This or That

It didn't occur to me up until today that I'm still so strung out on my previous relationship. Two days ago, I was comforting a friend and I told him that it didn't matter how hard we hit the bottom, because what really counted was whether we could float our way back up. After that he didn't miss a beat and asked, "Are you on your way back up then?" I told him I was. I guess that's what you always tell a miserable person; that there's hope, that the sun will shine a little brighter.

But that question kept me up all night, because I was so very confused. "Are you on your way back up?" Am I?

How do I even know which way is up? You tell me. Every night I go to bed with the thought of all the possibilities of him coming back so that I can have a sound sleep, and every morning I wake up trying to forget the late night thoughts just to hold myself together. And in my dreams he always comes back holding my hand bringing me to places I've never been, giving me shivers like it was in reality. In my dreams he always comes back and takes me back to the café where he used to wait for me after school and tutorial classes. In my dreams he smells like Spring and Summer and Fall and Winter. But then in my dreams he's also the child who hides the things he's broken so that nobody will ever find out about it. In my dreams I try to look for all the pieces of me and accidentally wander off. In my dreams we play like children, but not quite, because I seek-and-hide him like the most precious treasure in the world. In my dreams I end up crying desperately because I don't like what I dig up. In my dreams I dig up the fact that I am losing myself in the game.

And all of a sudden I felt so disgusted by it. Which way is up, really? It felt exactly like when you've finished a really nice meal with all the people you like a lot. And he just felt like a plate of its leftovers. You packed it in a doggy bag and took it home. And at night when you couldn't sleep, you sat in front of the leftovers and didn't know what to do with it. Because you thought it'd be such a waste to flush this delicious food down the toilet, but meanwhile you're too full to enjoy it. So you just sat there and waited. You waited for yourself to feel hungry again, and while you're doing that, you're also hoping the leftovers wouldn't turn too cold, even though you knew it in your heart that by the time when you felt hungry, the food wouldn't be as fresh and tasty as before. And sometimes this remote relationship felt like a cup of cold coffee that nobody wanted to drink or chose to remember because a few extra sugar cubes had been dropped into it, and it has become too sweet to drink. Too sweet that it would make your throat feel a bit too tight. And sometimes it felt like sleeping under the thick covers in Summer with the air-con on. It felt so uncomfortably tepid and you just wanted to push the covers away so the cool air could reach your lukewarm skin. But you're also concerned that a while later, you'd catch a cold from this chill. It sucked for whichever choice but you're also better off in both.

If life was made up with dilemmas, I would be the tightrope walker with the shortest balancing pole. The tightrope walker who spent a millennium just thinking about which foot should go first. The tightrope walker who was too scared to make it to the other side. The idealistic, never-will-be too realistic tightrope walker who got stuck between "clinging nostalgically to the last moment and clutching greedily towards the next".