Random thoughts

What is love?

Is it even important?

I tell myself from time to time that I would rather die alone and loveless, than trapped in a love that does not become me.

It's been a constant refrain ever since Karin.

Time has shattered the sanctity of these memories; once I protected my past from prying eyes... not so much for me, but for Her.

Now I realise it really really doesn't matter anymore. Time heals some things, and breaks others.

Time has shown me the ultimate truth - that I really don't know anything at all. And where once I lived in black and white, everything now is just shades of grey.

I have become a Grey man, like the timestealing creatures in Momo. One of the hordes.

I don't think I ever knew what love is; I was just trying to find meaning in my life.

Things have been rather bleak these last few weeks, resulting in an attempt to relinquish what little meaning I had rediscovered, from my life.

I'm just so tired, tired of soul-consuming work, tired of this country; tired of the rigid mindsets of those around me; tired to discover that those like me have relinquished their.. life, and blended comfortably into the comfortable, calm, lulling little niches this society opens up for them. I am tired of fighting to stay alive.

Love, to me once, was that pitter patter (or the Singlified version, as a friend of Ting's said in passing, the pikpokpikpok) in your heart when you met someone.

It was the thrill of looking into Her eyes, every time you met Her, and falling.

It was listening to her very witty comments, sharp like a razor's edge, and being caught off-guard, and laughing from the soul.

Scrutinizing her as she said Grace - and unconsciously shutting the world out; the other people around us... friends, strangers, or even an absence of people - everything faded. Tunnel vision. And feeling something tender, yet fierce.

Listening to Her ramble about what our friends would think, if they knew we were together (and in truth, just her friends, because mine wouldn't know what to think. Hers, methinks, would have been shocked, because She was so very much, and so clearly unsuitable for me)... hearing incredulously, her say things about a future that I knew could never be.

And believing Her for a while, and feeling only happiness.

Wanting to stay forever friends.

Leaving because you did not wish to seek to jeapordize her world any longer.

I took all that to be love. An even mix of infatuation, perhaps-love, and.. the knowledge of an impossible love, fleetingly conquered by hope.

I look back now and realise that perhaps I was wrong.

There are so many different kinds of love.

Wanting to exist for someone.
Craving affection and adoration from someone - anyone.
Appreciation of someone loving you.

There are more; I have not, this lifetime experienced the full complement.

I don't know what I want anymore.

All I know is that, looking back...

I remember Grace, a little.
She had a pretty face, and a wickedly curved beak of a nose. Her attraction lay in her love for life, and her laughter. She was fiercely alive... spoilt, and passionate.

She wanted to be loved, and was capable of betrayal to serve her own needs.

I don't remember her eyes.

I remember Lynette.
She, too had a desire to be loved, and a great capacity to give love in return. She craved the perfect little life... to show off to the world.

I don't remember her eyes, either.

I remember Vaya, we were more friends who spoke of loving, than two people truly in love..
She was vivacious, and quirky. She had a pretty, elfin face that belied her age, and a mind that lived for, and thought in music. Something in my gut told me that her random-ness was born of something painful in her past, a front that had become so practiced it was her new persona.
I wish her well now; I wish her all happiness with her new life.

I don't really remember her eyes very well, but there is a slight memory in my head.

And then I remember Karin. Chia Kim Mae, Karin.
And all I remember are her eyes.

The knowledge is here now, hammered in by age and a life thus far wasted.
It is all gone, all my past.

It doesn't matter any longer, because it was so long ago; and I can speak freely here at last, now that I have nobody left to read this, or care about it.

All I wonder is ... next week, when the axe falls.
Or the week after next.

Or years from now, perhaps a myriad relationships from now

One day when I am old

Whose eyes will I remember?