Goodbye

Sometimes life snatches the goodbyes –

I found out a friend died and sometime between reading the shock message and getting the shock all I could do was try to remember: When was the last time we talked? When was the last time we said goodbye?

My Japanese friend M was a writer, a fan girl, a believer in writing of the things she was a fan of with an interested, objective understanding. She was 20 years older than me yet younger, bolder. She was interested in things: people, travel, movies, Korean Wave, Bollywood, men… She would say, “That is SO interesting,” and mean it. She had friends who travel not so much to countries as to hotels, who explore not so much the world as deluxe Shangri-La bubbles in distant realms. She would say, “Don’t be like them.” She was never like them. She stayed curious about things, from Tony Leung’s wedding to the effect of cross-strait flights on Chinese-Taiwanese extramarital love to HDB heartland malls.

She was going to come to Singapore next month. Her last e-mails to me were about the trip. My last e-mails to her were about Jane Juska, the divorced schoolteacher who wanted a sex life at age 66, got it and wrote of it in A Round-Heeled Woman. I said I would send her a copy of Ms Juska’s new Vogue column on being a mistress at age 75. I haven’t had a chance to and won’t now –