Diary Lies

Dear Diary

A called me. Right after I finished watching his game on TV.

My phone rang exactly at the moment when the game ended. I knew it was him because only he would call me at this hour. It has become a ritual for us to talk every night just before midnight.

“Hey it’s me,” he said, “remember me?” He had a smiling voice.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I just finished the game.” He said.

…and he called me.

Dear Diary

I had a very exquisite dinner with F in Tokyo two nights ago. In a very exclusive Italian restaurant, with the restaurant manager as our only waiter.

F and I met a few years ago on the Gold Coast in a typical Cinderella manner. I was a part-time souvenir shop assistant trying to make my ends meet and he was a millionaire on holiday. He walked into my shop one day. I served him. We chatted. And he came back for a chat the day after, and the day after, and the day after. And that was it.

So there we were, sitting in that gorgeously lit restaurant, it was in fact the first time we went on a date.

He said “you don’t understand how much I feel for you.” He was right. I don’t.

The relationship we have, if you can call it a relationship at all, is a very strange one. I am not his lover, not his mistress, not his girlfriend, not even a friend. I am just a person who happens to be in his life by chance. And by a very thin chance that we somehow have managed to stay in touch during all these years.

So when he told me at the dinner that he had pushed me away because he was in love with me too much I could not comprehend what he was talking about. “I still have feeling for you.” He said.

I don’t know what it means. What experience am I going to embark from here?

Dear Diary

D was my older lover in his 40s. It’s odd to use the past tense to describe a recent lover. Because, it just ended a few days ago.

I was glad that it was him who ended it. Delighted even. I hate being “the one who left”. Yes. Even affairs have some moral restraints. Because we are already this bad we have to save grace from being holy.

A holy lover by definition, is a person who gives all the trusts, the tenderness, the compassion, the understanding, the affection, and most importantly, the naivety of believing “one day it will happen for us”.

He went away with guilt that he chose to leave me for another woman. He thought he had broken my heart. He was tainted and I became holy in this story of us. But in fact, not quite.

D was not a nice-looking man. Not unpleasant but there was nothing striking about him. So what was the reason for me to be with him? It was because, very simply because, he had a similar chin and thin lips that resemble the smirk like my ex-lover, E.

The best way to erase a face is to wipe it with another face. Therefore D existed in my life, for the reason he would never ever know, that he was, just a person who resumed a position in my unfinished dream.