To find a way into someone else's life, we need to find a way out of ours - Part 2

In the fall of 2022, I finally made the trip to California. 

8600 miles 

My former lover, A, moved out of Singapore into California. I swore to fly down to California to see her. It was the years of longing, an ember that glowed both brightly and weakly, yearning for that moment of rekindling. Perhaps it was nostalgia, or a study of tragic, foolish optimism in a hopeless, dead-end love. 

During those years, I was in the growing phase of my career and suffocated by student loans that I couldn’t afford to. Or until the fall of 2022, I thought maybe it was time.

40 miles

The air of San Francisco smelt of anxiety, dread and anticipation all at once. I texted her to let her know that I was in town; the intensity of the past enveloping into the present, spilling over. She had moved into Los Altos with her fiancé, a city 40 miles south of San Francisco. She texted back a couple of great places in Los Altos to hang. She remembered my favourite drink. 

Romantic movies typically depict stories of star-crossed lovers in their N-th year reunion blinking their tears away in eventual fairytale embrace. But for us, it wasn’t anything like Abramović and her ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010, MoMA).

It wasn’t at all.

I pondered. I could make the final 40 miles and she could make the time. We would spend a lovely afternoon together. We would spend the time updating each other on our lives (Gasp, I became a prodomme in Singapore! But I digress) but we would have been so detached from each other's lives that we probably couldn’t have known each other as well as we could anymore, yet I’m sure we still knew every bit of each other.

Three days before my trip ended, I picked up the phone and called her, “I don’t think I’ll be able to make the trip down to Los Altos. My schedule is quite packed,” I paused, waiting to feel her emotions through the line. 

“Why not?” It felt like a sombre ‘Why not’, but also peppered with a tinge of relief mixed with nostalgia.  

I wasn’t ready to meet A. I had nothing new of myself to show her, something that I could be proud to show how much I had grown alongside the melancholy of the years. If I made that trip down, we’d definitely have a good time catching up, but just as our hands would have slid away from each other forcing the final farewells to be finally bade, we would return back to our own lives, untwined and unraveled; just like how it has already been. Maybe she felt likewise. Nostalgia is sometimes best served as an aching sentiment that the longing, no matter how intense, the past would just stay as the past. 

It was a very revealing sentiment - the 8600 miles between Singapore and California intended to be the great divide between two souls, crossing over symbolised the pilgrimage of love and reconnection. But alas, the 8600 miles felt smaller than the final 40 miles. 

During the last night in San Francisco, I visited Power Exchange, a sex club off the Theatre District. The music was a cover as swingers cooed into each other in an intimate embrace. My physical self was there, but not my mind. I snuck out for a smoke, ready to call it an early night.

I smiled at the half naked girl with her partner’s coat draped around her as she walked out of the club and signalled to me for a light. “Are you ok? Do you want to join Raphael and me later?” She leaned into my gaze. I accepted a perfunctory drink from Raphael earlier on. 

“I need more drinks,” I smiled back and shuffled out of her gaze.  It was a chilly walk back to my hotel. I recalled a poem written by Alex Dimitrov, The Years, 2022.

8600 miles

Back in Singapore, I recounted my travel stories with my friends. A few checked in if I met up with A. “Why didn’t you?” was the collective response.

I reflected - this trip wasn’t about a misconnection, nor was it about recollection of trauma and formative grief over the past seven years. It was above love, and a love that lived on. And I quote the best line from Marvel’s WandaVision, ‘What is grief, if not love persevering?’

Maybe I’ll close that final 40 miles this year.