| siren song |

In between running the event, welcoming the people, hollering into phones, throwing out namecards and handshakes and plastic smiles, I snuck in a few private moments with S. Corporate friendships―they don't come often. When you find a kindred soul amongst the gyps that come as part of the white-collar package, you learn to treasure this serendipity.

S―her eyes have the same haunted look that I've noticed in my own. Dark. Wary. Weary. With the potential for pain. I know her story, and I share her heartbreak.

'The worst pain is, Jean, when you question why they don't feel half as much as you do. Why you're stranded here, an emotional wreck, and they're there, in one piece. And then you question. Did you love more? Did you feel more? Did you give up more? And why did you love more? Why didn't they? Why?'

Writing this makes it two dimensional. When I hear her, really hear her, her voice was almost monotonous. There was no drama, no torrential emotion, no anger. The words carried the impact, the history, the titantic heartache, the faint cackle of hope. The tone, the voice―they sing with a sort of resignation, white and clinical, ashes of the torment that had come and gone.

When love―the red, crimson tide of passion―runs its course, is this what happens? The bone-dry, tear-stained, white-washed calm of inevitability? I didn't―and I still don't―want this. I want peace, not resignation. I want hope, not indifference.

'It's not about what you want. Love is not about that at all.' S said, an echo of my greatest, most suffocating, fear. That at the end of the day―at the end of the fucking, miserable day―it's not about you. It never was. That's what they never tell you―this big-ticket item called love. They never tell you how painful, how consuming, how brutal, how unkind it can be. Getting over it, they say, another urbanised phase of little meaning. Getting over it takes three pages in a book. Five minutes in a movie. One chorus in a song.

In real life, without the cushion of dramatic poetry, getting over it―it's not even an option. When love leaves, you falter. Every tick of the clock, every turn of the day, the fact that you're left leers at you with its bleak apathy. The world still turns. People are still glossy-mag happy. Couples around you are still in their bubble-gummed world, sweet and pink and elastic. You? You've fought your battle. You've got your medal, singed with blood and memories and tears. And then what? While the rest of the world in coupledom sing to the melody of love, you learn the words to your siren song. You learn the tune, the bridge, the sweet-sad chorus that you never thought one day you would sing.

I think of her, and I think of A, and I think of M, and I think of my own siren song. We are a choir of broken voices.

| distractions a la mode |

Friday was a haze, a windwhirl of hours―minutes were squashed into instances of business necessity; a phone-call, an email, a quick lunch, a meeting, a fax. It was a day powered by function and coffee. I left nothing to emotion or thought, and by the time 7 p.m. rolled around, I was exhausted. It's been two years and I'm an unabashed corporate whore by now, a white-collared robot programmed to work. And even then there's a clear difference between the good exhaustion―where you're fulfilled and satisfied, the mental fatigue a sign of your accomplishment, and the bad exhaustion―where you're just tired. You're so completely fucked. You can't think. You ache for a drink, a fag, a pill to throw your conscious mind into chaotic oblivion. 'The pest control guys are here,' some kind soul hollered on his way out. I shut down my laptop, throw my things in my bag and left for Holland Village.

***

Holland Village. I have a peculiar liking for that place. It's near to my childhood home, and although I've never been a Westie, Holland V just feels like, well, home. It pulsates with a curious energy that is both raw and docile. Teenagers and families and chic singles and happy couples and blonde expats are jumbled onto the streets; the smells of pizza and Mexican food tangle with the strains of pop tunes and live Spanish music. And it was a Friday night, in itself an encyclopedia of careless charm. I sat at one of the stone chairs, waiting for A; my peace was disturbed with the sudden rush of memories of the old us, holding hands, strolling down these very streets. Oh, the pang. I was glad when A came and we plunged straight into dinner. My peace. I needed to preserve it.

He's got stories―vivid and funny, a colourful canvas of experience. A is, after all, an artist. The whole straight-laced art teacher thing―it doesn't conceal his artistic temperment. We talked and sang stupid songs. It was a nice break―and it was nice not to care what people think. Two crazy fuckers humming Broadway tunes at Starbucks.

But, said The Voice. Nice is an useless word.

***

I chopped off my hair. 8 years. (Ah, deja-vu, anyone?)

***

Another distraction. J and I took a break from all that running around―logistics management is a long, tension-fraught nightmare, I can't wait for my event to be over―and found ourselves seated, cross-legged at a Lebanese restaurant, smoking water-pipes. We ordered a round of sinful food, darkly rich with Arabic spice, and took a moment away from the hectic rush of work.

***

It's not too bad. But oh, the pang.

| tokyo heartbreak |

'It's not fair, Jean,' M said over the phone, the crackling static from Tokyo adding to the noir mood of the moment. 'It's not fair that I should get hurt, again and again. It's not fair that all I do is give, and I don't get anything in return.'

I listened, and I tried to say what was expected of me. Words of endearing empathy. Cliches caked with the icing of truth―or more accurately, what seemed like the truth.

I felt the spectrum of M's emotions―anger, sadness, jealousy, the unwillingness to accept, the want of fairness―and I measure that against my own happy-heartbreak. I feel no betrayal, no need to demand, to ask, to validate, to blame. At the end―the end―I see the potential for peace. His, as well as mine.

And now I'm learning to be contented. Just to see him for an hour, bitching about the day over teh terik. Just to get a random SMS from him, asking if I've eaten. Little things I never used to appreciate. Little moments that I had let escape. Now I'm learning. To let go what I have to, and to re-embrace what I never knew existed.

Love. Need. Happiness. Buzzwords. The viagra of modern society speak, the grass, the dope-hell high. Buzzwords that people―you and me and them―say all the time to kick ourselves in gear. But buzzwords that tingle only momentarily with truth; after a while the rust of time and routine sets in, and new buzzwords are formed. Freedom. Abandonment. Live and let live.

I didn't live to be here, now, at the young-old age of 22, both a cynic and a fool, just to change the world's agenda. But I can have my own buzzword. I can have my own choice of drug. And it starts with P.

***

As many nights endure,
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure,
When one is gone and far.

Peace, I realise, will forever be in the shadow of more purposeful emotions like love. It's less passionate, less heady, and less consuming. But peace is the darker shade of pale, a feather-kissed pinnacle of fulfillment, a pleasant shock of whiskey-burn. It has its own fire. And I'm waiting to be warmed by it.

| scars of hope |

I used to wake up and plunge mindlessly into the day. There was no pain, because I was not unhappy with my reality, but there was little emotion, because I was blissfully stupid about everything else except getting to work by 9.03 a.m., coffee in hand, ready to start another day with a buttery smile and an over-wrought 'good morning'.

But now I wake up and there is that little scar. That little knowledge of pain. That little funny choking feeling that doesn't quite redden the eyes, but burns with the curious sensation of―loss.

'I'm happier now,' he said. I know. And I'm at peace with that.

***

Amy and I, sisters in crime, went to buy ourselves some oranges. 'You need the vitamins,' she said, a cryptic emotional mother, her own eyes dry and plastic with the old-new memories of her own pain. So we stood in line at the supermarket with our 75-cent oranges, placid and out of place in our big green basket. And we watched the people.
'Do you think they are really so happy?' I asked, looking at satisfied mothers and cheerful corporate types and the ocassional couple.
'No. We're all unhappy people. But it doesn't matter.' She replied, not unkindly, but with a sort of final wisdom that you somehow don't wish to have―because you know it comes with a price―but yet you admire someone else who has it. It's all very complicated. We're a complicated spieces.
That's the only reason why Amy and I would stand at the check-out counter on a Tuesday afternoon, two women in their prime, buying oranges to soothe an invisible disease eating up our insides.
That's the only reason why.

***

On a lighter note. I have what it feels like 3 tonne worth of lecture notes in my glamourous new bag―an Hermes rip-off, I'm not afraid to say―and I have no interest whatsover in beating the 6.30 traffic to get to class today. Rene and I are going for sushi, and work out over maki rolls how to dominate the world with words.

La vie boheme. Tres fucking bien.

| glimmer |

And so it goes. Another day. Another white-washed morning. My phone was placid, silent. I thought of him and wished him well and knew that it was the best I could do. I remember someone else's wisdom―have faith, not hope. Faith endures, and hope―well, hope is a big bright orange balloon, a porcelain potrait that grins with a mouthful of grotesque, blithe teeth.

| new |

I used to think that the expression ‘if you love someone, set them free’ was both gramatically incorrect and emotionally useless. It’s some poetic trash straight out of a dated Mills & Boons paperback. It’s a whinging lie sugar-coated with a beatific philosophy. If you love someone, you love someone. And if you love someone, then why the fuck would you want to set him or her free?

But then, as I sat across him and saw the sad, final look in his eyes, killing the last of our old intimacy with his decision, I felt the same expression resonate in my torn and bloodied subconscious. I met his eyes―for a moment it was my old Sam looking at me, goofy, gentle, kind―and I felt the inexplicable peace of finality. ‘Okay,’ I told him. And for the moment became a crucible of heartbreak, of remorse, of pain, but also of newness, of mutual understanding, of concensus; I wanted to cry for the close of a chapter, but my heart beat wildly to the beginning of a different closeness.

I love Sam. There’s no doubt; I love him, and I love being with him. But my boy has grown up; the man in him now needs a change. Something in him craves freedom and hungers for choice; our old ties must give way to new ones, and I’m at peace―I can’t bring myself to say I’m happy, because my tear-soaked pillows say something else―I’m at peace with this decision.

And so I must bravely embrace my new life. The old security is gone: I no longer belong to anyone. I’m not part of someone else anymore; I’m just Jean. It’s a frightening prospect to be alone, but yet. It would have been ten times worst to remain together for the sake of a title, for a vague commitment we made 6 years ago as teenagers. We knows? Time apart could kindle a new fire. Time apart would force us to learn the transient nature of relationships, to renew our thoughts and rebuild our bond. And even if we never come back together as a couple―a possiblity that still drives a thousand knives through my heart at the moment―I would still remain at peace for accepting this with a calmness that betray my old wilfulness.

In my heartbreak, and through my grief, I realise―I have truly become a woman.