The last words he said to you as he stepped off the train were, “Text me.” And you have revisited that moment so many times since that afternoon, wishing you had stepped off the train too and said to him like a cool woman, “When you say, text me, do you mean goodbye? Then say what you mean, okay, and kiss me goodbye.”
But you are not cool, you are just crazy. You texted him, though you said you wouldn’t, then you had the longest two weeks of your life waiting for him to text you again. (He said he would be busy “these two weeks”, another of his roundabout goodbyes.) Then you wrote him a long letter, your rationale being: He started a fire, why should you spare him the smoke? (Listen to yourself. You talk like you are an avenging haze from Indonesia.)
You have stopped saying to your friends you are over him because you can’t seem to stay over him. You live in a dreamland with tarot as your new friend because who else can you trouble with impossible questions like: Did he read the letter? Will you see him again? (You did go to the Guanyin temple to get a divination but why did she say you were “carrying a ferocious tiger and climbing a steep mountain”? What did she mean exactly? But you couldn’t bring yourself to bother her again with your sesame-size crisis when so many other living beings need her.)
And so you wait on and on and on… Some days you are alone yet strong in your certainty that your encounter wasn’t random, that you will see him again. Other days you are alone and anxious…
Sunday, August 25, 2013
ORANGE JUICE | Four
In my 20s I was actively looking for love – promiscuously chatting on IRC on a computer I fought over with my brothers, the one and only computer we had – and I found disaster. That might have been why I blotted it out later, the fact that you have to go and look for love, that it won’t come and find you. That might have been why I stopped looking.
But around Chinese New Year, going on a junket to Seoul again, it all came back to me. My first South Korea junket had been eight years ago, one day after I became single. Because it was too soon to speak of the break-up I didn’t; I passed the trip working, shopping and hearing E speak of her Korean guy. Only on the second Seoul junket four years later did I tell her. This year, on the way there with her again, I realised South Korea had become a bookmark in the blank notebook that was my love life, an eight-year blank, before she even asked me to update her.
I realised I hadn’t been doing enough about it, not as much as I had the last time. Signing up for OKCupid and Match.com and deleting messages from men wasn’t enough. I would have to get out and go out with some of them, which I resolved to do the morning I woke up in Seoul and found a blanket of snow outside the window, a landscape of hope.
Dating got quickly disheartening, though. Two promising guys – sporty, articulate Chinese Singaporeans, the sort who never ever asked me out at school – had written me before I went to Seoul and after I came back I asked to meet them. One of them was keener and we pencilled in a date. Then he said he would have sex with me in front of my family and that was the end of the discussion. The other kept saying he would meet me and that was all he was, talk.
The first guy I eventually met, a Taurean, was into sex or talking about it. By way of flirtation, he regaled me with his sexual history, proposed an open marriage and repeated a Russell Peters joke about overstretched sweaters and vaginas. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t offended but he just wasn’t funny. Like, if I were to tell a woman a vagina joke 10 minutes into a first date, I would blow her away with my timing. (As I told Ms S about the date later she named the guy before I could repeat the whole joke. She also told me he had been named in an underage-sex case.)
The second guy, a Scorpian, was into cycling and sailing. He was sweet but I was bored.
The third guy, a Libran, I never intended to meet. Young, foreign, hot, he didn’t seem suitable. If I met him, I figured, it would be a break from the business of meeting potential marriage partners; a date with him would be a holiday from my life. But I didn’t say yes. A fourth guy wrote me, who was in Britain but would soon move to Singapore. A fifth guy asked to meet me at the weekend but stopped writing me one day before the weekend. Updating S on how I had been left high and dry, I said, “Then there’s a Libran but he’s 28.” And she said, “What’s wrong with 28?” And she had a point and still, I didn’t take him seriously.
But then I thought I would meet him at the weekend and not take him seriously and that was my mistake. Because when I met him I wanted to take him seriously. In the two minutes I walked with him from the train station to his place, I knew I had strolled into a holiday I didn’t want to end. But how could he take me seriously then, when I had sent him a “hey what r u doing today” message that sounded like a booty call, when he asked to meet me at his place and I didn’t say no?
Once I was young and stupid. Now I’m just stupid.
But around Chinese New Year, going on a junket to Seoul again, it all came back to me. My first South Korea junket had been eight years ago, one day after I became single. Because it was too soon to speak of the break-up I didn’t; I passed the trip working, shopping and hearing E speak of her Korean guy. Only on the second Seoul junket four years later did I tell her. This year, on the way there with her again, I realised South Korea had become a bookmark in the blank notebook that was my love life, an eight-year blank, before she even asked me to update her.
I realised I hadn’t been doing enough about it, not as much as I had the last time. Signing up for OKCupid and Match.com and deleting messages from men wasn’t enough. I would have to get out and go out with some of them, which I resolved to do the morning I woke up in Seoul and found a blanket of snow outside the window, a landscape of hope.
Dating got quickly disheartening, though. Two promising guys – sporty, articulate Chinese Singaporeans, the sort who never ever asked me out at school – had written me before I went to Seoul and after I came back I asked to meet them. One of them was keener and we pencilled in a date. Then he said he would have sex with me in front of my family and that was the end of the discussion. The other kept saying he would meet me and that was all he was, talk.
The first guy I eventually met, a Taurean, was into sex or talking about it. By way of flirtation, he regaled me with his sexual history, proposed an open marriage and repeated a Russell Peters joke about overstretched sweaters and vaginas. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t offended but he just wasn’t funny. Like, if I were to tell a woman a vagina joke 10 minutes into a first date, I would blow her away with my timing. (As I told Ms S about the date later she named the guy before I could repeat the whole joke. She also told me he had been named in an underage-sex case.)
The second guy, a Scorpian, was into cycling and sailing. He was sweet but I was bored.
The third guy, a Libran, I never intended to meet. Young, foreign, hot, he didn’t seem suitable. If I met him, I figured, it would be a break from the business of meeting potential marriage partners; a date with him would be a holiday from my life. But I didn’t say yes. A fourth guy wrote me, who was in Britain but would soon move to Singapore. A fifth guy asked to meet me at the weekend but stopped writing me one day before the weekend. Updating S on how I had been left high and dry, I said, “Then there’s a Libran but he’s 28.” And she said, “What’s wrong with 28?” And she had a point and still, I didn’t take him seriously.
But then I thought I would meet him at the weekend and not take him seriously and that was my mistake. Because when I met him I wanted to take him seriously. In the two minutes I walked with him from the train station to his place, I knew I had strolled into a holiday I didn’t want to end. But how could he take me seriously then, when I had sent him a “hey what r u doing today” message that sounded like a booty call, when he asked to meet me at his place and I didn’t say no?
Once I was young and stupid. Now I’m just stupid.
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