Your Ex-Lover Is Truly Dead

Reading Abby’s blog really brought a wave of memories of my secondary school days.  Come to think of it, I didn’t really study much when you compare it with the time I wasn’t actually playing attention and was doing everything else after school, before school and during school. But wow, secondary school was really the penultimate of all hormonal levels so far.

Maturity isn’t growing up, it’s the depression of feelings.

There were the odd fillers of everyday, the ones that took up an entire year and the ones that took a part of life away. For the sake of remembering and if I ever get some bout of amnesia or some memory loss as a result of a horrible accident, I will remember who these people were and what role they played in my life.

If you don’t know me, after this post you’ll know me.

Lesson 1: Reciprocation

R taught me a lot. First crushes are first crushes, first delusions are first delusions and first fights are first fights. She has been neither here nor there all these years and she’s been a friend, and a friend who’s going to go off once the A level results are released. Six years, and nothing about the way I feel has changed. (ok maybe somethings do)

From her I learnt that the outpouring of feelings for someone is not necessarily something cathartic unless it is reciprocated. She made me value the idea of reciprocation and the idea of appreciation. Love and the emotion that accompanies it is not something that shoul be given away so easily and you should only give it away to those you’re sure would reciprocate that love.

I could never imagine myself with her nor her with myself but there will always be that indelible mark.

Lesson 2: Time is precious

E taught me something else. Time is not an infinite continuum, only space is. And the space between us was just 16000 km but once I looked at the sky, it was a different story. It was a fast courtship, too fast such that I was falling in love within the relationship itself. And how did it start? There were no questions asked, I remember. Only the one word I added at the end of one message one day: dear.

14 year olds have that narrow minded perception of “love”, such that a call of affinity would upgrade the status of a relationship from level 1 to level 1000000000000. And like all adolescents (which I am still one now), we thought we could rule the world, we thought we could be together forever.

A month in, she told me about her moving to the States for a good ten years and I said I would wait. Have I stopped waiting? No. Have I started waiting? No, as well.

I took so much from her and we took so much from each other that I feel it appropriate to say that I would take a bullet for her as she would for me (hopefully…) and we started out as people so different and now as we grow I’ve found more things similar between us. I took more than her virginity, I took her first love.

I emailed her once asking her to forgive me and to erase me from her history of relationships, me as the eponymous “first”. She said “no, you will always be my first and no one else”. That one sentence was the appreciation I’ve not felt and the reciprocation I learnt from Lesson 1 fulfilled.

There are two things that can stop a relationship. Life and Death. Mine was stopped by life being cruel with its sleight of hand, time was not something we could afford.

Lesson 3: In Unstability, Comes a Learned Man

C was the most controversial. Some have blamed me for being a backstabbing fucker for saying all the stuff  did about her after we officially ended our communication but it was all good for me. As long as I’m happy who gives a shit about you!

I made so many mistakes, the first was about rebound. When in rebound, you pour too much emotion into something such that it destroys what you have with someone. I was suppose to be her best friend, but in the end I became her worst one. Our arguments weren’t because of her but was because of me  being emotionally unstable, and wanting her all to myself until she went off with the Vice-Chairman of my CCA when I was the Chairman during SYF year.

I learnt a valuable lesson in leadership as well, in the way that nothing that happens to you personally should ever affect your disposition and your attitude towards your team. I cleared my head and we did well.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t say I loved her. I would just say I was wildly wildly infatuated to the point of wanting her to myself every day. We wouldn’t hold hands, we would play with each others’ fingers and hugs were aplenty. But the one thing lacking was the stability. But little did I know with the exact opposite, I could learn so much.

Lesson 4: Flashes are familiar

Sometimes, you see familiar characteristics in someone and you begin to develop feelings. These characteristics existed in the person you’ve had feelings before and you find these in this new person. This was the case with G and D.

I wouldn’t treat G as a fling because all I really wanted was the familiarity, the want to be physically with someone and feel emotionally propped up by them. She, out of all I just mentioned, was the one that had the most distinct scent I can picture. Scent not in the literal sense but in the figurative way such that summer has its familiarity as well as autumns, signs we can identify and distinguish. For her, she had the most distinct and we had our good times.

D was so short, she was a dear friend, so very dear and still very dear but anyway she had a boyfriend then so it was that short. Once again, she was the emotional prop not as an object but as my love defribillator(sp?)

Now I’ve come to Meridian to find love in a dimunitive 153 cm girl jampacked with fizzy cola candy, indie radio and so much to offer me.

I asked Rachel once, “So how, you planning to find a boyfriend!”

No, I’m not as desperate as you, she said.

I wasn’t hurt simply because I knew it wasn’t true. As much as people think that it was a spur of the moment thing, too fast for her and too fast for me, we’re into our 7th and going strong.

I hope that you do not get the wrong impression of me going from one girl to another, my rationale for this is simply being that I wanted to really know what love is. It’s not merely being in a relationship but it has so many nuances, so many connotations, so many connections, I want to learn more about it and Lorry has taught me tons.

Moulin Rouge was right, the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. My first lesson.