Category Archives: Love

Love

August 18

Something had been gnawing at me all day, but it was only in the evening when daylight had gone and everything had turned to sands of dusk that it hit me. It was August 18. The day I met L seven years ago. Has it been seven years already? How did seven years go by so quickly?

Then at that point, a wave of sadness came over me and seemed to engulf me and break my current consciousness. All of a sudden, I realized what had happened. Something that had been my life had died – in the way someone had a sudden heart attack and disappears from your life, your reality. And it seemed to have happened in a flash over the last couple of months.

I had been anticipating this moment of realization. When I wrote my post “Breaking Up” in June, it had struck me how removed I was from my “former” life, as if it had all been a dream that was somehow banished into a storage area of my heart and mind. But with the end of everything comes the need to grieve, to mourn the loss of all the hours, minutes and seconds that were lived and shared and everything in between. Because how else are you able to move forward? Every moment of your life from that point forward would be haunted by the shadows and ghosts of your former life, your routines, motifs and themes that exist in your memory bank. At every instant that you get that feeling of deja vu, like you’re back in that former life, it freaks you out, because you wonder if your present reality is real, if it’s not afterall a temporal state that has usurped the former.

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Love

Sleepless Nights

Seeing him again after all these months remind me of the countless nights I would wake up in the stifling darkness of the bedroom, hyperventilating, with a deep, desperate urge to fill my emotional hollowness, to purge the toxins that were lining the walls of that emptiness. I would start up, carefully turn the door knob and walk to the living room, sit on the dark brown leather sofa in the middle of the expanse of the room and look into space. After a while, I would slowly break out in desperate sobs, trying to catch each breath and trying to stay as quiet as possible so that I don’t wake him. Because surely, he would say I was bringing depression upon myself, that I was incapable of being happy, that I was somehow at fault for not being able to sleep at night.
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Love

Breaking Up

I think of him sometimes. Not often; but from time to time, I see something that reminds me of him, of a certain memory in our past, of a certain way he would react to things, or of how he is doing. But the terrible thing is how I don’t think of him enough. In fact, he is absent from my mind and from my daily concerns most of the time. I go on with my new life, my new love and my new work without him. And that makes me feel a sense of guilt whenever I do think of him, because of the fact that we have been together for seven years and that we have shared so much together. Even if things had turned sour for the last few years or that we had become trapped in our own selfishness and inertia, we share family, common friends, common habits, pets and lived under the same roof. It scares me almost that he seems like such a distant part of my past and is stashed into an abandoned closet in my mind.

The night before I was to leave for San Francisco on my exciting roadtrip, we had one of those tiring “discussions” that we’ve been having for the last couple of years. But what was different about that discussion was that I knew it was going to be the final one — that there wasn’t going to be anymore. Maybe he knew too, but would rather pretend that things were alright than to face the truth and tried to come to terms with it. Something had broken in me just several months before — right about the time I started this blog, maybe shortly after. We had been having a lot of problems for a long time… perhaps the biggest problem is that we didn’t know why we were with each other. He was constantly unhappy with the way I did things and I was always nervous that I might be doing something wrong. And this resulted in a relationship that was at best stagnant and at its worst, stifling.

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Love, Sex

On Kissing, And Pray Tell

It was dark. It was damp. It was intensely uncomfortable. That’s what I remember about my first kiss. Then 13, with a head full of soapy Hollywood fantasies of the wonderful, all-important experience, I was beside myself with girlish joy that a cute boy of 14 would find me attractive enough to want to kiss me. With butterflies (and cocoons and caterpillars) gushing in my digestive system and a ball of spiky teenage lust, we went at it like we were going to devour the other’s face. The vivid image of his bony face and tongue slobbering on mine lurks in the “embarrassing” section of my mind and is triggered to my frontal lobe every time I kiss someone. Since then, every subsequent kissing session has been a conscious effort and attempt at trying to erase and replace that unfortunate first memory with better, more worthy experiences.

During a discussion in my Lit class last semester, the resident funny girl-class clown – me – started to talk about censorship on TV and made everyone laugh with cognizance at how you often see Malaysian TV censoring the parts where couples were about to snog each other. So, one minute, you see them getting into foreplay, all hot and steamy and before you know it, *snip*, and they are done with it – often out of the shower and on to the next scene. In the days when there was no cable, I would often go like, “What the fuck? As if we don’t know they are kissing. Doesn’t snipping it make it more obvious?” I mean, what’s going to happen if we see them kissing? Will we feel an unnatural impulse to want to grab someone on the street to stick our tongues down their throats? Wow, what a threat to national security that there would be people who might want to snog each other. Ring up the snog police, won’t you?

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