Are you not entertained? By which I'm referring to the "blog war" of comments in the entry below. It missed the all time record of 15 by just 3 comments. As you, my dear astute and observant reader can read for yourself, me and Michelle are officially, as the Germans would say, Kaput.
So I know in post entitled 100 that I wouldn't be falling back on dwelling on the past. I have, obviously, not adhered to my own resolutions. In fact, it was said post and my impassioned(read;I did not think it through when I wrote it) writing that lead to the dissolution of our friendship. I would be lying if I said I did not feel a tug at my heart when it happened, but that's the bed of thorns I chose to lie on. Words have been said which I can never take back and I just have to accept fate as it is. Having said that, I will try, in an effort to get over said former 3 time apple of my eye, to retell our entire 8 year history. Bear and humor me in doing so. Its just my way of getting over it.
We met in Form 4, which would put a starting date to this roller coaster relationship in the year 2001, on that miraculous thing called IRC. I was on a Final Fantasy kick then and (disturbingly) attracted to the fictional character Rinoa. No prizes for guessing who had said nickname. So after the initial chatting, we graduated to another platform of internet chatting, that is to say, ICQ. Yes, that wonderful programme that goes "uh oh" when ever you receive an incoming message not too dissimilar from MSN's ring/tone/beep hybrid of today,and to the eventual evolution to the Phone. Yes, that's how it works in the cyber world. Moving from visual(reading) to audio(voice) was considered a step up back in the day. Keep in mind that the Ipod had not yet been invented and what would pass off as a USB thumbdrive with headphones with 256 mb space that could play 16 songs today was considered the height of technology then. The seeds of our chemistry had been sown there. To say that I fell in love(hard) would be an understatement and disservice to the emotions I felt then. I mean, spending 8 hours on the phone and not even realizing it(till the parents got the bill that is), 60rm on a dozen roses for valentines for someone I haven't even seen before...I couldn't be happier. What we said and did over the phone of course is something between myself and her and I would like to keep it that way. This went for about a couple of months or so, with me being blissfully in love. I was to find out later that I was also blissfully ignorant of the fact that she had been seeing someone else in the real world and when the news was received, it was not received well. I remember lots of sobbing, throwing of inanimate objects against other inanimate objects and a severe case of the asthma. I think at this juncture the seeds of my fragile emotional state were also planted, though I have a feeling this insidious rot started the day my parents divorced, but that's a story for another, more melancholic time.
So post sobbing and asthma attacks, I even spoke to her said real life lover. I said, the best man won(Yes, you read right. MAN) and he praised me for being humble and gracious in defeat(like that was going to help me in what way exactly?) in the pursuit of Michelle. And so I moved on. Or so I thought. This period is what I would like to term the Voon "the tyrant" Ping times. Again, the modus operandi here was (surprise surprise) the Irc and ICQ and phone method. In this regard, I must, for once, offer sincerest apologies to VP as, with the advantage of hindsight, she turned out to be nothing but a rebound. Now, why the tyrant title you ask? This is a snippet of how our usual conversations went.. ".. Where are you?!?!?! I'm with my dad. I told you I spend every Friday having dinner with him. Come home now!!! But I just started having dinner. If you don't come home now Im breaking up with you!!" As you can imagine, conditions were intolerable to say the least and the relationship lasting only 3 months. I was the one having dinner with my dad on Friday's by the way, just to clear up any doubt and confusion.
So post SPM and onto the college years, the best years of my so called life so far. I mean, talk about transition. No more uniforms, smoking(which I picked up during SPM anyway so no big deal), drinking, moustache and sideburns growing, independence of sorts from the strictures of school life... and them college girls. One of which happens to be Ms Cristine "I avoided you like a plague because my dick of a boyfriend hates you" Seow. Again, another tale for another time. Pre Ms Seow getting together with said dick of a boyfriend, I was making the moves on her. And i had supposed things were going well, you know, what with the dancing classes(YES, you read it right), the lunches and other assorted social activities, when Michelle shows up in my life again.
She played the Damsel in Distress. I played Sir Gallahad, the chinese version. Said distress required face to face meeting and in those 10 minutes, i guess you could say the old feelings came back.For both of us. We hooked up again. (or is this counted the first time since there was no secret lover i was not informed about, I hope, and this was in fact the first time I had seen her in the flesh). All thoughts of Ms Seow vanished in a split second and I only had Michelle on the brain. We went out on dates and did all the expected couple things, except kiss. No, we're both not Muslim or have some saliva transmitted disease. We just didn't do it for reasons I cant, till today, fathom. It was bliss again for me, for the better part of 5 months. Then, again for reasons I can't fathom or ever got an explanation for, things soured. We both hit a rut and it was mutually agreed that we both break up. Painful, yeah, but this was the only time we broke of relations in a cordial and amicable manner and was the least painful.
So there I was again, single , alone. Ms Seow, as you probably guessed, ended up with dick bf and as explained above, avoided me like the plague. I guess this was when i started doing 40 sticks a day and boozing every weekend. sometimes even drinking alone. The emotional fortitude was not at its all time high. Then 2003 came and it turned out to be the very best times of my life. Michelle turned up again, playing the damsel in distress(again). I was to discover that the cause of her distress was an ex lesbian partner and it involved financial matters (seeds being sown again here people) Being me, I again relented to helping her out and the scenes of the previous year played out again. I still loved her very much and she felt safe that she had me to fall back on. That someone genuinely cared for her. We got back together again(yes, again. that's 3 times). And we did it with a vengeance. 2003 turned out to be the year i got my first kiss and the year my virginity was lost. I was happy, and I believed we were happy. Until the I-completely-lost-my -mind- because- of- her- infidelity incident.
Again, thorough sheer blissful ignorance on my part and deceit on hers, Michelle was seeing a lesbian behind my back. And when she finally broke the news, I was distraught to say the least. I remember the loss of appetite, uncontrollable sobbing, and drinking to the point i don't even remember what happened post drinking. And that was the day before I lost my mind. Having been a perceived "happy" couple, she left a few of her mementos at my place and wanted to take them back personally. Fine, whatever, just take your shit and get the hell out of my life were the thoughts that were running through my mind. She arrived the next night, with the fucking girlfriend stealer in tow. I not so much as handed her her bag of belongings but threw them in her face. All the while, that fucking bitch(the stealer) was smiling at me, so fucking proud that she stole Michelle from a man. I lost it. I did a blood curling scream, broke the shoe rack, threw the keys into the driveway and smashed anything remotely smashable. I punched the wall till my skin broke, and then threw about 3 to 4 glasses which promptly broke. I then proceeded to take a baseball bat and smashed a lot of chairs. After that, I don't remember what happened. All I remember was sitting among a lot of debris with a baseball bat gripped loosely in my hands and blood dripping onto the floor. I'm pretty sure it was from my hand and not someone I murdered in my frenzied state.Hopefully..
Then i sobbed like a little bitch. I called my dad of all people and told him what had happened. I don't have a close relationship with my father, him having left the family physically and somewhat emotionally since i was 11. Calling him was the last thing I would have expected to do. But at that point and time, I was so thoroughly mind fucked that all I could do was call a family member, with their unreserved and unconditional love, and I chose my dad. And that's when he knew i was smoking. Simply because I told him I was, in that fucked up state of mind. He tried his level best to be a comforting father, and yeah, I did feel slightly better. But the week and a half after that passed by like a daze. Literally. I didn't know what was going on, hardly ate, and slept a lot. And I think this was where i started hating lesbians. I brooded on it for the better part of 2 years. And I let it fester willingly. I mean, could you blame me then and now? The physical and emotional scars are still there today. Every time i see that crack in the wall or the scar on my knuckles i could only think about that lesbian bitch. If she wasn't a woman i would have, quite honestly, killed her. It left me scarred, traumatised and its still a sensitive wound today, even if I do a good job of hiding it at times(speaking metaphorically here people. If the physical wound still hurt today I would be very worried from a medical and health point of view)
After that was the whole Gi Gyn incident which, suffice to say, in my fragile emotional state post girlfriend stealing lesbians bitch, didn't end well. In regards to Michelle, I would get the occasional call, to see if I'm alive or not, and how I'm doing. Time healed the wounds a little bit, and we started being civil again. It took a while to forgive her(and its still taking a while). But I think, now with this introspection, I I was blinded to the fact that I didn't apportion the blame enough to Michelle and laid it mostly against that other bitch. What can i say? I had a soft sport for my first love. And the chemistry remained. The feelings were always there I'll admit. But we both( or rather I) knew it was never ever going to be the same again. So we decided that we could remain friends. And for a time it was good.
She was by this time, a full blown lesbian. The thought of it rankled me at the time, and obviously still does to this day. But I hid it and tried to look past it, for the sake of our friendship which I held close to my heart. I had rather have her as a friend, then not at all. Being a friend of course, beholds one to a position of less importance than say, family or significant other. With this in mind we only contacted infrequently, her time being mostly devoted to whichever lesbian partner she was with at the time. I felt a pinch of jealousy, obviously, but was in no position to voice my opinions. We drifted apart physically and somewhat emotionally, but again the feelings were there and so was the chemistry if and when we talked or met up. In this time I saw the world a little bit. Literally. I was off in the UK and part of Europe( I don't care what you say, Italy and Amsterdam(airport terminal) counts as me being in more than one European country). I experienced new things and Michelle was temporarily not the centre of my world for once, though always an afterthought in the back of my mind. Having returned to Malaysia, I set about a seemingly pre set path of life doing things I didn't want to but did it anyway because I considered it right. Goes to show that my power's of deduction and reasoning are not up to par with Mr. Sherlock's.
Last year, during my failed attempt at the clp, I was once again in contact with Michelle. And things were at their usual . Friendly and platonic. With a smidgen of us revelling in the chemistry we shared and the undertones of desire for new experiences in old comforts on my part. And i felt the rekindling of past emotions and foolishly wanted us to work again. I subsequently left to the States to see my mother and I tried to keep in touch regularly. Again, she found another lesbian partner(that's like what? 7 already? I don't know, I didn't meticulously keep count, nor would I have wanted to) and i was relegated to friend only and I don't have time for you status. That and her work. Which didn't seem to deter her in finding said partner. Hey, another blow to my already fragile heart. Its like as if i set myself up to get fucked over by her at will. We exchanged words and temporarily lost our friendship then and there, with me in the States but diplomacy and a willingness to apologize for my brash(?) behaviour managed to redeem our relationship again. I didn't realize then that it was a foreshadowing of things to come.
Back from the States, we still kept in contact, albeit again infrequently. And I tried to keep it platonic. Key word here being "tried". Things between her and he partner inevitably soured, as the familiar pattern of her relationships always seem to dictate. And on Chinese new year this year, we met, as friends, and also as two lonely people with a shared past. We hung out as we usually did, and the more time we spent, the more our feelings got rekindled. The first and second social activity with her this year ended with a kiss. Why we both did it, I will never know, but it invariably led to a strengthening of feelings for one another. We went out, as something in between a friend and, something else. In fact, we went out more now than we ever did when we were supposedly in love. I don't think I've ever seen that many movies in such a short space of time. Well, comparatively to my usual cinema going habits anyway, which equaled once every 3 to 4 months. I made the first move foolishly after watching slumdog. I had delusions of grandeur that i was Jamal and she was Latika. It escaped my mind that she was in fact having a its-complicated-fling with someone else and for once I let my opinions and my heart wear itself on my sleeves. That is to say, I didn't like it and I let her know it. Like I said, delusions and denials.
Make no mistake. I foolishly thought we could make it work again. 4th time's the charm. Despite the fact that all my family and friends would disapprove in a plethora of frowns and tut tuts and numerous round table discussions(arguments) on my decision. I thought that love only mattered between two people and what was important was that i was, for once, happy, but it seemed to all sides, Michelle included, that my happiness doesn't mean jack shit. This was the backdrop against which my pursuit was set, and like all my other pursuits, I failed. Michelle perceived me to be clingy, spouting such casually barbed words as, "I don't have feelings for you (even if I kissed you)" and thus began the ignoring. Because, you know, the way the world works is that you run away from your problems without addressing it(problem =me). And, for the umpteenth time, I was hurt again, more by the suddenness of such ignoring rather than the substance behind it, which was in itself as flimsy as a guy on crutches. I knew that it wouldn't work for the 4th time, coming to the slow revelations that things would never be the same between us, that she was hated by my family(not without reason) and that she was overall still confused and, when in confusion, retreated to her comfort zone that is lesbianism.
It hurt that she would have used the copped out reason of me being too smart for her, or that I was being too clingy, when we only hung out on the weekends since we're both working. This, after all the time we spent together, was what broke the camels back and culminated in my "butches think they have dicks" commentary. It was used in the context of moving on, if only people would have read it properly, but I guess reading the metaphorical and contextual meaning of sentences is a lost art these days. And so 8 years of friendship got washed down the drain over, of all things, fucking semantics.
So that's it, our 8 year history compiled into 3000 words. It was more like 5000. But i decided to leave a few things out that will only remain between me and Michelle, as we promised each other a lifetime ago. So what was this entire exercise in futility for? Honestly, from the first words, I have no fucking idea. Perhaps as a chapter closing? Perhaps as therapy for a guy who;s clearly hurting but too proud to ask for help? One last good look at the rubble and ruins of the relationship I've spent blood sweat and dears building before leaving to build a new one and reinforce others? I don't know. I really don't. I don't know if we will ever speak again or if we see each other on the street randomly we will stop and say hi. I can't predict the future. Whatever may come, it's been a whole load of fun and a whole lot of grief as well. The time has come to say goodbye, whether for now, for good, forever, we can't say, but it's goodbye nonetheless. And thank you for the memories. All of them.
You're still here reader? Jesus. I didn't think anyone would want to get through all that. Thanks for reading. No comments are welcomed. Nor do I expect any.
Apologies for the text differential. Blogger is, as usual, fucking up.
