Details

You remember sitting in a jeepney. Passing by a police station and a small branch of a big-name grocery store that sounds more like a rip-off of 7-Eleven. You come across a church. You forget to make the sign of the cross as the jeepney goes past it. You forget, or you just don't.

July 3, 2016
Seoul, South Korea

Those were the bigger details. Now your eyes travel to the smaller ones. The loud chatter of two high school girls at the far end of the jeepney, near the driver. Your right ear ignores it. Your eyes, however, cannot. So you stare. You run your eyes along the line of passengers across you. An elderly woman grips the handles of 2 large SM plastic bags as she snores, her head lolling around her neck. Someone from across stares at you. He's attractive, flirty. He keeps his eyes on you. Travels downwards. Until he sees the fingers locked with yours. He looks away and you swear you could almost see a small smile there, as if to say, "Of course not."

Ah. The fingers around yours. The ones owned by the person wearing the other earbud. You're connected by one set of earphones. You're too broke to buy a splitter. The music ranges from 50's folk rock to 60's German metal to 70's neo-psychedelia. It's only a 15-minute ride, but you do this all the time so you've heard everything.

He likes to surprise you with music. You love music. You're just not a musician like him, but he talks to you like one anyway. You mostly nod, ask questions. Mostly things you've read in your favorite book. Ever heard of an augmented fourth? The Devil's tritone? You wait for your turn to speak. To talk about yourself.

You zone out sometimes when he talks.  It's not unusual to be on a jeep with him when you're tired. You're always tired. He likes spending time with you. Or so he says. Whatever. He talks so much and you so little. But you love it anyway. Or so you say.

Whatever.

He's nice. There are days when he looks at you like you're the only person he can see. You feel stupid for looking for happiness anywhere else when all you need is right there in front of you, suspended in a single moment. Even though your intuition tells you it's all pretend. Because that's what you get for dating an actor.

Whatever. You sometimes confuse intuition with emotion. You're in love with him. That's what matters. Right?

You accidentally grip his hand too tight as you think all this. Whenever you're sad, you always clasp your own hands together and squeeze them, as if you could wring out the sadness from your bones. You can't, of course, but it stops you from crying. Just, this time, your fingers happened to be intertwined with his.

He asks you what's wrong and you smile at him and say, nothing. Like you always do. You lay your head down on his shoulder to assure him, soothe him. You're always soothing him.

You loved him once. You've convinced yourself you still do. You're desperate. It's not the loneliness. You're just a perfectionist. You wanted your first to be "the one".

Of course not.

You had a year together. You should've left earlier. Because now you're sitting alone in a jeepney heading home—45 to an hour—and you can faintly hear everybody hurts... sometimes... from the earphones of the person beside you.

You're remembering again. Afternoons spent in cramped jeepneys with his favorite songs playing in your left ear. Always the left ear. Maybe it meant something.

You cry in the jeepney. Nobody cares. All the strangers are tired and you're just another one of them. 

You like "Everybody Hurts". You liked every single one you listened to with him. Remembered titles in such great detail, artist and all, that you could name them in anywhere that you could hear them—during a neighbor's karaoke night or in a grocery store with your mom. Mundane, but effective.

These are the kind of details you notice. These are the details he never cared to know about you.

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Is this non-fiction? Maybe. Maybe it's fictitious. Maybe it's the fragments of a healing girl. Who knows.

[on medium.com]

Last Say

A long time ago, I was the luckiest girl in the world.

Lucky in the sense that I was in a happy relationship with my best friend and everything that once felt out of reach had suddenly fallen into place. Everything suddenly made sense—why we met, why we grew close, and everything in between.

And, for once in my life, I believed that it was something I could keep forever.

I was a naive girl back then. Ruthless when it came to grammar rules and spell checks, but undeniably gullible when it came to love.

I was a naive girl back then, but I was happy. It even reflected in my monthly laboratory results: I was doing a lot better than I did months before. My abrupt emotional upheaval could have been the cause of that.

To this day, I still believe it was.

But I was young. I thought he, my best friend, would never think of committing a grave fault against me. After all, he knew about my issues. He knew about the state of my family. And he knew I was barely recovering, and 2 years had already passed then.

Maybe I overlooked his issues, too, but it doesn't matter now. All I know is, after that, we fell apart and, no matter how much we tried, we couldn't piece ourselves back together. It often felt like sitting at a table for dinner and only occupying one seat. Even when his flesh was right in front of me, I had never felt more alone.

I felt my existence transform into an apology with each passing day. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that. I'm sorry for taking up your time. I'm sorry I arrived too early. I'm sorry for waking you. I'm sorry, just go ahead without me; I might take a while.

From Tokyo Ghoul episode 5 "Scar"

I was once the luckiest girl in the world. I was in a relationship with a boy I could call my best friend, was in love with a boy who could sing wonderfully and accompany it with every strum of his guitar, and a boy whose creative and eccentric mind was something I could never rival.

But he, too, was also young and naive.

Maybe his hands kept shaking as he held me up, all the while carrying another personal weight on his back. He could no longer keep up with my sporadic but frequent bouts of jealousy. He was only human, just as I was.

We both had our issues. And maybe my first mistake was not leaving at the first sign.

But it doesn't matter now.

I really was once the luckiest girl in the world. I was happy. We were happy.

It's best to leave it at that.

But from now on—no more.

Always,
Claire

P.S. It's all very dramatic, but this is just my attempt to explain why I'm going off the 'dating scene' for a while (or a long while). It's hard to explain in a few words. All I know is I'm not ready yet. And I probably don't deserve to be with anyone again after all the damage I inflicted on my ex. Still, things could change, but, for now, no more.

Note: This is from my perspective; I don't mean to invalidate what he went through with me.

Overthinking in Broken Conversation

"I'm so glad I met you."

"No. You're not. You shouldn't be."

"I am not someone you can imagine in the long run."

"There is no future with me so you need to stop. I'm not worth it."

"I am shitty with break-ups when I am not the one doing it, so this is me doing one."

"Trust me, I am doing you a favor. Save yourself. I will only hurt you."

"You deserve better."

"You don't need someone like me in your life. Life is so much better without having met me."

"I have a doctorate in Professionally Hurting People. Don't expect to be an exemption to that."

"I am not good for you. You know that, deep down."

"If you start this, it is always guaranteed that I will end it. Because that's just the kind of person I am. I'm a quitter, and worst of all, I'm a quitter at the first and only sign of doubt."

"You will only ever love the idea of me, and that's what I want you to love. The real person is a dark place. And you will not be saved."

"I am going to run away before I do any damage - it's still early. It is safer this way. For both sides."

"If you value anything that is yours, don't let me have any piece of it. Don't let me take part of your life. I am a parasite. I will drain you and leave you to find the next willing host."

"Protect your heart from people like me. I am not anyone's soulmate. I am a lesson. Hopefully, the only one you'll ever need."

Always,
Claire

P.S. I may or may not have actually said some of these things in real life.

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4ynDu7Hrlk

Warning Labels

I've been meaning to write about my first semester in college, but something happened when 2016 began that I just lost the drive to write about it. It is currently sitting in my drafts, unfinished and rotting.

But what is finished, however, is a certain relationship. I am not strong enough to recount to you the entire story since the "breakup" only happened exactly a week ago today. Though I am slowly accepting the reality of it, it still hurts. 

Here, instead, is a part of the story.

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I remember our last day together perfectly. It was a day that we had set a month prior, in December 2015. When we planned it, we just wanted to meet. We weren't planning on breaking up.

But something happened between the day that we planned it and the day we actually met, and while I will tell you that I had already changed my mind about leaving, you thought differently.

We weren't even officially together. Just old friends (or, rather, exes) who (still) had feelings for each other. Just best friends who found comfort in each other that trumped everyone else's version of it. The kind that said, "I can't find this in anyone else but you." You know what I'm saying? Even Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in Friends With Benefits got nothing on us.

We'd been texting since October last year, just two months after we ended our 8-month relationship. It first started as a normal "how are you?" "yeah, I'm good, MedTech's been killing me" "Please take care of yourself" kind of conversation, as was our habit even before our relationship. Eventually, it evolved into something more than that.

We found ourselves at the crossroads between friends and lovers.

Even at that crossroads, we still found many forks in the road. I was never really over you, even though I had a 2-week tryst after our official breakup and it was with a guy I didn't even like. And you, as you had claimed, were still in love with me and the pain was only making you miss me.

So I never really quite got over you, and that included getting jealous of other girls, of the same girls I was jealous of during our 8 months together. It was a bad itch that I, unfortunately, always scratched.

And you were the same, but we knew our boundaries because we weren't really together. What rights did we have?

That statement sure didn't stop us. Our toxicity to each other was never measured in our rights because, right from the start, we ignored our warning labels and went for the kill. Mine said "toxic material", yours said "fragile". Fragile because I was the one who left. I was the one who always left, needless to say.

We continued texting. I kept trying to push you away, kept trying to convince you that I was only going to hurt you, that even right now as we were texting, I was only making you hope, because we both knew that, after everything, I wasn't ready to be in a relationship again, especially not with you.

You always said that you were willing to wait for me, that if hurting while hoping was all you had of me, so be it.

You never were a fan of self-preservation. We were both the same that way.

What we did was a kind of cha-cha. Whenever you took a step forward, I took a step back. And whenever I took a step forward, you froze in your place, asking yourself if me making the first move was even real.

I'll admit, at that time, I had a cha-cha of my own. A one-person tennis game playing right in my head. My heart was scolding me because I knew I still loved you, and yet, there I was, dragging you by the neck.

In simpler words, I was leading you on. You gladly let me.

But you are still human, after all. Nobody has resolve that strong and the only thing I could tell you was, "You said you read the warning label."

So, on our last day together, after a year and 3 weeks of being together and not being together, including the actual relationship, I snuggled even closer to you, knowing that it would be the last. You were warm and comforting and you felt safe. I let myself bask in that because, even for a moment, I could pretend you weren't leaving.

"I love you," I said, for the first time in a very long time. Even in text or chat, I never let myself say it, afraid that it would only bring disaster to you. I said it a few times, maybe, but never enough to let you get used to it.

And for the first time ever, your reply was "Really?"

I struggled not to cry, instead choosing to just nod and bury my head in your chest, where I felt safer, and wondering why I never held you tight enough.

I had fears of my own. Plenty of them. They clawed at me daily, whispering things into my ears and I used to call you about them, and you'd accept them wholly, even when one of the causes for that fear was you, and you'd talk to me and help me get through it and, I don't know, there was always something in your voice that kept them at bay. Singing or talking—it didn't matter.

But you still left that day. There were many reasons: you got tired. You didn't know if I even loved you enough. And, mostly, you got hurt.

I know I screwed up this time. I had confessed to you, when the new year began, that there had been guys texting me. I never initiated conversation, but the fault in the matter was that I still replied. I did stop. It was never really difficult to stop texting mid-conversation. It was only difficult with you.

But I guess, even then, it was already too late.

The worst part of it all was that we weren't even in an official relationship. Then again, with us, labels never mattered, even the potentially dangerous ones.

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HERE'S WHAT I DIDN'T MENTION: For the first time in my life, I was the one being left behind. Before then, I always made it a point to be the one who leaves, never the other way around. The way I saw it, leaving was the lesser evil. It hurt significantly less than being left behind. But life has a funny way of biting you back in the ass and letting your sins finish you off. 

After leaving behind 3 guys, including him (who I left behind twice), I finally got a taste of my own medicine, and rightfully so, because I had never been hurt this much before now.

But I am happy to serve my penance because I know it is the only way I can fully understand the weight of my sins. 

I'll always be toxic material. What would you expect from a girl with an incurable illness and emotional instability issues? Tox(s)ic(k) material, indeed. 

Always,
Claire 

P.S. I had to keep a box of tissues beside me while writing this. That's why it doesn't make a lot of sense. But that's only a part of the story, anyway. I only write this in the hopes of getting it off my chest, but we all know I'm a professional at lying to myself.