Similarities

Yesterday... all my troubles seem so faraway...

Yeah right.

That yesterday for me was so long ago for me. Yet, I am still feeling it.


Yesterday was full of talk about loving, losing love, being open, being confused, being magnanimous, moving on, feeling stuck... and giving up.

All with different folks. From the young to the old.


My dear, dear friend has just broken up. A piece of new that struck me when I came back from Portland, but wasn't that much of a surprise to me.

My dear, dear friend had a man who evidently loved her more than she probably did him. A man who would loiter around Suntec City while we were having drinks at Bala, waiting to bring her home, only to be told a couple of hours later to "go home first' - because she had decided to hop over to MOS with her other girlfriends.

It was a mutual separation, so she said. Fundamental differences, or incompatibility. Or something like that.

She was packing her stuff, ready to move back home when we started chatting on Yahoo! the other night.

A slow, deliberate, and probably painful process that got delayed because of my online presence.

I asked if I could ask a stupid question: How sad are you?

She said: Very sad.

Then she said: It is all very sad because we've built so many dreams together, planned a future together, made so many hopes for each other. But I know it is better now to be hurt, than later in the long run... It's not so much being sad about the past and the lost love. It's about being sad that we're choosing a future that will have neither me nor him.

I don't understand you, just like how I don't understand the ex - was my reply.

How could anyone have even built a dream or seen a future together with another who was not even fundamentally right in the first place?

If you're gonna be upset about a future that has neither you nor the other, why choose it?

I don't understand. I can't.

The fact that her situation was so similar to mine bothers me. Except that the gender roles were reversed.

And that theirs was a "mutual separation".


I met up with a kid late last night for a last-minute kopi session.

A kid, only twenty-three years of age, telling me: Three years together is long enough for the relationship to lose its romanticism. I can't blame her. I was at fault too.

He had caught his dearly beloved 'almost cheating' on him.

'Almost cheating'. Never really did but had hurt him deep enough. Whatever that may mean.

He loves her too much to let her go, but feels he's never going to be able to get over 'this'.

He continues letting her be. He doesn't believe in 'restriction'.

Neither did I.

I couldn't tell him much to do, I could only listen and give whatever advice I had from my own experience.

The fact that his situaton is so similar to mine bothers me too. Except, again, the gender roles are reversed.

That silly boy. He is just so much like me.


I had dinner and a good talk with the aunt again.

Seems like she has found a friend in me. Which feels good for me - I am like the daughter she never had.

She was being upset about a cold war launched by her own son, and I was trying to give her advice about being open with him.

For one very simple yet important fact: he is going to be her only son forever. For the next thirty or forty years.

"You would know how I feel. The way I am accommodating with my son is exactly the way you were accommodating with him," she said.

Him, her nephew.

Ah. Nicely put.

We talked about a lot more things. Mostly about my lack of purpose in life now. And about my possible move.

At the very end, I had only this to say.

"The day when he finally decides to settle down, I'll be very sad I won't be the one around with him then."

The move would be a step toward giving up.


*****

I am having drinks tonight with a seemingly fine friend.

Other than the fact that she just got into a serious accident that saw the demise of her beloved Peugeot, she seems happy. A new job. A recent snowboarding trip in the US.

I hope I have a more pleasant conversation tonight. =)