The end
At one point, he feels it’s his duty to impart words of wisdom to me so he says, “You’re only 21, don’t tie yourself down. Live my life. If you cannot imagine yourself marrying the guy you’re with now, just break up lah.”
“I never stay with someone I cannot see myself marrying. If you’re a friend, you’d know that,” I reply, matter-of-fact, fully aware that I brushed off his attempts at getting me to indulge in his ‘single and ready to mingle’ lifestyle. But when you know a friend as long as this, you begin to understand which parts of them you should take in wholeheartedly and which, with a pinch of salt.
“You know, I didn’t think * was the one for you,” he shares after awhile, but not as if it was a secret that he had painstakingly kept. In fact, it seemed like any other sentence that one slips into normal conversation.
“Yeah neither did I,” I concede.
And that was that. There is an overwhelming sense of sobriety when your long term male friend confides in you his conquests of girls, because he deems you clearheaded and open-minded enough not to judge. And after the declaration (on his part) that there is a clear difference between a fling and a Friend With Benefits and my stance on the grey areas of cheating and hypocrisy, I knew we had officially stepped into this realm where we were no longer the innocent teenagers whose best idea of revenge was the f-word punctuating our blog entries, nor the ones who lived our secondary school days bouncing from one unrequited love to the next.
The night soon ended after I got tired from talking about long buried feelings and people. It is possible to run out of things to say and feel after awhile, because memories are stagnant compared to the present. You think you will love someone forever when they break your heart, and you think you will never get over the pain of waking up aching in places you never knew existed, and you think you will be noble and courageous and love them from afar, until one day you revisit the memory and realise you can’t remember how you once felt. Clarity is very sobering.
