Al Green sings about it. Britanny Murphy in Ramen Girl, mastered the art of cooking Ramen evoking eaters to shed tears to their bowls in the very cheesy fashion. Maroon V made megahit on songs about Jane, Adam’s ex. Throughout the history of pop art and men in general, breaking up can never be more platitudinous yet productive and enlightening. As any Cosmopolitan columnist might write all he-is-just-not-into-you wake up call in different lights, if you cannot move on from a fractured relationship at least what you should do is picking up the pieces you have left behind to build something purposeful for you to get by.
Of course in my case, the so-called four steps from divorce to happiness according to The New Adventure of Old Catherine easily blundered and blended with the rest of the phases conjures no less than lethal roller coaster ride of melancholic overdose and rustic self-pity. In Christine’s world, first you get angry then come the resentment, denial then the anger creeps back. In my world, it’s just another day of a perfect vicious cycle of love-hate juice. This is not a Meg Ryan movie, and you get to stop wanting to be in one. Meg Ryan off screen is the living testament to all the saccharine love the cathartic industry has sweetened your life with. And the lowest pit was when you could actually reflect your break-up with the ever raunchy national politics situation. Apparently, the feeling of getting denied by your own country when you checked that you were not in the voters list at the morning of Legislative Election Day (therefore denied whole access to any discount privileges promoted by the consumptive world that day for being politically active and a shopaholic) was shockingly vexing and ego-demeaning because you had played the idea of not using your right in the first place. The very notion that you actually get ripped off something you have taken for granted was connecting the dots to the emotion when one gets dumped, I just wanted to scream at the top of my lungs on how pathetic life can be.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of vengeance, competitiveness, and sad bliss, I try to do all the things on my dusted wannabe list pending for over quarter of century as a standard defence to any suicidal urge to sleep off with suddenly lucrative sleeping pills. I learned to swim like a frog after laps of hard adjustment to my new amphibian nature and vanishing act of taking benefit of cool dives to hide my tears inside the deep blue. When pool revisited a couple of days ago, in one of my long haul back and forth from the 1.5m area to 4m blanketed by the turquoise fluid, I ducked and watched the glimmering afternoon sunlight crisscrossed against my palms trying to define new lines of destiny as I am kicking through.
I started writing again, setting up awkwardly my first blog, submitting some rushed sappy contemplative film reviews none ever finished reading yet hoping lowly I already got even. But I also learned the power of absence could be so damaging, it broke you on the very sight of his constant disappearance and unexpected appearance. You either wanted to smile or punch him in the face. It just put you back to square one and made you find all along the wallpaper of your mind is the replenishment of him, it tested your very nerve not to flip out silently again in the toilet booth. As I open my eyes every single day, there is the regret, rage, and desolation succumbed to suppressing routine of saving myself from myself and trying to escape the world. It is a personal struggle and he is just another trigger. I became so downcast and wry enough, I helped my friends reworking the timid effort of a screenplay on short film tribute to the very master of romance Wong Kar-wai. I shone my undone complexity and babbled out my ever changing philosophy to any of my new friends who cared to listen and I knew no one including myself understood a word. I just wanted to get it out of the system. I wanted my words printed on the paper and people read it aloud to less the loneliness.
Another escapade that gave a whole new landscape like
The irresistable gluttony over movies marathon, overrated high school moments, delis hopping, ramen, cold beers, and coffee across the town was wiring as much as enlivening times with friends I never thought I had before. Good randomness in life can surprise you most in details and its banality that you just want to have a long-lasting blast of rambling along with your friends until the sun rises and sets. They could be very beat and ordinary at the same time.
And there are those constantly there for me to slap me in the face, the angels of loss times pinned in their own inflictions from flying away yet never once glitch to offer me their wings. I literary take their words of advices letter by letter like jagging the pill into my throat because I can no longer trust my pathetic judgement. The latest powerful top-notch bitterest pill one of them gave me was in a casual talk over after work dinner on how our male friend turned out to be quite a champ in the gentleman department by giving sincere snack and milk rations to his girlfriend during working hours secretly through this friend of mine. Call it lame and unsubstantial, but he just did that little gesture because he was happy if he could make her happy. The very essence of love is in that little tetrapack of milk. That is how I get to call him the Milk Guy.
To add the drama, the ultimate denial came in the form of so-called prophecy of the upcoming match showing up in three weeks since my excited family spilled it one day after visiting the trusted oracle without realizing it would hurt me more to know. I felt ridiculed and lost more than ever to hang on the mere notion of artificial hope. Thus, began the extensive un-self-fulfilling prophecy effort from my part to test the Big Destiny and wondered how in the world I got into this situation in the first place.
Somehow the unlikely zoo trip on a boring Saturday could be the very likely moment for redemption. It was my first time visiting Ragunan. I already visited the zoo of Basel, Ueno, and bird park of Singapore, but never before I went this ecstatic meeting the flimsy giraffe and dusty zebras nor getting jumpy for taking a ride in the undersized monorail car for kids ten feet above the ground with my overweight friend. We walked a long way around, pouring enough sweat against the balmy warm noon and stinging insects then hunger kicking in as we watched the gorilla having lunch gracefully peeling off the orange skins. Hundreds of photo sessions later and waiting the rest taking swan boat rides on the most polluted pool turning to swamp (with seems like the biggest alligator in town sunbathing separated few metres away by a shallow gate), we got back and get our portions of good Tonkotsu Ramen. Then I felt the sad happiness. The feeling that you are alone but no longer lonely and it is okay. That life is manageable once again and you can reach towards any direction you want because you know you can. I guess I stopped to want.
So there goes curbed anger, unbridled resentment and then self-fulfilling denial in my most sobering and exhilarated activities with friends and family, and the scariest part, with myself to forget how much I miss him (or the very idea of a boyfriend to be exact). All these started from the wrong reason of getting over a guy, yet it tries to save me basically from my self-sabotaging urge towards good things; which ironically confused me as this same self-sabotage recently cost me back to the final step of being angry all over again and bailed me from further denial as I dropped old bombs on him and future knowledge that he wouldn’t change to be the Milk Guy when he tried to reconnect and have another self-centric parasitic all-too-familiar catch ups. In a nutshell, I think I finally had the courage to dump and not wanting him back. What a leap of hate, but do I really being honest with myself? Does it mean it is mended?
