I Wanna Know What Love Is, I Want Me To Show Me

I'm probably not the first one to ask this, but really, what the fuck is love?

We all want it? Teenage fantasy? Maybe Jorja Smith was right.

I used to have DREAMS about love. I had this recurring dream of a man who would DIE unless I promised to marry him. I don't doubt it exists, love and all. I'm just doubting its quality. Maybe I've experienced too much second-hand romantic love already and I'm burnt out? My best friends have been in loving relationships, and I've been at the front lines. I don't say this with jealousy, once upon a time I'd have said it with jealousy, but now I say it from a comfortably numb distance.

Maybe I've also second-experienced too many breakups to actually believe that love is amazing?

I'm "seeing" this guy right now. A more accurate term would be, I am hooking up/hanging out with this guy right now. Sometimes while I'm laying next to him or staring into his eyes as we're having sex, I wonder, so how would "love" make this arrangement different?

People who engage in hook up culture are all too familiar with the performance - the heart and mind tricking performance of a relationship without the substance. Here's where I go on a tangent to elaborate on the performance - what my friend aptly terms "body canvas friction".

Today I spent almost the whole day at his place, longer than I usually stay with someone. Usually I wouldn't even be acquaintances with the men I have sex with. Here are generalised reductive one-word descriptions of the men I've hooked up with in the past (I'm actually referring to a list of their names and giving each a descriptor): confusing/mean, strange/odd, VERY odd/immoral, loving (anomaly), paranoid, odd, aggressive, inconsiderate, inexperienced, unassuming, emotionally-unavailable, confusing, nice, empty, poser-y, inexperienced.

That was actually quite fun hahah. Don't get me wrong, I'm not shitting on any of them, I was (almost) fully aware of what I was getting myself into. I had set my expectations extremely low because I realised we don't get what we imagine, even when we try to settled for second best.

Time spent with these men exists in another dimension. They are not productive hours, they are not accountable hours, they are (arguably) not meaningful hours. For some reason, memory fails you. What was the colour of the pillow you were lying down on as you so "lovingly" caressed unfamiliar nooks and bends of skin as if they were your own. Hooking up is not as wham-bam-thank you-ma'am as it is purported to be. It can be so tender and it can be so loving. But you must remind yourself that it is not real - which is often very easy to do, because once they open their mouths, the illusion is usually shattered.

What I have now is definitely an anomaly. A glitch in my sex matrix.

A man who's company I enjoy, with and without sex. An example: today I pretended to be a chaiwala with him. Not trying to immortalise this as some tender, perfect moment. Just elaborating on the glitchiness.

So how would love make this any different? How would love make this feel better? Would it offer me some unshakeable security and comfort? I can't fathom it.

For now, at this point of my life, I am content. It's like going over to a friend's house and playing with their pet, but never actually buying your own pet. You don't have to deal with cleaning shit and pee (except for the occasional accidents - yeah that's right, this analogy is getting even more real). I get to play relationship and then I get my alone time - time that I use to figure myself out, chat up other random fellas, hang out with pals, or make things.

It's so weird. I feel like I spent too much time at his place. As if there is a precise amount of time I can spend there before things start to get murky, confusing - I start to question an apathetic touch or a disinterested stare.

So yeah, what is love? Is it better than oscillating between single and performative sex/relationship?

Or am I just getting too used to this.

On Disappointing Your Friends (and Family), Amongst Other Things

This is a public declaration that I have not been a good friend (and arguably, person) this 2019. In a mere month, I have hurt (or at least pissed off/annoyed/irritated) 4 people who are close to me. If there are more, please don't come forward, I don't think I can handle it.

I don't hold myself to impossible standards. Bad grades are reasoned away with the logic that the module was bad or the professor was terrible or I wasn't in the right headspace. If I'm in a rush, you will catch me in a substandard outfit. I don't pride myself on being the most eloquent person in the room. We are all supposed to be our own worst critics. I've never entirely related to that saying. I give myself a lot of leeway and let myself make mistakes - mostly the administrative kind. Recently a friend of mine pointed out that I wasn't as caught up in the "rat race" as everyone else is in school.

But if there is one aspect in which I do conform to this saying, it is in my relationships.

I first discovered the power of friendship when I met my best friend at 14. Up till then, I always assumed family came first and then friends were temporary guests in the living room of my life. But this friend taught me that friends can be family, and that relationships can be so fulfilling. I haven't looked back since. I subtly inspect other people's friendships - I sit on my high horse of healthy relationships and superb open communication, and dispense unsolicited advice.

But when that bedrock is gone, when my relationships develop friction, I feel like I lose all legitimacy. Worse than that, I feel like I've lost myself.

My first instinct is always to get defensive. "I didn't mean it that way", "You're reading too much into it", "That wasn't my intention" but all these attempts at defending myself are instantly negated, instantly undermined, when I realise I've hurt someone I love. Nothing is more depressing.

Kinda hard to think of a silver lining, happy ending. Even as I write this in retrospect, it makes me sad. Seeing a counsellor in a few weeks, let's see if that helps. 

An Open Letter To My Beautiful Best Friend

Can I just point out that as I was writing this post, I clicked on a random playlist on Spotify and halfway through writing, I realised it was my best friend's current boyfriend's playlist. The irony am I right. 

It was a regular afternoon at the cafe I was working at. The initial anxiety that I felt at the beginning of each shift had subsided and I was looking forward to my best friend dropping - having a friendly face in a (mildly) hostile workplace.

As soon as she walked into the cafe with her boyfriend and exchanged excited smiles with me, my mildly inappropriate manager asked, as he usually did when my friends popped by, "is that your friend?".

"Yes", proud that I could show the people I worked with that I had a lot of friends and wasn't just the submissive, subservient, apologetic waitress that the FnB industry had demanded I be.

"She's beautiful."

And my heart sank.

I always knew she was beautiful. People in school who didn't really know her but were friends with me never failed to go on (to me or otherwise) about her "hot body", "great hair" and whatever other synonym for beautiful that you could think of.

In school it didn't really bother me. The multiple boys that were interested in her were never my type, and we were clad in unflattering combinations of our school uniform, so I knew my true potential wasn't being unleashed.

Okay I am literally lying to you guys. It fucking bothered me. And made me feel invisible on multiple occasions.

We are/were so close, I knew people associated us with each other and because of that, I felt like everyone was constantly drawing comparisons between our beauty (her abundance and my lack thereof).

There were times I thought it was just in my head, that people weren't that superficial, but then there was, let's call him, T.

This was maybe the first of many instances that I would later use in my head as empirical evidence that the world favoured the beautiful.

T was a cool dude - sporty, good looking, aloof enough that you'd feel honoured that he paid you any attention. We were in the same class and I guess he realised that I was pretty funny and smart. He started picking on the small things I said in class, and making fun of me - the kind of thing that makes you feel noticed. Don't get me wrong, I was very noticed in school, but male attention (I think you'll start to notice a pattern here) was different. It was a whole new level of empowering. I could get good grades, I could be the funniest person in class, occupy several leadership positions, but the one thing that always gets me is attention from the male species.

And I wasn't the only one who noticed this budding, unlikely friendship. People I barely knew would come up to me and ask my about my friendship with him, I could feel my social capital increasing.

But this wasn't just a shiny friendship that I could show off to people. This was the first time I had made a close, heterosexual male friend. A substantial friendship. I remember that this was around the time that my family was starting to become dysfunctional. One day, I was clearing our class recycling bin, trying to occupy and distract myself during a free period. I think he sensed that I was troubled, so he ran up behind me as I went downstairs to the recycling bin. I was 15 then but I can honestly say that it was one of the first genuine conversations I had had with a guy. I told him about my problems and he was sufficiently reassuring and nice.

It's possible that I'm looking at this with severely rose-tinted glasses but this is what my adolescent self felt.

Before this friendship could flourish into something more, things got complicated.

Me, T and my best friend started hanging out together. I realised that he was gradually paying more attention to her. Suddenly she was not just prettier than me but also funnier, more engaging, more interesting, more fun. Soon, they were hanging out without me. I'd like to emphasise that she is in no way evil. He was the one who was instigating everything and she was just reciprocating. But in my fragile state, I blamed her. I remember thinking, "If you care about me so much, why would you do this? Why can't you just not hang out with him?"

These are feelings from almost half a decade ago, but as much as I hate to admit it, I think I still carry a semblance of it with me. For a long time I couldn't shake the thought that guys only wanted to be friends with girls that they were attracted to. I only learnt otherwise in my first year of University where I met my now closest male friend who I love so so much.

My best friend and I got over the incident with T. One morning, when I sad in bed, she and another friend came over to my house with packets of Nasi Lemak and talked things out. We had honest and difficult conversations. I forgot why but her friendship with T fizzled out - partly due to me and partly due to the fact that he wasn't actually that great.

I know this whole post feels like I'm victimising myself. I can't apologise for that because this is how I earnestly felt.

If I'm being honest (trick statement, I'm always honest y'all), I don't think I can ever get rid of the feeling. Being jealous that every dude she comes into contact with ends up liking her to some extent, comparing my experiences against hers, trivialising her issues just a little bit because at the end of the day, hey at least you're pretty. I acknowledge that this is terrible with a capital T (pun not intended... or was it?).

At my worst, I shouted at her "what is it like to be so beautiful?" - an honest plea, genuinely wanting to know how it felt, but also wanting her to feel bad about it.

It sounds cliched but it is so easy to focus on the bad things. To let these feelings of inadequacy eclipse everything else, to let it gnaw at you, to let it corrode a wonderful friendship that has shaped me into the person that I am.

This poetically structured conclusion may sound cursory in comparison to the detailed anecdote I've penned above, but I think it captures how simple things really are when your vision is less myopic and you do not fixate on beauty:

My best friend is beautiful. She is objectively more beautiful than me. This is a fact. 

My best friend is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I cannot live without her. This is a fact.

My best friend is my family. I would not be the person I am today without her. This is a fact. 

My best friend is incredibly kind and generous to me. We will continue to be best friends until death do us part. This is a fact. 

My best friend is beautiful. I am beautiful. This is a fact. 

An Open Letter To The First Boy I (properly) Sexted

This is something I wrote about the first boy that I properly matched with on Tinder, sexted and met up to fool around on a roof with. He would also be the one to teach me that you can't always get what you want and that sometimes, people can be absolutely terrible to you, while loving the way your ass looked.

He was my first encounter with anything sexual. What started out as an innuendo-ladened chat exchange turned into my first ever steamy, sexy, sext session.

I learnt what angles made my breasts look bigger, my stomach smaller; I learnt that some men absolutely loved pubic hair and I learnt that I could derive pleasure from someone else's pleasure.

I learnt that I could be desired, sexually desired.

Me. The goofy, chubby, loud, self-deprecating, constantly red from the slightest physical exhaustion, un-lady-like, jokester. 

Then we met in real life and the sexy fantasy that we had created with our phones came to an abrupt holt.

Before that, post sexual revelation and newfound confidence in my body, I was excited to meet you. But I was also terrified that in the real world, with lighting and angles that I had no control over me, your attraction to me would disappear like every nude we had exchanged (or so we think...)

Was I attracted to him? Well, that didn't really matter did it. Because he was attracted to me, and he made it very known to me that my body made him feel things.

Problematic, twisted, indicative of some latent self-esteem issues - probably, yes. But I didn't have time to think about that, I was still trying to decide what I should wear. He lived all the way in the -insert a location in Singapore- and it just so happened that I was going to be in that area to visit my best friend in the hospital. She had just gotten out of life threatening surgery (destiny? fate? serendipity?). She fought for her life and I was picking out a thong.

I made up a half-ass excuse and left my dear, almost-dying friend to meet this lanky Indian man at -insert name of mall in Singapore-. We very covertly took the lift up to the rooftop, because apparently, living in that area meant that everyone in said area knew who he was and would tell all his friends that they saw him with a beautiful (ok, ethnically ambiguous) girl.

I later told said dying friend about this incident and we had a laugh because you could see the rooftop from her hospital room.

So, finally some alone time with my sext buddy. My tinder match. Some random dude who liked my ass. Where do we start? I'm assuming he has more experience (because... he told me he did). We have some casual but stranger banter, he proceeds to address and poke my vaginal area (boy does this guy have moves or what?). We begin kissing, or what I can only assume is kissing, and doing some of that heavy petting that they warn us about in primary school Sex Education.

I didn't feel much. I didn't feel anything. I had much more fun sexting. All those times I had wished that I had someone there to curb my sexual frustration with a cup of the breast, caress of the thigh, finger in the vagina, but no, nothing. It wasn't at all what I had built up in my head.

I would later realise that this would be somewhat recurring theme in my sexual and dating life: disappointment.

It was all (somewhat) fun and game until I realised that he was literally in love with someone. Information that I became privy to after following him on his private Instagram, something that he had insisted that I do. I had zero feelings for this man (man-boy may be a more accurate term). Okay fine, yes, I had entertained the thought of being something more for like 5 minutes, but I thought it'd be better for him, and better for me in the long run, if he just sticked to courting this girl he was so absolutely in love with. I didn't want to be forced into the undesirable position as "the other girl".

Not the girl he was in love with, but the girl whose ass he liked.

I Had You At Hello

Hello readers (which at this point, mostly consist of my close friends)

I am starting this blog because I have things to say and I need somewhere to put them, and I feel like other people want to say similar things, but don't.

I have to remain anonymous (not usually my style because I am very open) because one day I might be a teacher on this sunny island and I don't want a parent whipping out this blog (which is sure to contain lascivious content, knowing me) and using it as blackmail against me to ensure that their child is a prefect.

Now, what will this blog contain?

You can expect me to cover the following topics:

• Beauty in Singapore 
• Singlehood 
• Relationships (or lack thereof)
• Friendships 
• (online) DATING
• Sex (a lot of it) 
• Masturbation 
• Female-related products (e.g. menstrual cups)
• Insecurities 
• Jealousy 
• Academics 
• Family 
• Books 
• Films 
• Sexting
• Art 

In no way am I obliged to stick with this, and since you don't know me, you cannot hold it against me. That being said, the ONE thing I can promise you is that I will always be honest. 

Love, 

Me