How Do You Love Then and Now?

While making Bak Kut Teh (trial!) and Glee’s Songbird played in the living room, a sudden memory of a friend fleeted through my mind.

He was about to get married soon and he was beating himself up about not being enough of a casanova for his future wife. We were reflecting on the crazy romantic things that he used to do when he was a teenager. He would write songs for all his love interests and it never worked out, but one or two of the girls would keep his songs close to heart, because they were so beautiful! But still he picked himself up, wrote another song for another beautiful girl with all his heart. He loved genuinely and he was always faithfully in love. My friend, he was a very passionate little boy. 🙂

In our teens our idea of a relationship was just to be caught in a whirlwind of romance, with an admirer dancing on the roof of a school block while belting out “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”…nevermind the possibility that he would fall three floors down to the cement. Seriously, that was the kind of  fantasies I had in form3 as I looked out my class window during a boring BM class.

If I had a crush, the furthest I thought about would be what it would be like to hold his hand. And a kiss? Oh my! Well, I never. That would be… wow. Too much. My breath would then come in short gasps and my heart would palpitate at the most intense imagination of what a kiss would feel like. I would squeal into my pillow and tell myself to go to sleep. Maybe it’ll happen one day. Maybe.

I was a very forward little girl, as most of you probably already know with all my revelations of past love interests over the years on this blog. The kind of things I did would be to write poems. I had books filled with poems of  heartbreak, pining and confusion. All little girls love drama in their lives. 🙂 It was the kind of bittersweet sugar rush rose tinted kind of perception about what love is.

I kind of enjoyed the feeling of pining then and I would draw inspiration from it to churn out puppy love poems. The more I pined, the better the poem. When I got heartbroken, the poem became mindblowing. (ahem) I’ll probably get it out one day and put it here. Hehe.

My books were filling with such melancholic words like these:

I saw you walk on by under the afternoon sky,
I was waiting for you to catch my eye,
You pretended not to see, not to hear,
The deafening sound of my heart breaking here.

Hehehe. So drama and silly. Whoever the poor boy was was probably all caught up in conversation with some friend about some Starcraft game or some football game later in the afternoon. 🙂

If I had a go at writing poems now, it’ll probably be something like:

The floor I swept and then I mopped,
But I didn’t do the table top,
The bathroom you promised to clean,
And later please put a plastic bag in the bin.
I love you.

LOL. I can’t imagine myself writing my love sick nonsense to Chee Kiang. It would seem so silly. In a relationship so drama free, without heartbreaks, without anger, without pining, so much normalcy…there’s really no space for any poem writing. Granted he came into my life when I was still a kid but we didn’t happen till much later. We always have this running joke about how our courtship happened when we were about 15-16.. so our idea of dating is like stuck in time. It never grew into an adult form, so if touch wood, we are thrown back into the sea at this age now, we’ll be going around asking people “I like you, you like me? Can we couple plz? Oh and do you have ICQ?”

I am very happy with our stability, when so many people are finding it hard to trudge on with their own long term relationships. It breaks my heart every time I hear a fellow comrade fall out of love. Over the years, we would have couple friends whom we thought we could always double date with and then along the way they would stop loving each other and we would feel a sense of loss. Some people get together for a few months and then go their own ways, and we even have trips planned ahead longer than their relationship. It’s strange. A few months is a lifetime of a relationship for some, but to me it’s just a few moments in mine filled with things we want to do and need to do.

I’m sure all of us have grown up in some way to learn to adapt to our concept of love. For me, comfort, security, understanding, inside jokes are so important. But if you ask the 12 year old me, she would tell you that love would be when he tells you he loves you back after all that you have said and done.

And then what? Well, she won’t have a clue. 🙂

Aren’t you glad we do now?