:: Short Circuit ::

The serendipity of strangers is a drug, and my job is the dopepusher that feeds my habit with leisure.

One night in Bangkok―so old rock song goes. Our work for the day is nearly done, and I find myself kicking back with a beer, sitting across Stef, a fomer European rallying champion, now working with us as an instructor for our drivers' academy.

Stef. I like the way his name sounded so―gruff, like one of those tough-guy characters in a gritty ganster film. Don't you give me that horseshit. You see Stef here? Hand over the stuff, or Stef will take care of you. Stef. Amused, relaxed, even, I sit back and watch my companion, a stranger until today. Now united by work and a passion for cars, we nurse our Singha beers with friendly familiarity.

'Jean,' he says, appreciatively. 'Jean. Simple name, can't get it wrong, even with English like mine.'

I smile. 'Dein Englisch ist nicht so schlecht,' I tell him, my Chinese tongue fumbling over the guttural requirements of German. But it makes a point, and it makes him laugh.

Ed Harris, I think, as I sit and watch him. There is a certain film-star quality to Stef―the quiet masculinity that polishes up his everyday man demeanor, the baritone note in his voice, the pale comma of a scar skimming his upper lip. His love for travel made the world his home, but he's Austrian by birth, and he's got the strapping built to show for it. Just a touch over forty, his weather-beaten face wears the past-day glories of racing in circuits all over Europe with casual pride. I like the lines creasing the corner of his eyes―intense and marble-blue―as he laughs; he's attractive, but only as an after-thought.

'How did you get into rallying?' I ask with frank interest. Having seen the video documentation of his rallying antics―I was stuck with the image of him gunning our racing car into a flyspeck dance of dirt at a Monte Carlo race-track―it's hard to imagine that this man, placid and laid-back now, drinking his beer with unhurried ease, is the same one who has raced competitively for over two decades, a raging speed-demon whose throne is behind the wheel, a gladiator in a ring with a helmet and a shift-stick.

He shrugs; I notice a thin gold chain glistening under his windbreaker. Godspeed, I think instinctively. 'I wish I could tell you wonderful stories: like how my father is a circuit legend or something, and I was inspired at a young age to race. But no. I was simply uninterested in the real world, and rallying is nothing like the real world. No politics. You get in the car, you race, you win, or you lose. Das ist klar.'

His eyes shine with deftly: conviction and passion; no conflict there. He runs an absent-minded hand through his hair―brown and flecked with silver threads―and I notice another set of scars: lopes left by gaping cuts, starting from the tip of the last finger of his left hand and ending just after his wrist.

He catches me looking. 'You have a very quick eye,' he says, giving me his hand with the uncomplicated trust of a child. I slide my finger gently over the lengths of the welds, ghost wounds that have closed tersely over new flesh, deadworms fused to his hand in memory of an angry injury.

'What happened?' I retract my finger, and I think: he looks disappointed.

He throws a customary glance at the scars. His eyes narrow with remembrance: 'My first big race, the European motorcycle circuit. I was 18? 19? Last corner; I was second. My head was gone, all I could hear was the engine. I curved the bend―' he jerks his body sharply to the left for emphasis―'and my bike flew out of the bend, with me going the other way. I was sliding, 5, 6 meters. I broke my knee and wore my hand out, but I knew I would do anything to race again.' He grins sheepishly, like a boy showing off his first toy truck, and then he drains his beer with manly nonchalence.

'Another round?' he asks. I like the note of hesitance he tags behind his question; there is nothing more annoying than presumptious men.

'Bring it on, and this time, on me.' I say, laughing. How easy, these lines―movie-like, running smoothly, little poetic arcs, high on tension, low on impact. Perfect for me. He leans over and catches my left hand, suddenly. 'I just see this. You have one too.' He nods at my own scar, little Horus, snaking up my ring finger.

'Nothing exotic like yours. Sculpting accident.' I say, with deliberate off-handedness.

Stef meets my eyes. He drops my hand, but not the questioning look; and then―'No ring.'

A question. 'No ring,' I say, falsely bright, as if being unmarried is the most natural thing in the world. Which, I think wryly, it is. What is so goddamned natural about being with one person for the rest of your life until death do you part blah blah blah blah?

He nods approvingly, as if being unmarried allows me to be part of a secret society, a brotherhood of sorts, a movement that will be the free spirit that mothers us all. 'I am separated from my wife,' he says, wriggling his ringless finger for comic effect. 'For coming to three years now.'

His tone is light, but his eyes become sombre. Regret can be sobering, and honest emotions are so unceremonious that they demand you to touch, to connect, to reach out. 'You get married, because you believe it's for the best, but sometimes you separate, because it's for the better,' I say, candid but kind. Twenty three fucking years old. What do you know about marriage?

'Very true, for the grown-ups. But maybe for the kids it's not so clear.' I feel sorry for his paternal pain, and it must show, because he says, quickly, 'I'm sorry, this is turning out to be a confession box.'

We smile in unison and unseasoned understanding. We touch glasses as the bartender leaves us with a fresh round of drinks: double Scotch on the rocks for him, and gin soda for me.

'Not tonic?' he asks.

'Not tonic,' I affirm. 'Soda brings out the strength of the gin.'

'You need a soda in your life I think. Someone to bring out your strength.' He swirls the ice in his glass, and then looks at me with philosophical deliberation. 'I like you,' he says simply.

Ah, the old fire between a man and a woman. Always burning, always ready to flame, to engulf―always bright and blinding, a cataract threatening to snag the sight of sense.

He doesn't say more, comforted by the liberty of his own candor. I politely ignore the primal question in his eyes, because this is not a movie, and you don't fall to bed with somebody without consequence or compromise.

And. Even though you've got beautiful blue eyes, my memory is nailed to the eidetic image of someone else's, even if they are paler, greyer and not as frank as yours.

:: Purged ::

It's been a year, almost, and the ordinariness that has characterised the end of our relationship still stings me. You lost your heart, I broke mine, and by the end of your second cigarette that August night in a budget hotel, seven years of love―haha―evaporated along with the shafts of your fagsmoke.

That's it? I had wanted to scream. You're sorry, you still love me, somehow, and you claim you always will, but you need your freedom as well as the unequivocal right to fuck someone else, and therefore we're through? That's it? I had sat in idiot silence, letting the pain permeate me in flashes and waves; in a state of reverse perversion I knew, suddenly, that this is life―this―loving and losing and wanting, at once. It was all so common, really. All of it. From the pallid promises to the tears to the exhaustive, emphatic goodbye fuck―it was all so nondescript.

Love―specifically, ours―didn't make us heroes. It conquered nothing, and consumed everything. I'd watched you sleep, the knowledge, that the one time I feel you're finally familiar to me―all of you, in fierce focus―is when you've become a stranger, scarring me with its random fire.

And that's all there is to it.You left. You found someone else, and we joined the dismal league of ordinariness, ordinary men and women who have killed off their relationships, plundering their partners of their previous dreams. Dissidents of love, if you will; something poetically tragic like that.

Months afterwards I still can't shake off the grave pity I have for the break up―not for us, as individuals, but for the accrual of sentiment we had build up along with our collective identities. I'd refused the melancholy of mourning. My logic had steeled itself against the vertigo of memories and emotions: it helped steady my feet and dry my eyes, despite the shadows that linger, like the sour smell of tobacco. Occasionally, it even brought me renegade bouts of happiness, because even with my selfishness, your peace accounted for mine as well.

Now? Now, life and pain and hope and want all share the same common denominator, an equation that catches me cold. I'm like a spent firework, dried of sparks. Is this my eternal failing then? That the only reason why I'm self sufficient is because I'm so effectively selfish?

As a child, I had been curiously aware of my own emotions, according my thoughts and feelings with solicitous respect. It didn't matter what I was thinking or feeling―pious or perverted, pompous or prim―didn't matter. I'd studied myself with scholarly narcissism, absorbed in the cogent absolution of my own intellect. I thought I would grow out of this. I'd looked forward to being―normal; one day, I thought, I would be able to eventually shrug off the clocked-up tally of my internal debates, to lose that need to continually jerk off mentally. To be normal, whatever its definition. But I never stopped. Everyday I wake up writing lines of reflexive stories, a mistress of the linguistic drama inherent in things. The whorl of a fingerprint, the fray of a wire, the muscular arch of someone's back―

Sometimes I wonder if this was the one thing that had driven you away, perhaps even without you knowing it. There is a space around me that is sacred with self-containment, a space noisy with plebian philosophies. A space that I don't think you ever truly penetrated, or wanted to.

So what now? This space follws me. I guard it violently, fearing its erosion, fearing the need to share, fearing its potency and its pathetic price. Getting to know someone all over again is like the proverbial classroom show-and-tell-session: what do you have there? Tell the class about it. I have a space, I start in my head. A space that has been there since I was old enough to reason, a space that has collected private perversions, histories, scars and scabs, people, phobia, a dead baby, light, memoirs of memories, echoes of laughter. This is my space, and I'll pawn it for your love.

This imagery amuses me―as my private fantasies often do. Intellectual masturbation seeks the climax of meaning; it forces you to see the world as one big secret code, entwined with knotted mysteries, waiting for you to crack the cracks. On long plane rides, on buses and trains where you can't escape from looking at your fellow commuters and yet you wish for everything looking, I run away to this space. During conversations, when my mind, trained to dislocate with random visual cues, has to follow the social conduct of listening (the act, I've always thought: it's the act of listening. Who the fuck really knew if someone was actually ingesting your words and their meanings? We hear sounds and we decipher it as best we can. It's the act that comforts: he or she or they or you―listening. Caring. Whatever.), I grow into this same space, comforted by the effortless existence of the self―my―self.

Sometimes, in my imprudent, callous stabs at intimacy, I would offer to share this space. Like an alchemist armed with a white-coat curiousity, I would await the results of my despicable experiment. After all, I'd think, rather contemptously, we are all scientists and subjects in turn: a professor one day, a lab rat the next. I'm seldom disappointed. My space is like a wall, its phantom insides strange and unlovable, a concrete doom. Unfeeling: knowledge dispels sentiments by dispensing logic with analytical precision. My natural pessimism draws misery, but my distorted sense of strength―diluted with careless, care-less humour―rejects the melodrama that comes with it. I admire those with an innate ease with life, and yet despise them for their smallness and inability to be more; I'm compassionate to those filled with heroic melancholy, but their prodigal problems bore me. I like strong men, but I fear their egos. I like men I can talk to, but then I question if that connection is not more friendly than anything else. My power is my bane, and my choices make me lonely.

'You're so goddamned complicated,' someone told me the other night, a colleague, the strength of his whiskey matching the strength of lust in his eyes. 'You need someone to slap you out of all that worldlorn shit and take you by the hand and say, move, bitch.'

I had found that ridiculously funny, almost insightful, in a crass, red-necked sort of way.

You: you had worked for me, you see, because you had that natural flightiness, a constant, faithful sense of motion in life. When I'd stalled, previously, when my inner engines smoked with the snags and struggles of being me, you never seemed to mind. You gave me space to regenerate, knowing that I'd be okay, eventually―you never understood the writer in me, you never got why I had to perversely hurt myself with grievous improbabilities―but you stayed close enough for me to believe that where there is balance, there is hope. Your cheerfulness, versus my complications.

Or so it had seemed. The final straw of irony, breaking on my back (broad, the way you said you liked it, how the expanse of flesh had turned you on), is my own sightlessness when it came to you. I was blind. I thought you loved me, all of me: including that inconquerable space, which has conquered even me. And so you did, for a while, at least.

There was this one night. You were asleep, one hand holding mine, the other flung across your chest in a gesture that was almost feminine, child-like. I'd stayed awake in the familiar shadows of your room―still rich with our spent energy―taking in the shabby bookshelf by the wall, your family potrait hung over the ancient stereo set, your table overwhelmed by the general, generous mess of things. The discoloured Dragon Boy poster. The T-shirt tossed over the back of your chair. The roller-blind, yellow-bright in the dark, shielding us from the nightsounds and streetlights outside your third storey home. I had shifted closer to your warmth, committing the way our fingers were laced together to memory. That moment, I think, was when this particular epiphany was born: if you ever leave me, I would be okay. I would survive it all; I would weep and write about it, I would cry and curse, I would think about our baby―but I would be okay. Because there will always be this moment, in my memory, where I'm safe and secured in your presence, knowing that when morning breaks, I would break your dreams with a giggle and a kiss.

I was so romantic then. It did chafed me, occasionally: the uselessness of romanticism, the fear of losing you, the want to fuck someone else just because my body was curious, the spells of anger at your failure (why don't you get me? Why did you allow him to understand me the way I so badly want you to, when I'm here, right here, dammit, for you?), the abysmal sense of my own inadequencies, the heartbursting moments at the sight of your smile (god I love you; I think Les would have had your eyes). So many moments, so much emotions, always overpowering my logic. It made me selfish, I realise now: self-ish, selfish, fuck it, it just means I need to get off on my own mindfucks, please, step aside and let me be, thank you very much.

Could that have been love, that indurated self-containment?

'Do you know what love is?' Cem had asked me, a long time ago (three, really, in physical age, but distance has a peculiar effect on time, and distance has smudged the memory to be old).
'Love is the willingness to sell yourself as a whore,' I'd answered with the guile and efficacy of a twenty-year-old.
'What a pagan you are,' he'd said, smiling, eyes afire with the great and simple weight of affection.

And I'd thought immediately of you, about you, about the straight-laced, straight-faced reality of your history and future, and I'd felt the pricks of panic, blanketing me like a second skin. No no no no. I can't just marry you and have kids and fade into the obscurity of life. No―life must be more than this, more than marriage and children and sitting there in your church pretending I can believe in Jesus Christ and the great redemption of the fuckwits that we all are. I must be―what?―greater than this, can't be contented to be just a wife, just a mother―I can't, can I?

I had chalked all those thoughts―threads of dread, tied to the perverse insecurity of certainty―to my random flights of fancies, back to the anomaly of the space, back to my need for the imploding relief of my intellectual and emotional orgasms. Because I was―still am―a whore to my own insanities. Because I never felt safe in your love. Because if I sincerely believed in the eternity of our teenage promises, the day that we fucked up―doesn't matter who―would be the cosummate end. I'd never be able to forgive, much less to forget. I was scared, a gutless alarmist, pacified by pessimism.

All of this, but yet it all seems so remote, so removed now. We caught up, the other night; I'd watched you, the way I've always watched you, with distant intimacy. I watched you knowing that I know you, that I've always known you, that with or without you, I will always know you. I watched you laugh and I watched you eat; I watched you slouch in your seat and I watched you drag on your cigarette with élan. I tested myself: no, there was nothing left of the old love. An odd tingle of relief, followed by the immediate sense of disgust at my own predictability. And then, a hollowed-out sadness, an extripation. There was a paradoxical energy pulling at me―I wanted to tell you that I'm free, that the fact that you're fucking someone else no longer cuts me open like a sore sickle, but I also wanted to let you know that I've missed you, that I've missed the simplicity of our togetherness. That being free of the memory of us does not make the pain of losing you disappear completely.

You see, I have accepted my new life, my new autonomy, with impatient fatalism. I have no apology for the hearts I may come to break―or truly, might have already broken―because I was given none when my own heart was smashed to pieces. It all fits, a continuum: my compassion is tempered by a calculated need to cause hurt, and my casual curiousity (I want your stories, yours and yours and yours, to add to my space) will be persistently misrepresented as romantic affection.

It's not that I haven't tried to share―my thoughts, that space, my life. In bite-sized pieces, I'd rationed myself out to a few men that have reached me, breached me in some ways, and have found something they think they can love. And own. But it all feels so―rehearsed. Like an out-of-body experience, I would watch myself try and relate to these men, my cloying laughter and gentle teasing grating on even my own ears. It felt as though I was witnessing my own burial. They were reaching out to a blank, and they didn't even know it. Here she lies, gentlemen, I'd think to myself, caustic, cruel, infinitely ironical. Heyho, what a bitch.

It's not so much that I'm afraid of getting my heart cleave opened again. It's the categorical, all-consuming sadness at the inevitability of love―a cowardly philosophy, I admit―but it's there. The removal of all my delusions of grandeur. That night, that August, when you told me it was all over, and then you casually fucked me with your eyes closed―the world died for me then. Not just because of the break up, you understand, but the reality that my love was the same as everyone else's. It lived, it died, and it has made no difference whatsoever―nothing of true consequence, much like life, only much worst because of its unceasing need to repeat history. Yes, you're right. I am selfish. A hedonistical ego-maniac when it came to our love, I had actually believed that we were good enough to make it. To last forever, despite your obvious boredom and my emotional infidelities.

But with one little sentence―I feel lighter without you―you proved me wrong. You surprised me then―gave me a sense of mystery―peeled opened the skin I thought was all there was to you and revealed someone else. I knew then there must be another person―either a thought or a reality, no matter. But there, her physical possibility tangling with your new desires. 'I just want some space,' you'd said. I thought then you meant space for yourself―only later, much later, when you finally said you were with her, that I realised that this space meant the removal of me. That I should vacate in order to give you your wings, to fly to her piece of sky.

'You know what your problem is?' You asked the other night, teasing, uncaring. 'You've got too many to choose from!' About my obvious state of singlehood. I'd sat in the same idiot silence, incapable of rationalising why your rightful apathy felt like a backhanded slap, catching me across the face like a flaming clout, leaving fingermarks. I supposed the fact that you're unwilling to consider that even now, your inability to care for me still hurts, torched some of the still-raw nerve endings.

I ran then, to my own space. A wounded dog, licking her wounds.

***

My rant stops here, like a gout of vomit purged and dried after too many drinks. Here, being Bangkok: I look at my clock, and it's 3 a.m. Singapore time; my eyes have fogged over. Here, being my private space, where I don't mean to hurt―never meant to hurt―but truth is a tricky agent, even if it's my own closet truth, and I can't always account for the consequence of its obvious deficit.

To you: you still have my best wishes and my eternal friendship. Not the old love―we both know it has faded off long before this night―but somewhere in my space, there is always space for you, if only because once upon a time, your constellation lit my way.

:: White Flag ::

My A. I look at him, and I see the scholar, the artist, the friend. I see the sunbeam in his smile, I see his eyes twinkle like earthstars when he talks about lines or spaces or the majesty of his cat. I remember his grave sadness at my gentle rejection before―is there hope? he had asked, his face carrying the weight of the world, his eyes clouded with knowledge. I had looked down, on my hands, at the scar left by a sculpting knife on my finger (Horus, A had christened thus), and then I quietly shook my head. Why, he had persisted, despite the wash of shadows that had come into his eyes. You don't fill my heart the way S. does, I said, unwilling to be blunt, but unable to deceive. He was winded by my honesty, I could tell: he slumped his shoulders against mine, and we fell silent. Loneliness whispered its lonely verse around us, the strength of which was sapping dry our friendship.

That episode of romantic casualty had left its insidious insignia ever since. We stayed friends, and I wanted―perhaps foolishly―to believe that he had recovered from the accidental collision of our hearts. That he was happy with my friendship, my inconsistent place in his life: the urban poet to his eternal artist, the Isis to his Apollo, the occasional cause of his melancholy.

But now. 'I have to leave, don't you see. You are my drug; you make me do desperate, needy things. I need to leave―leave here, leave you.'

The night was quiet. No stars―all the brightness had surrendered itself to the dark. His pain was swallowing the distances; I felt like Judas. Words―appropriate phrases, benign sentiments, silver slips of feelings―played in my head, like the downward rush of current. But I found nothing to say.

'Falling so easy, forgetting so long,' he said, with a ghost of a smile playing on his lips. His eyes fogged over. I held him for a long time, willing him to know that I love him, that I have never stopped loving him―if only as a friend, as his random muse, as what I know isn't what he wants, at all.

I'll miss this walk out to the road, nightsounds in my ear.Your lines still freshly fading from my consciousness. Your scent now a whisper.

I imagined the sweet sadness swirling like impish eddies in his heart as he texted me, and again I ached for the various hearts that do, without rhyme or reason it seems, but with enough potency to dislocate.