Other People's Love Stories

(With a heartfelt thank you to all my friends who have had the courage to share the story of their lives and their loves, in all its beauty and complexities, with me.)

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She stands in front of her bedroom mirror, and bends forward to reach for the moisturiser. Her hands unscrew the top of the container and she milks some moisturiser into the palm of her hands. She makes slow circular motions onto her cheeks, and her reflection mimics her movements in an opposing fashion.

Just at that moment, her mother walks into the room, holding a book, and she plops herself down on the bed behind her.

Hot lah, her mother complains. Here got aircond, she continues. The book makes a noise as it is opened, and her mother's eyes start tracing it absently.

Her fingers on her face slowed down their circular run as she caught her mother's image in the mirror. This simple event was actually extraordinary, because Mum never came into her room without reason. There had to be something more than the thrills of cooled air to have invoked a Parental Visitation.

There was a pregnant silence and the briefest of stand-offs before her Mum cracked first -"You can burn all the 'papers' that K gave you."

She was unsure of how to respond to this sudden retrieval of a name she had banished to the Recycle Bin of the Windows of her mind. K was such an old love story, such a distant memory that it was almost disconcerting to hear his name fill the air.

K was the boy every mother wanted their daughter to bring home. Respectful, earnest and a doctor by profession, Mum would have married him if she didn't.

Theirs was a complicated romance. Being her first relationship, she went into it with her head fully in control of her heart. All her values had taught her to take it slowly, and to allow herself more time before committing. He misconstrued that as a slow rejection, and distanced himself from her, secretly finding his way into the arms of another lover.

Mum never knew this side of the story or how K came back to divulge that he had never really moved on completely from their relationship, after being confronted.

The 'papers' Mum was referring to were the numerous cards and love dedications that K had penned to her in their courtship. The 'papers' had sat untouched in a corner since K got married to someone else last year; she keeps them not so much because she yearned for a relationship lost, but rather as a reminder of that period in her life.

'Burn all those papers, you know. Ah, burn. Burn. Burn. Burn in that big pasu out there.'

Mum was referring to the big flowerpot in the front where they used to burn dry leaves and other such refuse. Her tone carried both the disappointment of seeing her daughter losing such a good catch, but also the protectiveness of a mother who feared her daughter was single right now because she hadn't gotten over him.

She was unable to read her mother's intonations, much less her mind, but she firmly knew in herself that the marriage last year was the death knell of that relationship and she had long since moved on from it.

Which was why she wasn't sure what would have transpired recently that warranted her Mum's bizarre intrusion into the sanctuary of her bedroom, evoking a name that had not been heard in the household for a year.

She flipped a few more pages.
She squeezed out more moisturiser into the palm of her hand.
The silent dance continued.

'He's a father now.'

That was it? All that mystery and tension because K was a father now? She had given up on him already after the marriage, and she couldn't understand how his being a father now was of added significance.

It was as if Mum actually harboured some absurd hope of them still ending up together despite his marriage to someone else. It was as if being a father now evaporated whatever slim chance they had of him coming to his senses, realising that it was her that he actually loved, divorcing his newly-wedded wife and then eloping with her to a foreign land.

She was still trying to follow her mother's train of thought when Mum abruptly said, "There are many more fishes in the sea."

There was a finality in her voice, possessing a certainty as if it could shape the future, but the clumsy timing of it left her daughter more confused if anything.

With that her Mum gets up and leaves the room, the book clutched in the hand that had never touched her daughter before in reassurance.

She applies more moisturiser to her face, processing her Mum's choice words that still hung in the air. She almost laughed at how bizarre this whole episode was, given that she had gotten over the relationship for at least a year, but the silence gave birth to a niggling feeling which she could not escape.

The end of the relationship was not exactly amicable, and a tiny part of her loathed the fact that he had stormed into her life, sweeping her up in his love, only to move on in the manner that he did.

It was her first relationship in this game called love, and no one had ever taught her the rules of engagement or warned her not to fall too deeply.

She closes her eyes and hears him, the old wounds throbbing again, ever so slightly. His promises still rang in her ears, whispered words like "You are the one" and "I will wait for you", heavy in its sincerity, but ultimately empty on its delivery.

She remembers treading on eggshells after that, cautious to the smooth tongues of future suitors; holding her love in her hands, quivering in its fragility caused by his clumsy handling of it.

She takes a deep breath and looks in the mirror again, shaking the self pity away and slowly smiling at a familiar face that had moved on from him, whose wounds time have healed.

The first cut is the deepest, but the scars no longer ached.

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She smiled wistfully at me from across the table as she recounts this story, and I smiled back, and I fully understood how our relationships and love stories would return to influence us, no matter how long ago we wanted them to seem.