This Funky Mood
I watched Ghostbusters with my parents at West Mall tonight. The movie was average; all the funny bits were in the trailer. Chris Hemsworth, however, is hot. It does not seem to make any sense that a man is capable of looking as hot as he did in a plain white t-shirt and jeans, and so the extent to which I was mesmerised by his hotness in his extended dancing scene during the credits was somewhat mind-boggling.
We had dinner at Sakae Sushi for want of a better place to go (the Chinese restaurant that we'd wanted to go to was full). I was really tired for some reason, and I wasn't in the mood to be physically inside West Mall, physically surrounded by what felt like the whole neighbourhood. Something about West Mall depresses me; it seems to embody the precise banal quality of life that I am desperate to avoid. It represents the kind of bland, surburban life that scares the living shit out of me. Am I arrogant for thinking that I am better than that and/or that I want more than that?
To what ends, and for what purpose? I am feeling really stressed out and unmotivated. I did very little work today and I feel as if I can't do this, that maybe I am a West Mall Girl and I just don't know it, or refuse to admit it. Am I in denial? What made me think that I could do a PhD? Cambridge admissions obviously made a mistake. I am so tired.
Kevin asked me a few days ago, when our morning tennis session was rudely disrupted by a sudden downpour (the same thing would happen again the next morning; I even took the MRT all the way to fucking Lorong Chuan), what I would like to do with my life in an ideal situation. Without hesitation, I immediately answered, 'I want to write novels.'
So much for that. I haven't written anything since 2008. What am I doing with myself? When is this half-heartedness going to go away?
*
G sneaks into my mind virtually everywhere I go. I am reminded of him even when I am somewhere that we hadn't been to...like West Mall, for instance. I walked past Coffee Bean and I immediately thought of that time when he suddenly went cold and told me that it made sense to hang out with me; the next day, I went to the Coffee Bean and wrote about how awful that made me feel in my then-diary, which was also the notebook that he gave me when we went to Books Actually on our first real date. Walking through the bus interchange to the car park reminded me of the night when we had another depressing conversation about 'us' at One Rochester, which made me so sad that I walked home from the bus interchange, tears streaming down my face. Even in Cambridge; there is a particular Pret a Manger that always reminds me of him. It reminds me of the time when he responded to my 'happy birthday' text in a series of messages, which I saw when I went to Pret for lunch, and I sat outside, next to some construction workers happily smoking away, texting him with the biggest, most ridiculous smile on my face. 'We should definitely see each other in Singapore' was what he said then. Later, I went back to my room and had a Skype call with him. I remember how happy it'd made me as if it'd happened yesterday.
It's hard to imagine that it's almost been a year since I met him. Despite the passage of time, he still feels so frustratingly unresolved. We've tentatively made plans to meet on the morning of 11 August for coffee at 10ish (his idea), and although I feel quite apprehensive about it because of how drastically he affected me, the truth is, I really want to see him. I don't expect anything to change; I'm not sure I even want that. I just want reality to catch up with the inchoate bittersweet romance that's stuck in my head. These memories of him that I have - they are so vivid, the feelings so immediate, that I need them counterbalanced by what I am hoping would be some awkwardness, some distance, some severance of the connection that we had, so that I can finally let go.
I'd started thinking about G again sometime in March. It made me compare my relationship with Dominic to the passion and the intensity and the romance that I had with G, and the relationship in which I actively held back obviously paled in comparison. There is nothing fair about that, of course. I really did D a huge disservice, and I really hope that he finds someone who can love him the way that I didn't and couldn't. It seems like I shifted the goal posts mid-way through the relationship; I vividly remember telling Barry over dinner at Vedanta once that I was fine with the placid nature of the dynamics between D and me. He wasn't quite convinced that a relationship could work without passion, but I thought that I wanted something simple and calm because of how out of control my feelings for G were.
I was clearly wrong. I need to be excited about meeting my boyfriend, disappointed when I don't see him, and I need to miss him when he's gone for two weeks; and when he's back, I need to greet him more passionately than a lame peck on the lips. I need the initial fireworks, and then settling into a comfortable boredom.
Perhaps it would've been like that with G if our lives had been aligned..but they weren't. Our ships have passed each other and it's been too many nights since. I don't want to hang on to these beautiful memories of an unsustainable whirlwind romance anymore. I need to let go.
We had dinner at Sakae Sushi for want of a better place to go (the Chinese restaurant that we'd wanted to go to was full). I was really tired for some reason, and I wasn't in the mood to be physically inside West Mall, physically surrounded by what felt like the whole neighbourhood. Something about West Mall depresses me; it seems to embody the precise banal quality of life that I am desperate to avoid. It represents the kind of bland, surburban life that scares the living shit out of me. Am I arrogant for thinking that I am better than that and/or that I want more than that?
To what ends, and for what purpose? I am feeling really stressed out and unmotivated. I did very little work today and I feel as if I can't do this, that maybe I am a West Mall Girl and I just don't know it, or refuse to admit it. Am I in denial? What made me think that I could do a PhD? Cambridge admissions obviously made a mistake. I am so tired.
Kevin asked me a few days ago, when our morning tennis session was rudely disrupted by a sudden downpour (the same thing would happen again the next morning; I even took the MRT all the way to fucking Lorong Chuan), what I would like to do with my life in an ideal situation. Without hesitation, I immediately answered, 'I want to write novels.'
So much for that. I haven't written anything since 2008. What am I doing with myself? When is this half-heartedness going to go away?
*
G sneaks into my mind virtually everywhere I go. I am reminded of him even when I am somewhere that we hadn't been to...like West Mall, for instance. I walked past Coffee Bean and I immediately thought of that time when he suddenly went cold and told me that it made sense to hang out with me; the next day, I went to the Coffee Bean and wrote about how awful that made me feel in my then-diary, which was also the notebook that he gave me when we went to Books Actually on our first real date. Walking through the bus interchange to the car park reminded me of the night when we had another depressing conversation about 'us' at One Rochester, which made me so sad that I walked home from the bus interchange, tears streaming down my face. Even in Cambridge; there is a particular Pret a Manger that always reminds me of him. It reminds me of the time when he responded to my 'happy birthday' text in a series of messages, which I saw when I went to Pret for lunch, and I sat outside, next to some construction workers happily smoking away, texting him with the biggest, most ridiculous smile on my face. 'We should definitely see each other in Singapore' was what he said then. Later, I went back to my room and had a Skype call with him. I remember how happy it'd made me as if it'd happened yesterday.
It's hard to imagine that it's almost been a year since I met him. Despite the passage of time, he still feels so frustratingly unresolved. We've tentatively made plans to meet on the morning of 11 August for coffee at 10ish (his idea), and although I feel quite apprehensive about it because of how drastically he affected me, the truth is, I really want to see him. I don't expect anything to change; I'm not sure I even want that. I just want reality to catch up with the inchoate bittersweet romance that's stuck in my head. These memories of him that I have - they are so vivid, the feelings so immediate, that I need them counterbalanced by what I am hoping would be some awkwardness, some distance, some severance of the connection that we had, so that I can finally let go.
I'd started thinking about G again sometime in March. It made me compare my relationship with Dominic to the passion and the intensity and the romance that I had with G, and the relationship in which I actively held back obviously paled in comparison. There is nothing fair about that, of course. I really did D a huge disservice, and I really hope that he finds someone who can love him the way that I didn't and couldn't. It seems like I shifted the goal posts mid-way through the relationship; I vividly remember telling Barry over dinner at Vedanta once that I was fine with the placid nature of the dynamics between D and me. He wasn't quite convinced that a relationship could work without passion, but I thought that I wanted something simple and calm because of how out of control my feelings for G were.
I was clearly wrong. I need to be excited about meeting my boyfriend, disappointed when I don't see him, and I need to miss him when he's gone for two weeks; and when he's back, I need to greet him more passionately than a lame peck on the lips. I need the initial fireworks, and then settling into a comfortable boredom.
Perhaps it would've been like that with G if our lives had been aligned..but they weren't. Our ships have passed each other and it's been too many nights since. I don't want to hang on to these beautiful memories of an unsustainable whirlwind romance anymore. I need to let go.