| 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.