Tuesday, August 13, 2019

ROARING 20'S


this is my roaring, roaring 20's
I don't even know me
roll me like a blunt 'cos I wanna go home


I have unpacked my luggage after our trip to Japan. It was a lovely summer vacation, we experienced many things together and we ate a lot of good food. Ten days next to someone is a long time to spend, or maybe it seems that way to me, 'cos I've never been in a proper relationship and I've never lived with anyone with the exception of my family. Lucas and I spent quite a bit of time talking. We talked about why we wanted the things we want in life. Sometimes I think relationships could turn out like a quadratic graph, and once you have reached the maximum value of the curve, you can only go downwards. Conversely, perhaps once you have reached the minimum value, you can only go upwards. If it's a good relationship, maybe it's more like a sine curve with ups and downs, instead of a quadratic function. I don't know, I'm just a 29-year-old girl who regularly talks to myself, what do I actually know??? I was reminded of when I was friends with Khalis, whom I sort of used to date, ish. At one point of time in our friendship before we just lost contact because of life, he said his girlfriend at the time didn't like him being friends with me, even though I had never met her and I never made a move on him once he had a girlfriend. At another point of time, he told me that I reminded him of the agape definition of love, which in common terms means I have a love for everyone. I don't know where this is going. I'm in the midst of taking out a bank loan for my studies in New York. I am very excited to be doing women, gender and sexuality studies in one of the most sexually liberal places in the world. I think one of the hardest things to reconcile in my life is the fact that my mother is religious and regularly in denial, like when I was leaving for Japan with Lucas, my mom asked me to "respect myself and the relationship", which means she honestly had high hopes that I wouldn't be physically intimate with him. In contrast, I believe the women (and hopefully men) in my course will be much more in tune with talking about sex openly, engaging in and encouraging it healthily, as well as fostering difficult conversations in regard to intersections of race and sex. While I'm moving to New York, Lucas is also planning to move there with his career, and I think the general plan is for us to move in together. However, I also think that this Asian (or at least Singaporean) thing of moving out of your parents' place right into your marital home doesn't allow for much independence in between. I think, at 29, I have the emotional maturity and independence of a much younger person in say, the US or Australia. I want to be able to live by myself and explore the person I am, and my own life, at least before I settle down. I don't know where I'm going with this, it's like life has just begun for me, and I don't want to think of it in terms of being me with respect to Lucas, I want to be a separate and independent entity. Don't get me wrong, I love Lucas very much. I look into his crystal blue eyes and think of when a guy at Naoshima told Lucas he had beautiful eyes, and I encouraged the flirtation between both of them by telling the Japanese guy (honestly) that Lucas thought he was cute. I love it when I'm the person rubbing sunscreen onto Lucas' sunburned neck and shoulders. I love giving him a foot massage that simultaneously relieves his foot pain and also tickles him, so that he's torn between wriggling and keeping still to enjoy the massage. Lucas is amazing, politically aligned with me, is soft and sweet and affectionate, he's intelligent and smart, he makes me laugh and I make him laugh, we're great together. And yet. And yet I still don't know where this is going. I feel like I haven't had the time that some people have had, to find out who I really am.