The story goes: my would-be partner, when we were just briefly acquainted, read an essay I wrote about being chronically depressed and suicidal. She was so struck by it, she did something I later knew was uncharacteristic of her – she sent me a message on Facebook telling me how she felt about it.
A few exchanges later, she asked if I would be keen to hang out.
What she didn’t know: a few weeks prior I had met her for the second time at an event, she had caught my eye (and probably a bit of my heart) because she brought home some excess food from the event to prevent food wastage. She became stuck on my mind thereafter, but I resolved not to do anything about it. I was tired of falling in love, I had a ton of baggage, and I didn’t want to drag anyone into the darkness of my world.
But she texted first. I tried so hard to run away from my inescapable fate. I thought we could just hang out and be friends, as long as I kept my feelings a secret.
It turned out she couldn’t keep hers a secret, and that was the day I discovered that there is nowhere to hide when fate knocks on the door.
18 months later today, we are both still lovingly intertwined in this inescapable twist of fate. I am still trapped in the darkness of my world, and she is still by my side. I don’t know how I can use words to describe: the awareness of what it takes to be with someone like me, the gratitude and yet the guilt when someone is willing to just be still with me, the love and trust that grows a little every single day when this person doesn’t abandon me like how I was used to. Every day till today I am still waiting for her to leave, to love me a little less.
The paradox that comes with people who has a fear of abandonment: the more we trust, the more we fear. I know with great clarity that my defences are eroded with every little bit of love, in parallel the reservoir for grief deepens.
I tell her I am almost like walking dead, she tells me I am very alive. For a long time I waited for her rose-tinted glasses to fall off.
They did fall. But maybe, just maybe, there is a poignant beauty in loving the harshness of truth rather than a illusory romance. There is the sort of giddy butterfly-inducing chemical reaction that is often mistaken for love, and then there is a sort of love that can only come with fortitude, one that can only be built upon facing trials and tribulations together.
She spells the colours of my darkness. With her I can be utterly myself, a blessing I don’t think I deserve, and it must be a reward accumulated from three previous lifetimes. Most of the time these days I think life is meaningless and the universe doesn’t give a shit, but when I think about us I can’t deny the sense of inevitability, how everything has unfolded the way it exactly should be.
Love is probably the most misused, misunderstood, over-simplified and yet overcomplicated word in the universe. But there’s no reason for someone to always be looking forward to your awakening or returning, as though as you’re her favourite collection of particles in the entire universe.
It is even more unreasonable for the other party to feel exactly the same way.
That has been the phenomena for 18 months, inclusive of 12 months of living in the same space. During moments like this when I think about us in our entirety, all the odds we had to overcome in order to be with each other –
I feel like I am the luckiest.