I haven’t been blogging as much as I hope to. I tell myself it’s because I have been busy, but that’s as bad a lie as when I told myself that Nutella is made of nuts so it’s basically protein. Being busy has never stopped me from blogging, and I’ll do it over the toilet seat if I have to. So no, it’s not because I have been busy.

I don’t want to say I have a ‘writer’s block’ either, because I can still write my column for NST and I can still write other projects without trouble. But blogging is different from these things because it’s a place that I treat as an indulgence, for me to organize my thoughts over things I am currently experiencing or things that are presently happening around me.

Doing this for as long as I have also means I know very well what causes my ‘blocks’ or ‘hurdles’ – I usually experience trouble blogging when my mind is too anxious and chaotic.

Which is absolutely true, in this case.

A man once told me that I was the bravest girl he knew. I felt so proud of myself when he said this. As a self-professed ‘independent’ girl, being validated for my courage to do things felt like such a milestone. But afterwards, I wondered if it is also the same thing that fuelled me to do a lot of stupid things in my life.
There are two things that really scare me in this lifetime.

​The first is time.

The second is regrets.

Time is frightening because I think it steals from us. Before we know it the moment has passed, a chance has gone and an opportunity has disappeared. In a blink of an eye everything can change, and the next thing we know is what we used to have is not there anymore. And unfortunately a lot of us, perhaps myself included, never truly realise that we have something until times fleets by and takes it away from us.

Which brings me to my second fear, regrets. I spend a lot of time reading about or talking to other people because I love stories, and from these stories I often deduce a lot of regrets coming from them not doing something. I suppose it is true that in the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take. In some ways I am afraid that I am on the verge of being exactly that.
That I had a dream but never did enough to pursue it.
That I had a chance that could change my life but I was never brave enough to go for it.
That I had an opportunity to make a difference but I never stepped forward.
That I could tell someone how I truly feel but never did, and end up spending a lot of the rest of my time wondering ‘what if’.

These are the concerns that often drive me to do stupid things. They make me seem weird at times, unfathomable by (some of) my friends. They make me make strange decisions my parents don’t agree on. The make me appear like I wear my heart on my sleeve. Recently it happened again, and as I did this thing I cringed over the fact that I was risking myself being embarrassing and weird, but that fear of waking up one day regretting that I never did it drove me to be brave and do it anyway. I’m still cringing over that possible silliness, but I hope someday when I’m older I won’t be sitting on the patio smoking a cigar wondering ‘what if’ (I’m not sure why but I always picture myself smoking a cigar at 70).

I went through this thing I did over and over again in my mind, and this is the cause for my chaotic mind that did not allow enough calmness to even string a few words together on a blog post. In the spirit of chasing time before it passes us, I decided to send you the parcel on a grey Wednesday morning. In the spirit of avoiding regrets, I told you everything I wanted and needed to say.

Maybe it’s stupid, and maybe it’s pointless.

But in the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take.

Recently a friend told me that she was experiencing some ‘unseen disturbances’ at her house (translation: hantu). They were creepy, detailed stories of moving objects and voices and traces. I wasn’t sure if I really actually believe in ghosts, but let me tell you, being awake in bed in the dark at 1 am will pretty much make you believe a lot of things. I began to imagine the unthinkable – something crawling from under the bed or a child standing at the corner of the room. Any sound made me jump and I was afraid to come out of my blanket (although the logic is weird. I’m pretty sure ghosts can travel through blankets).

And then one day, I had lunch with some girlfriends and one of them revealed that she had somehow, at the spin of fate, ended up in the same office with her longtime ex. Not only were they in the same office, but they were also seated just mere desks away from each other. They had not broken up in good terms a few years ago and had not spoken to each other since, and now there they were, awkwardly sitting across each other and pretending as though they never knew of each other’s existence.

That’s also a story of a ghost, albeit a different kind.

We believe that this world is big until we end up bumping into a ‘ghost’ from the past, and then we realise that the world isn’t really that big at all. I once saw an ex I wished to never see again at the train station, and I literally ran away. Unfortunately for that friend of mine, she would probably have no choice but to spend the next few months involuntarily seeing a past she would like to forget.

Some ghosts are no longer welcomed. They represent a chapter of our life stories where we were a completely different person back then, and now the circumstances are different and things will never be the same again. These are the ghosts we run away from, the ones that make us cringe upon encounters and if you’re like me, you’d be pushing your way into a crowded train and hide yourself behind the largest person you could find on that coach, pretending to be nonchalant despite your sweaty armpits.

But some ghosts also came back to resolve an unfinished business. After all, not every ending would end with closure. Some ghosts come by for validation that your decisions in the past really were the best ones for you. Some ghosts come by so that you can accept them in a different light, as a friend, as a wonderful memory, or as someone you grew up with. And some ghosts come by for second chances, now at a better time, a better place, and a better outlook.

These are the types of ghosts we should never run away from, for they would teach us so much more than they ever could when they first came into our lives.

Did I dream it?

I sat across him as I watched him speak. Outside it was raining, slow and steady as the evening grew late and the sky turned cast and grey. He told me about his life and his latest adventures. He looked exactly as how I remembered he looked, which side his hair parted and which side his body leaned on. He seemed in good spirits. I was happy to see him happy. It is always nice to see someone you care about happy. But at the same time, there was this pang I felt to see that he was happy without me. He was doing just fine without me. Did it make me jealous? Maybe. Did it make me sad? Absolutely.

As I returned his orange sweater I had been keeping in my possession there was a sudden realisation that I was never going to see it again. The painting project we bought was packed and ready to go to him, the last little piece of memory of something we did together. It had been sitting in my own living room for three months, and when I tried to pick up where we left off I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. It only reminded me of his face when he was painting on that canvas. I always liked how kind his face looked.

As we talked I began to think about how strange all this was. There we were, two people, once close enough to know what was funny and what wasn’t, what was important and what wasn’t, and what was real and wasn’t. We talked as though neither of us was ever hurt by the other, trying to keep a façade that we were doing absolutely alright. At least that was what it was like for me. I had missed him. I wondered if he missed me. If he did, he certainly hid it well. And then he left, back outside into the dark, rainy weather, the sweater and painting in tow. Gone.

It felt to me like I had been staring at a long, empty road, somehow hoping, against the smallest of odds, that somehow he would emerge again at the other side of that road. I would see his shadow looming as he would appear yet again, telling me everything would be alright now. No matter how much I told myself to stop looking at the edge of that road, to stop staring, I found myself looking and staring anyway. Two weeks later, by the strangest chance of strings of coincidence (although we all know by now that there is no such thing), I came across a picture. I saw the new girl. I saw him. I saw them. They looked happy. And I don’t know what or how, but something inside broke. And that broken something...goodness. If there ever is an adequate enough word to describe the hurt.

There it was.

I wish I write better stories. I wish I write stories about a boy who met a girl and the boy would hang his things and stay. But I don’t know those kinds of stories. The ones I have are about a girl who was staring at that long, empty road, but it was time for her to pick up her things and walk home alone now. That boy who one day showed up with lavender tea, his Sunday sneezes, with his adventure stories about sleeping under the stars in Greece and dreams of trekking the world – he is never coming back. He is gone. The girl will have to do with no closure for this chapter, a cliff hanger, a lost ending.

Did she dream it?

I lay in the dark. It was quiet, still. I glanced at the time. 2 a.m. I realized I had just fallen asleep for two hours or so. My thoughts went directly towards the same place, and with that I was immediately wide awake. I sat up and adjusted the air conditioner. A half hour later. No, the air conditioner wasn’t the problem. I got out of bed and went groggily to the kitchen.

As I sat in the quiet kitchen and had a drink of water, I heard the slow and steady buzzing noise from my old fridge. I heard him telling me it was time for me to get a new fridge. I smiled to myself. He hated that fridge.
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There was a semi-permanent headache that was pounding somewhere at the back of my head. I can’t remember when I last had proper sleep anymore. My body was exhausted, but my mind – my mind, it is too busy rummaging through everything that had happened, frantically questioning the what-ifs and exasperatingly missing what was gone. Throughout all the difficulties, he did not stop me from leaving. He did not ask me to stay. And so I had to go, and it is the hardest thing to be brave when you have to do something you do not want to.

From where I sat I looked across the room. There was the little painting project we did together, and the canvas sat there lonely at the corner of the living room, unfinished. Unfinished felt like a word that would describe us now. There were pillows over the couch that he helped me pick out in IKEA. The orange sweater I borrowed hung on the chair. That boring documentary about gold mining he liked to watch whenever I flip the channels. There was a book on curry recipes that we were enthusiastically planning to try out. Not anymore.

Saying goodbye is not just about saying goodbye. It is admitting that someone who used to be so important in your life is now a stranger. And isn’t that strange? He will now exist in a parallel universe where I will never again know how his day is, hear stories about his life or share the excitement for the future. It is bidding farewell to adventure plans. It is realising that all those times, the laughter, the flutter, the moments that stood still, the hardships, they all slowly corrode into a void that was left for me to bare. It is parting ways with a trusted confidant who was there for the woos and wins. It is grieving the loss of a friend. I wondered if he ever wondered about me. I wondered if I am now nothing more than just a distant memory of his.

He did not ask me to stay.

As I stared at the moody living room I saw all these little things that were a constant reminder of his shadows. Last night I went through my freezer looking for a quick dinner. I saw some frozen pesto sauce, and it jolted memories about the first lunch we ever had. That was what he ordered. And the first meal I ever made him? You guessed it. It hit me like a pang to my face. Needless to say, I did not have that for dinner.

Sometimes we don’t realise how much we mean to others. Or how much someone means to us, until the day comes and we watch them walk away and disappear. I remember it vividly, the last time I saw him walk away. It was like a play-by-play of a slow, silent video that I could not erase from my head. There are moments in life where words or tears will not do justice as an adequate expression of what you're experiencing. Like this one.

Sitting in that living room made me feel overwhelmed. It felt like I was sitting in a huge puddle of things that unintentionally reminded me of what was. I wanted to flee. I wanted to go somewhere far away. But I felt stuck onto the ground, unmoving. After a while sitting there, I slowly made my way back to bed.

Tomorrow might be better, I told myself a lie.

My Grandma used to tell a story about a distant relative who lived in Penaga, Kedah. It was, and still is, a small village where people worked the paddy fields and the sea. This distant relative was married to a lady who lived in Karangan, Kedah, another small village about 45 km away from Penaga (see map). They lived in a time around and post-World War Two, when life was hard and dangerous.

Due to circumstances that was rather vague or perhaps forgotten by me, they had to live separately in these two separate villages. Every week, or every other week, this distant relative would travel all the way on an old school bicycle to see his wife, all 45 km of it, through uncivilized terrains and the dangers of communists which were the rage around the area at the time. Just to see his wife for a couple of days, and then off he went cycling back to work. They had a happy relationship until their passing.

It sort of sounds like a plot of a period drama love story, but things like these really happened back in the day. These are real people looking after their relationships throughout some real shit. Us? Most of us can’t even hold it together during ‘tough’ times, despite the technology, living comforts and privileges we have as opposed to these guys back in the day.

What constitutes working hard to keep/maintain a relationship? In the past, I had been known to be the first to draw the curtains whenever things get even slightly difficult. In my mind at the time, relationships are one hundred percent happy times, and there was no point staying if it gets hard. In case you’re wondering, yes, I was watching a lot of movies at this time. You know, the ones that showed relationships to be all about rainbows, candy and galloping across the wheat fields on a magical unicorn together forever towards the sunset. And all of relationship issues solved within two hours or less.

These days, none of us really have to cycle through a dodgy road in the tropics avoiding random militants with guns to sustain a relationship, and most of the hurdles we would ever face are just the ones of our own minds. And yet somehow, we give up much too soon compared to my distant relative there (I have no idea how he looked like, but I always imagined him as a lanky guy with a ‘songkok’ and the 1960s styled pants pulled up to his chest).

I suppose the old-age saying is true – the best things in life are usually the things you have to fight the hardest for. This applies for both fighting for seats at a new brunch place in town, as well as our relationships (although the former is often overrated). Like everything else in life, most of the time high risk bares a high reward. And if it does end up down the drain, there is peace and closure in knowing you’ve tried your best, as opposed to sitting there in your little comfort zone where nothing grows, wondering ‘what if’.

Perhaps it began one day many years ago, when I was dumped by a guy via a text message a day before my birthday.

Or maybe it was somewhere around when I was stood up by the SAME guy twice (seriously, sometimes I wish I’m making these things up but unfortunately they really happened).

Or perhaps it was a string of bad luck on the dating front**, of false promises and falling for words instead of actions. Of being too gullible or becoming an accidental doormat (although these days I have come to learn that when people treat you the way you don’t want them to, it your own fault for letting them do so).

Whatever it was, on a lazy evening not too long ago, I was sitting across the kitchen bar watching a nice man make me dinner. He bought the groceries and made me a Greek Baked Frittata (which was delicious, in case you’re wondering), and then he did the dishes. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this picture. In fact, I was quite fully aware that I had probably hit gold and this was a good, happy thing.

But whatever it was, as I sat there feeling rather content I also felt a slow and steady crawl of troubled thought. The troubled thought was concerned that something catastrophically bad was going to happen next. Because there had been many incidences in the past where this trend was true, I was half convinced that this was the way of my world for me. It had built a cynicism in my head where I was always suspicious.

Oh my God, he just made me dinner, what will he say next? That he has an irreversible disease and will have to 'disappear'? That he has two other girlfriends? That his face was actually made in Korea? That he actually doesn’t like pasta (oh God no)? I ate my dinner with a wild mind wondering what was going to happen.

Nothing happened next. It was a normal, nice date and we had a good dinner, a good laugh and nobody revealed that they were an ex-convict.

The point to this story is the inevitable influence of your past towards building the your current perception of the world. You wouldn’t notice it, but it subtly and discreetly shapes you to make you who you are at this point of time. The downside is it can make you too cynical for your own good, too afraid or too careful. I never knew how much all these things have created the ‘crazy chick’ inside me that was often brimmed with hesitance when the time comes to let someone in, until that day I was sitting at the kitchen bar.

But the light at the end of the tunnel is that these crazy string of unfortunate events will also teach you how to know better. One should never think that the past was unfortunate. The past happened so that you learn from it (which, I suppose, makes it a fortunate thing really). Subtly, it will also show you how to spot a good one when you see one. Or what to appreciate in a person. Or what is worth fighting for. Or what behaviour is deemed unacceptable, something that you may not have understood before. Or in my case, how to fully understand that past pains happened for a reason, creating a myriad of pathways that you walk through to get to where you are today, as a much, much better version of yourself for others, and vice versa.

​**PS: Of course they were the good guys too. Here I'm just highlighting the bad ones from the past.

Here are some of the few things that I consider to be a great mystery of the unknown;

1. The Universe and beyond
2. Who Jack the Ripper really was
3. That ‘IT’ factor between two people

The ‘It’ factor. Otherwise known as connection. Otherwise also regarded as a Sumatran Tiger, because you may/may not catch a sight of it even after numerous times in the jungle. And we all know it’s a bloody jungle out there, folks.

The glimpse of this mystery began after I discovered that I could not explain the science of attraction through well, just easy science. In the book The Body Language written by Allan and Barbara Pease, the writers approached this subject through the laws of physical attraction – that your mind responds to traits in an opposite sex that you find to be good candidates for your possible partner in producing your future successors. In other words, the physicality of love is seen here as purely animalistic, a biological response to the need to populate earth.

But then riddle me this. How many times have you sat across the table with someone else on a date, liking how he/she looks but not feeling a twitch of connection whatsoever? I recently had a similar experience, finding myself at dinner with a nice man who seemed to fit the bill but then didn’t. I liked how he looked, I liked how he sounded and I also liked his resume. And yet after a few attempts the connection was not there for me. The ‘it’ factor, whatever that is, did not seem to manifest itself upon us. And so it begs the question, what constitutes a connection?

Connection is not to be confused with chemistry. Chemistry is highly associated to personality traits, where one can easily establish a sense of closeness to another. For instance, a person with an extroverted nature could appear to have chemistry with almost anyone due to their warm character and outgoing personality. On the contrary, a connection is more focused on this strange feeling of attachment and a sense of being understood by someone else. To further enlighten this idea, research shows that comedians are the loneliest and more depressed group of people. This is because although they could easily have chemistry with others, they also lack a certain sense of connection to these people.

I am further baffled by this as I moved through the motions of life and found connection in the strangest of places. I befriended people who are completely different from me and for some reason we just clicked. I hear stories of friends who were separated by someone else for years and yet the connection was never lost. Similarly, I once met a guy by random chance a day before he left town and had the strangest connection, despite not knowing much about each other and coming from completely different worlds. We ended up in a long distance relationship for God knows what reason.

Connection, it seems, spans beyond the physical boundaries of it as well as compatibility in character. You’re not connected to someone just because he/she is a nice person. There are millions of nice people out there. Why this one? And forget trying to correlate connection to similarities or differences. You and I know that some relationships connect because they are similar in many ways, yet there are also ones who thrive because they are the total opposites.
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What I have deciphered so far, however, is that the ‘it’ factor should not be taken for granted of. It is a rare occurrence, but one that is blissful because it is a medium that allows you to be the truest form of yourself to somebody else. It is not fully understood, and this is pretty evident because if it is in fact solved, poets and philosophers and writers would finally stop talking about the mystery magic that surrounds it. All we could do is look out for it if we haven’t found it just yet, and if we already did, appreciate the opportunity to be able to enjoy the rather wonderful feeling of being able to connect to somebody.

I found myself in a place I had been before, one too many times. I was once again the girl who stood in the middle of the dark street, with memories of someone else put in a box, and I carry that box home with me again, alone. These sort of things have happened to me before, some being just mere shrugs of not very significant encounters, and some as let-downs that would last for a few weeks. But this? A few weeks will not cut it.

I hate telling people to move on. Nor do I like being told to move on. What I had come to realize is that a relationship is about two people – only the two of you will ever know the complexities, the depths and the death of your companionship. No one else will ever completely understand it. Therefore listening to what people say you should do is like Kim K telling Kanye West how to make an album. It is with good intent, but it will never completely fit the bill. All you have is your head and your gut.

After all is said and done, many of us end up being in a limbo of emotions. Some days we feel glad that what was not meant to be is now over. Some days, unfortunately, we find ourselves pining over the loss of a soul who used to be someone important in the story of our lives. It is despairing when someone who used to be a part of our memories become a memory themselves. I would find myself to feel like I had somehow fallen down into a deep dark hole, with the pieces scattered around me on the floor. Somehow, I would have to pick them up and learn to assemble them again, albeit broken and a bit bent, and then climb out of that dark hole by myself.

The sad truth about this hole is that nobody can pull us out of it except ourselves. We may have friends and loved ones who would cheer us on to keep climbing out, but it will all need our own doing. Not family, not friends, not even another boy. A lot of people say that you know you have moved on when you find another. This could not be more wrong. I am not a fan of the ‘rebound’ concept. It is not an excuse to delude yourself with other people as a compensation for your own sadness. The real way to know you’re moving on is when you wake up one day and realize that you can think about the past without being emotionally affected by it. With or without someone new.

As you successfully make your way out of this weird, dark hole, the real journey begins. I know people who bounces back as fast as a silly putty, and before you know it off they go again, without much of a pause to reflect on how things have unfolded themselves. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I am not one of those. As much as I try I always end up preferring to sit in my puddle of thoughts, dwelling on lost words and broken promises, feeling like I deserve to do what I want despite what Dr Phil would tell me. I start picking up the bricks again, putting them up one by one until they once again become that wall I had once smashed to the ground in the spirit of trust. Then I remain aloof towards anyone new, because bitterness is an anxious old man. He cringes at the sight of a possible future repeat of the same hurt.

I was watching The Walking Dead all last weekend. There was a character who was dying, and as she was in her final moments she told another character, “Someday this pain will be useful to you”. I think she was talking about being eaten by a zombie, but whatever. You catch my drift, right?
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Because someday, this pain will be useful to me.

I’m sitting here on a particular Sunday morning, enjoying a slice of pear tart that just came out of the oven, watching the cloudy sky outside from the comfort of my home desk. Sometimes random memories would gauge me in the early morning hours, and today it is one that I had a couple of weeks back at the office with a male colleague.

This male colleague, I must first press, is a catch. He was one of those nice guys with an even nicer smile, and he was seeing a lovely girl whom he knew way back when in college but has just started dating. In short, he was the sort of guy who could’ve just ventured out there and become a hot commodity. But instead, we had a conversation about the idea of ‘settling’ or to ‘make do’, which I strongly suspected was based on his current situation.

This subject is one that have left me stirred countless times. How do you know if the one is The One, and at which point do you settle? In fact, this subject bothered me so much that I went to the extent of interviewing all of my happily (and unhappily) married girlfriends, in an attempt to better understand this idea. Of course, whenever you’re in love you will tend to think that the person is The One, until he isn’t. Or perhaps it is just a mediocre relationship where everything is stable but not necessarily mind-blowing – is this the part where we settle?

What I ended up with was a string of answers, which to be frank didn’t help me much. I have a girlfriend who swore it was love at first sight for her, seeing her now-husband from across the room and nothing was ever the same again (we’re jealous of her). There is also one girlfriend who got married after six years of courtship, anchoring on the fact that they’ve been together for so long and would probably never find someone else better. And one other girlfriend was an expression of true bravery. After years of searching and not finding what she was looking for, she settled with a decent man that she was set up with by her relatives. No butterflies, no jitters, nothing. But now it’s a year later and I swear she has never seemed happier.

Like this male colleague of mine would eventually emphasise, are the butterflies-in-the-stomach overrated? Perhaps it is not necessarily what everyone would experience when finding The One. Perhaps instead of focusing on the euphoria of love, one should find goodness wherever they can, and accept that love isn’t necessarily manifested in the feelings of your feet not touching the ground, the excitement to the point of sleeplessness, nor the jitters whenever you see each other’s faces.

Perhaps.

This male colleague seems to have a fair point. I thought about this for a while. It is true that some people find happiness through ‘settling’, and by that I do not at all mean making do with someone who is below your sub-standards. Rather, there are people who chose to proceed with having faith that good is enough, and find peace in life liking each other and being nice to each other. Some people are even lucky enough as to find that through this, they eventually fall in love and the rest are fireworks.

That’s really great. Really. But this morning, as I sat here through my half eaten dessert, I recall the times I fell in love, and then the times where I tried to somehow force myself to fancy somebody, out of the pressures of people, or even out of the pressures I gave myself as a result of self-assessing that I was probably being choosy. And what I recalled was this; those butterflies-in-the-stomach? That can’t-live-without-you kind of love? Those moments where everything dissolves around you except for yourself and the one you’re fond of? I live for that kind of stuff! It is a beautiful feeling, the sort that leaves me feeling as though all those years that weighed me down with age doesn’t seem to matter anymore. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything else for myself except for that kind of stuff.
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So by the end of this little research I did, I came up with two conclusions. First, companionship comes in a variety of ways. One is not better than the other, whether it’s voluntary love or something that evolves as a result of trial. Second, if one has a clear conscience of which route he/she is to take, so be it. Whether it is to settle or to keep finding those butterflies, one should be brave to get out there and find whatever it is that one is searching for. Even if it can sometimes seem a bit bleak, like this morning sky I’m looking at. But as always, grey skies never last forever.