left him teary-eyed and her shrugging, and though we all laughed at the time, there was a dart behind his words. My mother kept a wall up that no one could scale.

Until, of course, my father did. Somehow he had made it inside, past my mother’s carefully erected boundaries, past the cool remove, and in response, my mother loved him for it. And now, because of that, I knew what real love looked like. I also knew something else. 

You are not in love like that, I thought as the plane touched down at Kennedy airport.

It took me a few months to break up with my boyfriend. I won’t pretend that I handled things between us wisely or well. I could barely put together coherent sentences, much less make sense of the fact that I was acting on a vague hunch that even though we were pretty good together, we weren’t great. It was an uneasy decision, one made more difficult by the fact that when I next visited home six months later, what I saw wasn’t exactly inspiring. 

My parents had gotten to the sticky, vulnerable part of being in love. If my earlier visit back had caught them in the first flush of romance, this time I saw them in the middle of an awkward, transitional stage. Gone were the asymmetrical fights of my childhood, the shrugs of indifference, the wide berths, the gliding quietly to other rooms to regroup if anything got too intense. 

My parents were now brazenly close. They laughed a lot, but they also fought bitterly, sometimes bringing each other to tears, then promptly fumbling their way back to normal without apology or explanation because neither of them needed to be right as much as they needed to be together. Even mundane activities that were once simple—like going to parties, where they used to arrive in separate cars and leave at different times—became minefields of logistics and expectations. They wrestled over whose car to take, what time to go, how long to stay. It was as if, in deciding to be together, they had turned into one animal with two separate heads, each with distinct ideas about how to move through the world. Watching them became an exercise in worrying.

I couldn’t help thinking that things would end badly. Pessimistic, yes, but when you’ve grown up with the idea that Indian love leads to a rational, calm, reliable marriage and American love leads to a passionate, fragile marriage, then the fact that your Indian parents have fallen in American love is not good. I imagined the worst, thinking I could prepare for it. Maybe someone would cheat, or lie, or double-mortgage the house to pay off a hidden gambling debt. I wasn’t sure exactly how my parents would break each other’s hearts, but I was on the lookout. 
And then something happened that made me forget about my parents altogether: I fell in love. It happened quickly and without warning, the way flash floods hit the desert. Jed was a documentary filmmaker, a talker, a guy from back home, as it happened, and a person I could not remain coolly detached from, even though I tried pretty hard those first few months. It was one thing to want what my parents had, and another to actually try to get it. Pretty soon Jed and I started traveling together, then living together, then learning how to do things like run errands and cook meals together. Sometimes at night I would wake up and watch him, equally thrilled and unnerved by how much he was starting to matter to me. 

But being close to Jed didn’t come easily. As a person who had long ago decided that sleeping with someone automatically precluded showing them my flaws, I found vulnerability desperately uncomfortable. I’d take any issues or anxieties I had to my brother, or my close friends, or even strangers in bars before I would take them to Jed, something he picked up on quickly. 

“Have you ever noticed that you only tell me things once you’ve figured them out with someone else?” he asked one afternoon. “It’s like you only want me to see the cleaned-up version of you.” I smiled and shrugged, a fight-avoidance tactic that had worked well with my previous boyfriend. Jed frowned. 

“It’s weird,” he said.

“You don’t get to be everything to me,” I said, escalating the conversation into a fight so quickly that I thought to myself triumphantly that there was nothing for him to do but back down or break up. “Maybe find someone else if that’s the kind of woman you need.”

Before I knew what was happening, we went at it, exaggerating every slight misunderstanding we’d had over the last few months. He said I was pushing him away. I said he was being too possessive. Just as things started to get really heated, Jed stood up and sang, “You’re trying to stop yourself from loving me, but it’s not going to work.”

I stared at him like he had grown gills. He kept singing. He was just a normal guy who wanted normal things, he sang. I was a mostly normal girl who didn’t know how to let things be real. 

Was it uncomfortable being sung the subtext of the undoing of every romantic relationship I’d ever been in? Yes. But in that strange way that you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it, I also knew he was giving me what I wanted most—a way to get over myself and start loving big.

Three years into our relationship, Jed went to shoot a film about political dissent in Nigeria. We had made arrangements to talk every couple of days, so I didn’t panic with the first missed phone call, but as three days stretched into four, I went into a sleepless frenzy. I knew there were plenty of reasons this might have happened (bad phone connections, long working hours), but another part of me feared the worst. I wandered through our apartment alone and found things to organize—bathroom drawers, spice cabinets. On the fifth day, I put on the last T-shirt he had worn and lay in bed all day, terrified. When he finally called that night, a short call full of echoes and blips, I started crying. He assured me he was OK, and I assured him I was, too, but afterward, I still couldn’t sleep. There was no undoing this kind of love, I realized, or the complications that came with it. Even after he returned ten days later and I had him right next to me, I remained uneasy. From that moment on, I understood that whatever happened to him would happen to me, too.

Six months later, we got married. By then I knew that committing to each other would not mean that I never felt scared again, or even that I was permanently safe from heartbreak. But it would mean that for as long as we were together, I would be part of something larger than myself. And I felt thankful then—truly thankful that my parents had found each other, and given me a different idea of what marriage could be, after nearly 30 years of living coolly side by side.

For the past eight years, I had blamed myself for my failure in university. Today, this article changed it all for me. The only thing I failed at was continuing to believe in myself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes

I believe everything happens for a reason, everything presents itself for a reason. To all those to say we subconsciously go looking for signs, this article was on the front page of the NY Times.

Windows.

Where do I even begin.

Sunday night I sat in his bed, wrapped in the comfort of darkness, my face illuminated by my iPad as I tried to pen down my entire weekend. He was outside watching Game of Thrones. His son was asleep in the adjacent room. I had told him I was going to sleep, but really I just needed some time alone, some time to herd my thoughts back towards me because I was already starting to feel like I was grasping at the strings of escaping balloons.

He had brought me here, against his will, because I had delivered an ultimatum unto him one afternoon in early March, premeditating my plan as I was walking to see him, to get him to commit to some form of action behind his words. What did he take me for, a fool?

"Are you ready? For my life? My family? My friends?" 
"That was the plan wasn't it? Are you ready?"

His talents and weaknesses both revolve around people. He watches them at his vision's periphery, and at the right moment, he pounces; less with the predatory grace of a feline but more the flailing clumsiness of a canine - finding a way to connect with them by putting his nose to their warm spots, their humanity, carving a place for himself in their hearts. Sometimes he then controls them by telling them what to do, yet sometimes he submits himself to their control, and then he proceeds to let them ruin his entire day. Perhaps he hasn't found a way to step back and regard his technique in its entirety, harnessing it, controlling it, refining it. It is behind this glass window I stand, observing him with my head tilted, noting to myself what he does so naturally.

And so it was Friday night I found myself in front of his apartment, wondering what being stuck with him for the next three nights would be like. I hadn't even wanted to come, envisioning an utterly shit weekend, but I thought I'd incur a more furious wrath if I chose to not show up.

The weather for the entire weekend had enough rain and cold winds to dampen even the hardiest of tourists. I wandered around Manhattan, after visiting a friend and his family in Brooklyn, a quick lunch in Chelsea Market before walking the length of the High Line in the pouring rain, picturing a sunnier day where those who worked at Gucci and Valentino and galleries would spend their lunch hours lying on deck chairs overlooking the Hudson.

Sunday I spent in an existentialist depression. A general bleakness hung in the air, suffused with gray from what seemed like eternally dusk skies. I was overwhelmed by the fact that he immersed me in so deeply into his life, having heard his conversations with his sister, mother (he dominates the conversations by telling them what he thinks they should do - just like with me), talking to his cousin, meeting his ex-wife, playing with his son. I read the titles of every single book he owned, ate some mashed pumpkin leftovers from his fridge, drank his espresso, found all the red accents he decorated his home with, the lack of photos of his friends (only his son), paintings, drawings, sculptures, his collection of shoes, his selection of sensitive scalp shampoos, his bathroom cabinet (the holy grail of private space!), his wallet while he was in the shower (oops, have I said too much - once, in a drunken haze, I told a stranger that a wallet is the most intimate part of a person - a story to save for next time) his cleaning habits, his weed habit, his sleeping habits, his snoring habits - perhaps this last one can't be called a habit - if only it was consistent! Argh. It was fascinating, yet it took considerable effort to steady the volume of information that was coming my way. In short, after a while, I desperately yearned for the familiar textures of my bed sheets.

Sunday I sat against a wall, defeated, exhaling, surrendering to letting this mist seep slowly through the pores of my skin and into my body, soiling my insides, and he, being the extrovert, fed off of my tainted mood, and together, we lay in his bed, soaking in the futility of it all, sharing that faraway look, standing behind each of our respective windows, gazing at time's effect on ourselves. When I looked at him I felt the desolation one feels when one is racing to the end of life (do you want to win this race?), the broken family environment, pasta for an entire week, consumerism, empty interactions, insubstantial frivolities, materialistic gifts for children who have yet to learn materialism, over investing to compensate for imbalances, the stress to perform when every one of your peers is as hungry as you, hungry for power, hungry for the money that comes with the power, for the money you've traded your health with, only for you to inject this money back into the economy in trying to get your health back, or even worse, a toy-of-the-moment. Maybe we should stop calculating consumer goods in dollars, maybe the new currency should be in tumors.

In New York, one's feet must hurt from being on one's toes all the time. One's voice must be hoarse from trying to shout over the deafening cacophony of everyone else's conversations. One's face must be wrinkled from straining to smile for everyone but oneself.   

Getting up to go to the bathroom after surfing on my iPad whilst waiting for him to finish his homework: "You have a weird way of walking. You see, this is your feet! *gestures with hands* And when you stand, you should be like this, shoulders out."

On flirting with our Italian waitress who turned out not to be a lesbian: "You see, she is gay! Look at how she moves, she is like a man!"
"Wow you must have a great gaydar."
"I know these things."

As she approached again:
"Where is your girlfriend"
"What! I am not gay. But I would like to be with a girl someday..."
To which he then gestures to me. I instinctively let out an eye roll.

While he was on a washroom break, she came to talk to me. Sensing she was more comfortable with me than with his distinctly forward manner, I apologized on behalf of him. "I'm sorry for my friend here - when he has an idea he needs to tell the world. "

"I could have slept with three different people tonight. But I didn't. I don't do this anymore."

"I went out with an African American model last year. She was a model, an ex-model, she was a bit, you know, bigger. On my birthday we all went out, I was talking to this woman and she got incredibly jealous. She had bought these cupcakes for me, and she just started eating them. She ate five in a row! I told her her it was disgusting - her behavior, I mean, come on, five cupcakes? We broke up on my birthday."

"I liked sports, but I was never good at any sport. I did a lot of cycling though."

On his ex-wife:
"She cares a lot who in my life I introduce [my son] to. But she was the one who left me! When she left me I was devastated."
"What happened?"
"I cheated. I was a bad boy."
"Did she find out?"
"She suspected."

"My day is ruined - the friends I was with this afternoon - this woman, the wife of my friend - very beautiful, very gorgeous....she called me a sexist."

"Another woman there, also very beautiful, her husband is very jealous - he thinks we are having an affair but there is nothing between us. When I commented his daughter had beautiful eyes, he said, my daughter or my wife?"

"I lost my friend because of a girl from LA, this bitch. These Asian girls from LA, they are the worst, like Persian girls there. She messaged me, and I asked her out for drinks. She kept hesitating, but I kept trying to get her to meet with me. I wasn't sure if she was with my friend or not. Then she showed my messages to my friend. It's been two years since we spoke."

"My best friend - no, my second best friend is in town right now. I might meet him on Monday. He took his father's two million and turned it into five million."

On the topic of love, I asked:
"Have you ever been in love?"
"I've been in love a few times"
"When you married your ex-wife, were you in love?"
"Yes - I lost the passion and when I found it again, it was too late...I would like to be with a Spanish girl some day. I was with a Spanish girl once, if I told you her age you would kill me."
"Was she legal?"
"Of course she was legal"
"When did you meet her?"
"Two days after my divorce."

"You have fire but you are lost"
"When you were my age, were you lost?"
He ponders for a moment.
"Yes - but I embraced it. You should embrace it!"

"But you are good - you listen"

"You don't know how to relax"

"You have very little emotions"

"When I look into your eyes I see sadness"

"You are someone who is very tough on herself"

Sunday evening, watching him put together a lego plane for his son:
"Why did you buy my plane ticket?"
"Because you needed to see, you needed to see my life - you ask why I don't call, this is why. And perhaps we can be friends."

"I'm attracted to intelligence - this is why I liked you in the first place. I'm also attracted to strong women."

"Ok, ok, one more stereotype before I am done for the day. You guys are the worst drivers in the world."

Here's to a good memory.

(I should be concentrating on work, but I feel the need to capture this piece of history herstory before too much of the memory slips away.)

When you know a relationship can't be built, sometimes the next best thing you can do is to make it a good memory.

It ended well - he was due to fly back to New York today, and I don’t think we should ever interact again, save for cursory glances across the room at the occasional work party (but I'm sure he'll come up and try to talk to me). My heart doesn't pine for him, only because he never had ownership. I never let her hand go the entire time, as I gently admonished her that she should always be vigilant - be aware of the strangers, not the candy - our ages, family situations, language barriers, my own personal barriers, his own personal barriers. I was enamored by the tales of his life experiences, shocked at his expenditure levels being social classes above mine, intimidated by his brilliance, and frankly quite surprised he paid any so much attention to me in the first place. He, already a very impatient man, went through the month-long courtship exercise (harder when you live in different cities), and then it culminated with incredible frustration at me.

“I thought we could have dinner and get to know each other better”

“All these rules! You don’t act on your passion!”

“We are drinking wine. You impose your rules, I impose mine.”  

“Stop thinking. You’re thinking too much.”

“Life should be simple.”

We share the same core personality, crazy ENFPs as we are, yet from different periods of time and from cultures and backgrounds that made our differences as vast as the oceans that separate our birth countries. I was built to expect a lot more structure and reliability in my life, while he was the most anti-structure/detail person I’ve ever met, and seemed to be accustomed to a lifetime of having his way.

(We arrived at 10.30pm, half an hour late for our dinner reservation which he managed to book on the wrong day, and were told the kitchen was closed)
"Closed?! Well, can't you just open it?"

The city of Toronto has taught me 9.30pm means 9.30pm, there is actually a directional corner to specify when you meet at an intersection, your scheduler is your third arm, itineraries (and reservations where relevant) are to be expected, and thus spontaneity is so rare, because everyone is so efficiently busy all the time.  It’s hard to describe this, perhaps I feel it’s more European of a concept, but he....liberated my mind. He grabbed me by my shoulders, spun me in front of a mirror, and put my hand to feel the cocoon that I had built around myself, the cozy husk of routine and predictable outcomes I had crafted with leftover bandages from torn-apart relationships and disappointments, and a general fear of the unknown, the unexpected. He showed me how I was holding my heart's hand so tightly, constricting her blood flow, that she didn't know how to reach out and feel real emotions anymore. I know him because I know me, and in looking away from the mirror and at him I saw what I could be (perhaps it was what I could have been? Is it too late to change?).

But what happens when you keep acting on your impulses? You accumulate all these experiences and become the most interesting person in the room. Then what? You've shared yourself with so many people, you've spent your life chasing the assortment of brightest objects within your reach, was it all worth it in the end? What happens next?

Our time together (scant as it was - a date in Montreal, a date in Toronto, phone calls, texts, FaceTime) made him caring yet distant, but as a woman with a guarded heart I made sure to have no expectations and appreciated the little things as they came. How he bought me a Michael Kors purse for my birthday, how he called me my love, how love progressed from luv to love, how he kissed me on the forehead before going to sleep, belted out the lyrics of Happy Birthday to me on his way to work Saturday morning, how he would always grab the cheque and point at me and tell the waitress “she’s the client”, to which I’d respond with “Yes, he manages me”, the times he’d say “I’ll call you” and actually call back.

“Just finished” (business dinner)
“Do you want to meet?”

“It’s too cold and I am dead love”

“Ok good – I’ve actually been dead for the last hour haha. Good night then, safe flight”

“Thanks! Good night J”

His goal was to conquer me, and my goal was to make it as hard for him as I possibly could. One might think this to be a conflict of interests, but in practice, ours were very much aligned - victory tastes sweeter the more one feels like one has earned it, right? 

He made me remember a time when indeed, life was simple, I was bold, and I acted according to my heart’s desire, nothing less. I took great strides and leaps of faith because I listened to my own directional compass and societal backlash was far, far behind in the dust of my progress. I was fearless! The unknown was exciting! And more importantly, I was so goddamn carefree and happy. 

Mens sana in corpore sano.

One of the benefits of penning down your feelings, aside from retrospection, is that you always have advice waiting to welcome you with open arms upon your next return visit, which, is usually when you are looking for some direction in the first place.

But now I realize I only the time and heart for people who have the time and heart for kindness, smiles, positivity, coffee with 10% cream, honesty.
These past few days I grew a little. I chose to do the right thing for myself instead of the one that would've been the easy way out. One of those decisions I would've messed up on at a younger age, a year ago even. 

Well, the right thing remains hard to do - it somehow never manages to coincide with the easiest path, and I do wish a lot more people were more honest sometimes. It’s like exercise, you get back what you put in. It can also sour things up really quickly if your actions never sync up to your words. It’s all fun and games till one party feels deceived, and a little disrespected.

These days I’ve been really addicted to kickboxing. What started out as a feeling of dread one evening towards the end of August (one usually feels such when commencing a diet/exercise regimen....again) has turned into making it to the gym 4 times a week and trying really hard to stop myself from continuing at such a pace because of a foot injury and the beginnings of a cold. Who knew. I’ve also started perusing body building sites to get motivation and diet tips, not that I want to enter those competitions, but I’ve reached a level where I can start looking to sculpt certain parts of my body. Again, who knew?

I’m really grateful for the fact that kickboxing has always been there for me whenever I’ve turned to the sport, and has only given me benefits, both mental and physical, that have exceeded my expectations. They say mind over matter, but for me, mens sana in corpore sano – strength in body, clear in mind, lofty in ideals. While the right thing remains hard to do – the new-found discipline instilled in me through kickboxing has managed to keep me on the right path. 

Deja Vu

I had deja vu the moment he told me he might not be able to come to Toronto next week. Je l'ai deja vu dans mon reve. The coffee cup stopped just short of my lips, and my eyes widened a little, startled at the sudden recollection.

Je me souviens

Sometimes, when the noxious fumes of a pestilent week permeate my breathing space, saturating the air, blackening out the sun, and making me a little faint, music pulls me away from the danger like a hero's hand at my waist.

The beginning notes of a good song are the earliest breaths of clean air, the whiff of fresh pastries, the brief but exciting glimmer of infinite possibilities of infinitesimal variations, and alongside, a small reminder that the rays of happiness shone on my face not too long ago.

The hook (at its very best!) is contentment in its atomic form, an appreciation of the beauty in simplicity that is best enjoyed with closed eyes: a warm blanket and a cuppa on the coldest day, the first sip of work-week coffee, the safety-net of those who care, the evening glow of the sun from the passenger seat as a lover drives, sitting on the window-sill in the cover of dusk watching the tiny flickering lights of traffic down below, all the different shades of off-white, the sweet taste of water post-workout, and most importantly, a respite from the objects and events that make me forget all these things.

The best songs inspire me to think of what can, instead of what cannot, as their melodies stir the inner dragon that slumbers in the deep recesses of my mind's corners, flints to its steel scales as an amaranthine fire, once dormant, peeks out through the metal, with each repeat making it successively difficult to quell.

A post-mortem.

 Obliging a request from a friend, we watched 500 Days of Summer the other night. Every time I watch that movie I'm always bequeathed with a different interpretation to Summer and Tom's relationship, a reflection of my current stage of life, a reflection of the new experiences I've accrued since the last viewing. This time I feel like I've reached a deeper level on understanding of Summer's actions, why she does what she does, says what she says, when before she was the conundrum, and I identified more with Tom's plate-breaking trance.

Summer: I just... I just woke up one day and I knew.
Tom: Knew what?
Summer: ...What I was never sure of with you.

 I've started to think of him a lot more often now. But I know I don't miss the relationship, rather the intimacy of it. It was really nice having him as a pillar of strength and consistency where other anchors of my life -  work, school, job interviews, moving apartments, friends, - threaten to pull me down to the seabed and drown me, constantly elbowing each other for my attention. The problem was when he wanted a significant slice of my attention, and in trying to reshuffle my priorities I sadly realized I couldn't give him what he deserved.

 So the last day of my work ended up marking the last day of our relationship. We parted amicably, both agreeing that we tried our darndest to make it work, but there were 'irreconcilable differences'. I've always felt he loved me more than I loved him, and so I was unsure of the authenticity of his accord, but when he left I felt pardoned, the remaining slices of pie became fatter and everything was more manageable again.

 I thus began the road of self-rediscovery, filling my days with activities (funnily enough not with people this time - I've become quite the content hermit), redesigning my lifestyle - buying a road bike, taking up jazz dance, looking up design opportunities, feeding the homeless, growing an herb garden, making my own meals, redefining my diet - wild instead of white rice, almond and flax instead of cow's milk. It used to be an alternating cycle of getting tired of dealing/arguing with him, followed by putting on my rose-tinted glasses during alone-time and letting my heart soften again as I start to miss him the intimacy. Rinse, wash, repeat. I checked out his facebook profile out of curiousity last night, and the moment I saw his picture familiar memories came rushing back into my head like a giant wave and I notice my vista had pink edges to it (damnit). I remember Boston, scratching his car, his anger manegement issues, his viewpoint on friends, his viewpoint on acts of kindness, his pessimism, self-deprecation, traditional Asian-mindset, and inability to come up with any alternative to the brute-force method (and getting angry) when it comes to solving problems. And of course, the fact that EVERYTHING is a problem.

 Then I discover the fortress I've imprisoned my emotions in has been quietly crumbling at its turrets, and that I've been holding my breath these past few weeks, putting on a brave front, but then getting into fights with people and subsequently purging them from my life. Some deserved it, but of course there are always grey areas. I've also developed a severe intolerance to vision-without-execution, individuals that tell you they are 'going to make it happen' but do not lift a finger (or spare a thought) to do anything to 'make it happen', except for constantly reminding you that they are, indeed, 'going to make it happen'. I know the type because I am prone to that as well, except that I keep myself in check. If I really want it, I will do whatever it takes, whatever means necessary to carry out my vision. And I will keep quiet about it until I have something significant to share. Call me bitter/pessimistic/pitiful, but at this moment it bugs the shit out of me and I've definitely been lashing out as I see fit.

 Ironically, I'm less in control of my temper and more pessimistic - and it's unsettling me.