This is where it all started. My First relationship, first love, and the longest that has ever happened to me.
It all started in the year 1998 Christmas Eve party at Zouk. I was 20 years old. She was 20 too.
There were 2 groups of Secondary school classmates with mutual friends partying at Zouk and drinking our heads off getting high with the usual concoction of long island tea and e33. The cheapest way to get high was to down a glass of long island tea and 2 bottles of e33. Immediately, most kids like us would feel the effect and be high and merry.
L was from a different class and I have never met her before. I was a geek and didn't socialize much when I was in Secondary School and in 1998, I was an NSF doing my national service. Like every army boy, we were horny, deprived, desperate and wanted girls in our lives badly.
After getting high, our 2 classes ended up sharing one table and drinking together. L was attractive, open minded, friendly and most importantly, she was dancing with me on the dance floor. We held hands as we maneuvered through the crowd that was when I completely fell for her.
Soon after we were talking on the phone every night, and after a few months we were together in a relationship that lasted through my army, through her university days, and into my Uni days.
Hello World!
She taught me everything I knew about a relationship, how to dress up, what a girl wants, send a girl up to her apartment to her door step, how to kiss.
After she graduated, she wanted to be an air stewardess and asked me about it. I told her I would support her in anything that she wanted to do. Till this date, she still enjoys flying.
As every relationship goes, there's always ups and downs and I am not one of the lucky guys with a fairy tale ending of marrying my first love. Sad to say, I didn't end up with her although this story goes from 1998 all the way to 2011.
Here is how this relationship ended. Or at least, how it ended for the first time.
We were quarreling a lot about the change in her lifestyle. Her growing appreciation for the high life, the clubbing and partying, the excessive drinking, getting drunk, and the final straw was travelling to Bali with her gf and getting to know this guy. An oil trader, rich, older, more mature. He finally gave her a Cartier watch that she has always wanted which I couldn't afford on my minimal allowances that my parents gave me for my life in University and we decided to be friends. She knew me very well in these 3 years of our life together. She became my soul mate. Although I was never her soul mate, we would meet twice a year to celebrate my birthday and hers.
After her failed relationship with the oil trader, we met up, she told me what happened and she would cry her heart out.
Her next relationship was the photographer, a rebound relationship that lasted a few years. Finally, she dumped him and she hated him for some stupid thing that he had done. I can't really remember what he did but after they broke up, he asked her out to return something to her but ended up not returning it to her or something. It was probably some of the photos he took for her.
Next was a pilot, and as she puts it, retribution happened and she became the rebound and was dumped after sometime. The pilot always put his ex girlfriend on the pedestal as she puts it. He was an apple fan, a pseudo-geek, started a cafe with some friends, everything she liked about a guy. Someone who is generous, earns a good amount of money, is a graduate and likes gadgets and runs his own business on the side. I never knew what happened to her after she broke up with the pilot but always guessed that this breakup had the greatest effect on her. She was never attached again after this failed relationship. Or at least, not attached to a single guy.
She became independent, happy to be "alone", and didn't want to settle down.
I happened to be in Vancouver in 2008 for a holiday with my family and we were both single at that point in time. Her flight to Vancouver coincided with my trip and we spent a wonderful day and night together before I continued my trip to the Rocky Mountains. After the trip we met up and I wanted to get back together. However, she declined.
I figured that she was doing something like an "Eat Pray Love". Going on holidays to exotic places with her gf, being a god mother to her friend's children, going on holidays with her friend's family, she was closer to her friend's family than her own. She wanted to have a family and kids, but she couldn't.
In 2011, I found out that her soul mate and lover was her girl friend's husband who has a kid. I only found out about it when she asked me to go on a long trip with her. She loved exotic travels around the world and she was looking for a companion to go on a trip with her to south america. During the trip she would get messages and calls from her friend's husband. I ignored it at first but as we progressed into the trip, we grew closer and were sort of back together in a relationship. Sort of as in we did everything we did when we were in a relationship except that she did not verbally say that she would be my gf. Everything was perfect to me except that mysterious guy that was always on her phone. Finally, I couldn't take it and asked her about it. She told me the past and the present doesn't matter. What matters is the future and if I am part of her future.
After the trip, I asked her to be my gf and on the condition that she leaves him. She said that he was a soul mate and she would not leave him. I couldn't take it that he was her good friend's husband. To me, it is just wrong. If you are with another person's husband, I can close one eye and let it go and wait till you settle things with him and grow to love me. However, it was her good friend's husband and I couldn't accept the fact that she could be so natural about it and still hang out with both of them as if nothing has happened or is happening behind the wife's back.
L made it easy for me. She refused and she said that I can take it as she is in the wrong and doesn't want to give up her present relationship. And if I were to force her to choose between him and me now, she would choose him. I walked. This time, I never looked back.
