“Woman to woman, I just think you deserve so much better.” Now that’s a punchline, I remember thinking to myself as it was being delivered to me by the ex-girlfriend my boyfriend had been cheating on me with. She had said it in a way that was so maternal and gracious that, for a split second, I felt grateful. We were sitting side by side in a café in downtown Taipei, the type that had their entire menu written on a chalkboard in bubble letters and their counter fully stacked with oatmeal cookies and gluten free muffins. I wish it hadn’t been so unoriginal.
“She did not say that,” Emma, my best friend, said in disbelief as I recounted the experience to her the next morning. We had driven up to the observatory behind Wen Hua University, somewhere we drove to whenever one of us was going through a crisis. “I mean, seriously, ‘woman to woman’? That’s something you would hear in a soap!” She belted out a laugh that rippled into the woods behind us.
I took the last hit of my cigarette and flicked it onto the gravel ground. Emma usually hates it when I smoked, but given the calamity that has befallen, she allowed it. That was one of the few benefits of being cheated on: you get free passes to many things you weren’t allowed to do. It was the equivalent of a kid in a sling. I thought about how I’d break the news to my brother, whom I shared an apartment with. Time to get rid of that iguana he brought back a few months ago.
She had very good posture, the ex-girlfriend. I couldn’t help but notice as I sat there, listening to her detail her affair with my boyfriend. Her back was straight as a pencil and her chin was tilted slightly upwards, like she was trying to keep her head above surface in a pool, or that she had sat right on a poking nail and was biting through the pain. Either way, instead of drafting my rebuttal or planning my funeral, I was captivated by her posture, which made me feel insecure about mine because, far away, I always looked like a boiled shrimp, or a question mark.
When I received the text from the ex-girlfriend asking to meet up, Emma’s advice to me was to “just focus on the good things in your relationship”. That became quite the impossible task when the ex-girlfriend started showing me pictures of her and my boyfriend. Here they were shopping for sunglasses. Here they were at somebody’s boat party. Here they were cozied up in her bed. She had the zeal and the sloppiness of a new mother who works into every conversation pictures of her newborn, the difference being nobody in the ex-girlfriend’s pictures was teething. My first thought at the time was to offer her my salad. “That’s a crazy story, would you like to try some of this arugula?” I don’t know, I thought it would be funny. It’ll throw her off her game, I thought, even though I was the one being flung off of the game like a frisbee.
“Do you think I made a mistake?” I turned to Emma, who had hopped off of the hood of the car we were sitting on and was now stretching her leg against the tire. We were parked on the edge of the hill, and we could see the entire view of the city below us, blanketed in a layer of morning fog, from Taipei 101 to the Ferris wheel.
“Hey, you made a decision. Stick with it, even if it might be the wrong one.”
I let out a sigh and watched my breath vanish into the cold air. Maybe if I had questioned my decisions earlier on, I wouldn’t be in a situation like this. The problem was, I always get too swept up by the incipient feelings of excitement and romance. I confuse chemistry with compatibility, fixating on the passion and overlooking the evidence of trouble, like a blindfolded kid swinging a baton with full force, the piñata behind her back.
I met my boyfriend at a mutual friend’s housewarming party. She, like many of us who had gone to America for college, moved back to Taipei upon graduating, into a fancy two-bedroom apartment in between the Red and the Blue line that she claimed to have purchased with her own college savings. “I wonder if college savings also got her the job at the Grand Hyatt,” I remember overhearing from an obviously spiteful guest.
I, too, had moved back to Taipei that year, the difference being that my college savings couldn’t offer me a luxurious apartment or a prestigious job. In fact, I moved back in with my college savings. My mother reassured me that I could stay with them for as long as I needed to find out what the hell I could do with a degree in Comparative Literature, but those job fair brochures she left on my table said otherwise.
I remembered noticing him as soon as he arrived because he came to the party empty-handed. He was tall, broad but not toned, like an athlete whose had a few months of rest and had put on a few pounds. I remember being drawn to his face. He had very delicate features, with a softness that made him seem youthful, but his eyes exuded a sharpness that felt almost aggressive.
“Look, I didn’t think I could get you anything useful, so I figured I’d come here and set up every electronic device in this house for you,” he said with a smug smile. It was that smile that got him away from many things. That and the fact that he always had a way of explaining himself that made his wrongdoings seem purposeful and well-intended. Despite so, by the end of that house party, he had gone around and fixed up the surround-sound system and the smart locks, synced together the phone apps to the Google Home and the Alexa, and connected the smart fridge to the talking toilet to the Roomba.
After furtively observing him for the entire night, I finally summoned enough courage to talk to him. I asked him to take a look at my watch. It was a vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre given to me by my great-aunt, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t worked since the Japanese left Taiwan at the end of World War II, but he said something about the click spring being stuck to the main barrel, and I was sold immediately.
We talked for a long time that night, on the cream-colored leather couch in our friend’s fancy apartment. She had dimmed the lights (which, thanks to him, could now be controlled from her phone) and put on a Peggy Lee record, filling the entire apartment with soft jazz tunes. Our conversation lasted for hours, which took me by surprise because he didn’t seem like the type to speak with such candor, especially with a stranger. He told me about his sister, and how they were never close, despite him trying. I told him that I loved to write, and that I’d like to start my own publishing company one day, and he told me that he loved people who loved things. It was a conversation that I could remember word-for-word to this day.
The way the ex-girlfriend put it, my boyfriend realized, when he ran into her at the local market a few weeks prior, that he had lingering feelings for her. He was in love with me but infatuated with her, and he didn’t know what to do. She was never quite over him to begin with, so, when she subsequently reached out to him, things were immediately picked up where they were left off. The truth is, I actually empathized with them in this aspect. I’ve found myself in the past in similar situations, yearning for a connection that I had lost before. If anything, the potential of rekindling a past relationship just makes the uncertainty all the more enticing. So, I get it. I just wish I wasn’t also in the picture.
“Your faucet is leaking, by the way,” he said to me on the night we met, after we had gone back to my place, “I’ll come back another day to fix it.” I had to bite my lips to stop myself from smiling.
Four days later, he came back and fixed the leaky faucet. He also steadied the wobbling chair and replaced my rusting stove. I was in love. For the first time since I had moved back home, I felt secure. It was nice to have somebody who knew how to rearrange parts of a personal computer into a blender, or to be able to show up at Syntrend without doing any research when I needed to purchase a new television set. But, most importantly, it was nice to have someone who had solutions, especially at a time when I felt like I had none.
Now that I think about it, I probably should have known that his eager dexterity were the early signs of his self-righteousness, since it didn’t take long before his fixing turned into backhanded suggestions on what I should wear or how I should speak. I could as well dive into how my desire to be with somebody who could fix my life said more about me than it did about him, but I was smitten with his competence and mesmerized by his obsessiveness, so I was distracted. Besides, he was also the type who said things like, “it’s nice that you understand me, not many people can,” or the type to denounce the validity of the Myers-Briggs personality test because his results came out to be nearly identical to that of Adolf Hitler’s. My point is, there were many signs that I should have noticed along the way, I just didn’t pick up on any of them.
“You should have punched that woman in the tit,” Emma said, swinging her fist into the sky, “or kissed her, you know, to complete the triangle,” she grinned, as if kissing the ex-girlfriend would evoke some sort of wizardry. I would have kissed her, if kissing her would have made her magically disappear. And, although tit-punching sounded like an equally viable solution, self-pity was what I actually went with during that fateful meal.
The problem was, at one point during my conversation with the ex-girlfriend, I realized that my hatred wasn’t directed at her, but at myself. Wallowing was one of my many problems. Emma tells me that self-pity is an ugly trait, something I had to fix from the bottom-up because it wasn’t something I could disguise, no matter how well I thought I was hiding it. Questions like, “what did I do wrong?” and “why wasn’t I enough?” consumed my brain like a tumor, multiplying and spreading by the second. I rewound through every memory I had of my relationship, trying to pinpoint where things could have gone wrong. Maybe I wasn’t fun enough. Or smart enough. The ex-girlfriend babbled on like a Muppet. Maybe I didn’t show enough affection.
“Maybe the problem was that you were too good to him. He tells me how you two never fight, and that you calm him down,” she said, shaking her head as she twirled her zucchini noodles with her fork, “I can never do that, I don’t know how you do it.”
That surprised me. I thought back to the times when I would go over to his place, and we would spend the entire afternoon snuggled up in his bed. It would be pouring outside, and the sun would be set by three in the afternoon, but we would be warm, under the covers and in each other’s embrace. Or the times we when we’d stroll around the city for hours, with no particular destination in mind. We’d start from the publishing company I worked at downtown and meander, past the quiet neighborhoods and the financial district, until we reach the river park, where we’d share the sandwiches and beer we picked up along the way.
We were great, weren’t we? It didn’t take much for us to be happy because we enjoyed each other’s company. We never felt the need to flaunt our love to the world, or find proof that we were enough for each other. We were a team. But, now, I suddenly felt unsure. I had lost all sense of reality. What if it was all just in my head? And that I was just a placeholder for him until he finds someone better, that he feels more passionately for, someone who was more challenging. The ex-girlfriend took a bite of her food and flashed me a small, idiotic smile. I felt a tingling sense of rage bubbling inside, followed by a slow slither of numbness.
As it turns out, all I was to him was a sedative. He was the horse, I was the tranquilizer.
When I was really young, probably in the first or second grade, my mother would often tell me she loved me by listing out all the things she sacrificed in her life to care for me: her degree, her career, her friends, and even other men. Though her statement was well intentioned, it left me with years of unresolved guilt and the belief that love is quantified by how much I am willing to give to the other person in a relationship. How much I’m willing to sacrifice, the same way my mother did for her family.
Now, the belief isn’t entirely flawed. To love is to pay attention, to nurture, to care, all the like. But the flip side of that statement is the fallacy that love equals the amount you are willing to give. And, when that becomes the sole focus, the reasons for those sacrifices, or who you’re making those sacrifices for, begin to lose their meanings.
I think a part of me always relished in the fact that I was very good at giving. I was good at being supportive, I was good at being attentive. And, on top of all that, I was good at being who he wanted me to be. I was adaptable, and I was easy-going. Being able to do all of that made me feel empowered — I loved making another person happy, especially when that person was someone I cared so much about.
After what felt like centuries, I left the ex-girlfriend and marched to my boyfriend’s place, determined to end things with him. As much as I wanted to rip her pea-sized head off of her perfectly straight back, I knew the ex-girlfriend was right. “You deserve so much better,” her voice rang over and over in my head. Her words rang as I sat in silence with him in the lobby of his apartment. They rang as tears began to well up and trickle out of the side of his eyes, then more as we screamed viscous things at each other. “You can’t leave me,” he said, “you’re all I’ve got,” his head hung low like ripe fruit in late spring. They rang late into the night, then into the early hours the next morning, while I lied next to him in his bed, watching his chest rise and fall. Her voice rang, over and over again, even when he turned to my direction and scooped me into his embrace.
Sometimes, when you feel empowered, you are. You are empathetic, you are loving, and you are forgiving. But, other times, that feeling of empowerment is just plain stupidity. I was clearly still learning how to differentiate between the two.
As I was in bed with my boyfriend, I don’t know why, all I could think about was this one argument we had a couple months ago. It was very petty, the way all couples fight about petty things, but it stuck with me, and was replaying in my head like security camera footage at a crime scene investigation.
I had just had my first essay published on the Times. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, a turning point of my career and the beginning of my dream. I was elated. That night, my boyfriend called and asked me to meet him at his apartment. I got all dolled up and showed up to his apartment, only to see that he had his golf simulator set up in his living room. Turns out, he had perfected the new swing he had been practicing for weeks, and he wanted me to film him from behind. I felt like a fool for thinking that he had a surprise set up for me. I left without explanation, and he chased me down to the bottom of his apartment. He accused me of overreacting, screaming at me that he hated when people made a big deal of things that could just be simply talked out. I threatened to end things with him, and he began to cry. That was the first time I’ve ever seen him shed a tear, and I immediately buckled. I told him I wasn’t going to leave him, and, what’s worse, I told him I was sorry for ever being angry. I went on and had eight other essays published at different renown journals, but never again did I tell him about them.
The whole night, I kept telling myself that I made the right decision in forgiving him for cheating, and that, given enough time and encouragement, he would change. He would learn to love me, and only me. But, by four o’clock in the morning, I realized that I didn’t care whether he changed or not. I didn’t care whether or not he saw what was good about me, or our relationship, and it no longer bothered me that he had spent so many months lying to my face. I realized that none of that mattered because I wanted to be with someone who loved me for who I was, not someone who loved how I was to them. I turned over to look at him. He was sleeping soundly, with his mouth open slightly. I still love you, I thought, but right now you look like a big baby, and I can’t bear to feel like I’m that big baby’s mommy. So, I texted Emma, and she showed up at his place thirty minutes later, and we drove up into the mountains.
Around seven o’clock, Emma climbed into the passenger seat and fell asleep as soon as she sat down, so I drove us back to the city in silence. It was late November, and it was cold enough that, when I turned on the heater in the car, the window fogged up in a rush of mist. The cold reminded me of the trip I took to Tokyo about a year ago with my boyfriend, now ex. It was late January, so it was snowing everywhere. We were walking back to the hotel from the izakaya nearby, and it was late enough that nobody was on the streets. From time to time, we’d stop and look around. The snow-covered houses were very calming in the night. We’d watch the falling snow merge and disappear into its own shadow, slowly adding onto the soft sheets of white. He would look at me, then brush the snow off the top of my head.
I thought back to that night as I drove Emma and I through the familiar streets of Taipei. I could picture every detail of that night in Tokyo, but I couldn’t quite remember what was going through my mind. It felt like watching a TV show about a couple that was in love. Was I happy? I must have been. Emma was starting to snore. I chuckled at myself, I must have been pretty happy.
