#Me seeing them eventually getting deep over good coffee walled off by a thousand obscure books and The Cure in the BG

[recitedemise]

Sliske's really ought to check if he's a tracking device on him. There's no other reason, surely, for how Gale is suddenly clamoring his way, his bright eyes beaming and outright twinkling, and his cheeks, wind-bitten, all winter-nipped. He enters the book store, a chintzy hovel more a bookworm's secret. In the corner, a humble station serves peculating coffee, and quieter than anything, a vinyl sings. "Spending an evening with Robert Smith without me? I don't know whether to be offended or delighted in your continual show of exceptional taste." Gale grins. Wind-swept, he looks just a little bit like an over-eager puppy, one with a leather suitcase, a thousand papers, and a late-lecture-glaze. "Ah. I didn't mean to startle you. Admittedly, I meant only to swipe a new read after the day I had when I'd suddenly happened upon you--and not a moment too soon if your song choice is any indication. It really is quite palpable, this one. On my darker days, I'd played it like a litany. May I join you?" / @abysswarden.

[randomlycynical]

FAQ (pt. 21)

Q: What is your biggest regret in life?

A (S.L.): What a question. I suppose all I can offer is the truth. 

Lately, in those strange, empty minutes before I fall asleep, I’ve found myself looking up old pieces of me and her that I’ve left around the Internet: in dead blogs, in old accounts, hidden Facebook albums, thinking that maybe a word or a picture can teleport me back to where I keep on going back to.

Q: “Her”? Who are you talking about?

A: This girl I met when I was in my first semester of graduate school. In hindsight, I guess it was inevitable that I’d fall in love with her. She was the only other Asian in my program, so naturally we gravitated towards each other, bonding over our love of William Blake, Howard Zinn and A Tribe Called Quest. And of course, nothing energized us more than our disdain for white people, which our program consisted 90% of, as you can well imagine for a History department. 

Q: What happened to her?

A: She and I started to see each other more and more, getting coffee together, studying in the library together, texting each other all the time.

One day, I invited her to a party a friend of mine in the Linguistics department was holding a few weeks after the semester had started. 

She agreed to come along. I knew this would be my chance. 

There, both of us were enjoying ourselves, mingling, a few drinks in. I introduced her to my friends, and I felt something deep inside me that felt so... warm. I really felt as if we were a true couple. 

I decided to make a move. When we went to refill our drinks, I leaned in close to her face.

Suddenly, she stumbled away and into the bathroom, closing the door behind her, sick beyond belief after one too many shots.

Concerned, I hovered close by the bathroom door, but being pretty drunk myself, I couldn’t manage more than a few weak words against the volume of the music coming from downstairs. I leaned against the wall and slid to the floor.

A few minutes later -- or hours, I had lost track of time at that point -- I woke up with her on the floor next to me, her head leaning against my shoulder. I woke her up and asked if she was alright.

She said she was better now. I asked if she usually gets this drunk when she goes out. That’s when she told me. 

It turns out that she had been going through a rough patch with her long distance boyfriend and that when she’s upset, she usually ends up drinking even more.

Q: We don’t have to continue if you don’t want to. Would you like to stop?

A: No. It’s fine. I’m fine. Please, just... let me continue.

She told me that she and her boyfriend had been dating for 2 years after they met each other while studying abroad in China. He was a Singaporean national who went to the same school as she did studying business and finance, but they had somehow never crossed paths before on campus.

So in a strange new environment, thousands of miles away from home, among strangers, among new friends, among an entirely alien culture, she tells me that they fell totally in love. They were aligned so perfectly on every level. “Spirtually, emotionally, mentally, physically.” Her words.

It was then I asked her his name, but she refused to tell me, or even to show me a picture of him. But eventually she did agree to show me one. In it, they were together on a mountain in China, with the sun shining brightly, her smile radiant, her eyes closed and her face tilted upward, as if she were the center of the universe itself because she was with her beloved. She blurred out his face, the colors obscured and melted, circling and swirling around his features. This cruel, ambiguous lacuna.

When they returned to the U.S. and came back to campus the next semester, it was like their honeymoon period. 

But then it came time for him to return to Singapore. His student visa had expired after they graduated and he had no intentions to renew it. He was always meant to work at his father’s company, a rather large corporation over there that was quite profitable. Actually, "profitable” would be an understatement. He wasn’t coming back.

...

What do you do when you know your time together is limited? When you both know that the relationship is terminal? That you’re essentially holding in your hands a love with no future?

This was the terrible problem she faced. As it grew closer and closer to the day that they had to part ways forever, she told me that she seemed to go through each stage of grief every single day, all the way from denial to acceptance. And then she would start all over again the next day. She described it as having death pains, the phantom hurt that prisoners on Death Row have as they await their inevitable punishment. She lost sleep. She couldn’t concentrate on anything. She became like a living corpse in love with someone who might as well be dying. 

She hated him, she hated herself, she fell into depression at random times in the day. She became irritable at her friends, her parents. She would resent him, scream at him for leaving, as if it were his fault. Then she would love him again, love him even more than she did before. She would buy him things, perform these random loving gestures, hug him even tighter, in the hopes that maybe it would be enough to make him stay.

What do you do, she asked me, sitting on that floor in my friend’s apartment, when you know that all of your love is going to waste? To know that everything you do with someone doesn’t matter, and that every thing, every kiss, every embrace, every word, is gone forever the instant it’s over? 

What do you do when you love someone so much, but it’s not enough to make them stay? What do you do when your love doesn’t matter?

What could be more tragic?

You think when you’re a kid that love can do anything -- move mountains, reroute rivers, pluck the stars out from the sky. But when you grow old you realize that your love can’t even move the air in front of you. It can mean absolutely nothing at all, this thing that was once so full of meaning.

After he left the country, they started their long distance relationship. Because of the 12 hour time difference, they could only communicate with each other at very specific points in the day. But they made it work for 2 years, calling, texting, Skyping when they could. They even downloaded programs on their computers that let them watch movies together while videochatting. They did this all not knowing when they would see each other next... or if they even would. 

Pure and utter agony, she told me. That’s what it’s been like to carry a love with no future, no end in sight, no goal, around with her for the last two years. To want someone so much, but to never have because of situations you can’t control; to scream at the mountains and to tell them to move. She would have married him.

It was then that she started to cry. 

Q: What did you do after you heard all of this?

A: I took her in my arms, called a cab back to my apartment and we made love. 

I made love with her desperately, despite knowing that when she looked at me, she didn’t see me -- couldn’t see me. She may as well have been looking through my skull at the ceiling above us. 

The morning after, I promised myself I wouldn’t love her, after learning what I did. I told her this, too. I wanted to be honest. I told her I refused to be a surrogate, a rebound. Both of us were fine with this.

But no matter what I said that morning, I loved despite myself.  

A few weeks after the party, she told me she had broken things off with her boyfriend for good. A love with no future in sight wasn’t good for anybody, she told me. 

We formed this kind of liminal, amorphous relationship after this. We went out together, went to restaurants together, held hands, had sex -- we were by every definition, except one, a couple. 

I loved in spite of myself. 

No matter how much time we spent together, though, I knew the awful truth. It revealed itself in tiny ways that even she wouldn’t notice. How she’d check WeChat on her phone constantly, the way her eyes looked when she saw a Chinese or Singaporean flag or a married couple holding hands or a mother carrying her child, or smelled the food walking through Chinatown.

I knew that despite how hard I held her in my arms, she would always be somewhere far away. Our relationship -- if you could even call it that -- was a lie.

I knew that I could never be the person that she wanted me so desperately to be. I could never be him. I could never measure up to this idea of perfection. This impossible smudge, whose perfect features were hidden behind a blur of colors that I could never see. All I could do was hope that my awkward gestures, my clumsy lovemaking, my futile touches, my vapid jokes, my skinny, short frame, would somehow be enough to make her stay. 

After a while, I fooled myself. I tried to fool myself. I wanted to fool myself so badly. I led myself to believe that maybe there was some sort of truth in the heart of all of the lies. That maybe our acts of love could mean something. Or, if not all of them, at least some of them. That maybe it was possible that...  

But in the end, there was nothing that I could do. We are all powerless in the face of true love and the scars that it leaves. 

To have someone else, to be someone else, to love someone else, to be loved by someone else -- all are equally impossible. 

These girls don’t belong to us. They never have, and they never will. They will always belong to someone else. But most of all, they belong to themselves. We are nothing. For what are you in the face of her hopes and dreams and fantasies and grief and lost loves? What if none of those things involve you? We are all small, so very small, in the face of a love so large. All any of us can ever hope to do is pass through another’s life like a shadow, if we are even so lucky. 

[pause]

Lately, in these idle months since graduating, I have come to the realization that some people are just completely and totally alone in their sadness, and that has to be okay.

There are just some places where no matter how hard you try, you will simply never be able to get to. So the best we can do is let people be selfish, secretive, furtive. It is their right. It is their coping mechanism, their defense, their precious center. What right have you, an intruder who would invade their beautiful, hidden kingdom, to know anything about anyone? Who cares for you?

Perhaps all you can do is to hold and to kiss and to love and to never let go and to hurt and to suffer and to doubt and to be alone, all in the service of another. And shouldn’t that be okay too?

I have been old ever since I started loving her. I have been old ever since she left me. All I have left to comfort me and warm me and to alight dimly the path ahead of me as I creep into old age is a smoldering pile of our memories, the smoke from which are my regrets. What could be more regretful?