To pass the time in my one month of post-birth confinement, I’m rewatching Sex and the City. I have a love-hate (but mostly love) relationship with the series; I think the script is TV gold, and I love how the characters consistently inhabit particular cliches yet travel through such familiar and relatable paths of orbit. I do, however, deeply detest almost all of Carrie’s truly awful life decisions, mostly concerning men. What makes it worse is how much I see of myself in her. It’s like looking at myself in the mirror of a public toilet in the MRT, under unforgiving white florescence – most unflattering.
Anyway I’ve reached the point in season 2 where Miranda meets Steve. My heart swelled when he appeared, a bartender making very smooth moves on Miranda as she sat alone after Carrie had unceremoniously ditched her because ‘Big wanted to cook me dinner’ (Truly awful. Truly.) Having watched the series twice through (this being my third rewatch) and the movies at least twice each, watching Steve meet Miranda was a little bit magical because I know what’s in store for them – a baby, then marriage, then the doldrums of marriage, then a redeeming reconciliation. A whole life together, really. It made me feel like a clairvoyant who knows what’s coming for two people who believe they are engaged in just another unassuming, flirtatious encounter.
That got me thinking about the magic of first encounters. Looking back, you come to see how certain people who slid so unassumingly into your life eventually wove themselves so thickly into the fabric of your existence that they are now inextricable from your sense of self. And yet, when you laid eyes on them for the first time it was nothing more than an innocent ‘hello’, a name you didn’t dwell upon, a face you thought you might soon forget.
The first time I met M, I was 19, a week into my first real job as a part-time dog handler in a doggy daycare, and I was miserable. The dogs were adorable, but the work was gruelling, and amongst other things involved plucking fresh ticks off the dogs with a tweezer, inciting full resistance from my lifelong fear of bugs and creepy crawlies. 3 days in I’d contemplated quitting, but stuck at it partly due to an intense fear of the (well-deserved) judgment I would incur, and partly because I’d convinced myself that you gotta give the job at least a week before deciding that this hell was not yours to be incinerated in.
Then the boss walked in with M by his side, and perhaps it was my fatigue but there was almost a glow about him, and he was so handsome it made me giddy. I was sweating, bare-faced, hair pulled back into a ponytail – in other words, I looked like a moist egg. I also had in my hand a pair of tweezers with which I was extracting ticks. That’s how we met, and that’s how I continued to show up to work each day (some months in, I hit a new low when I took my post-work shower and felt an unusual bump behind my armpit. It was a tick.). I admired him, tall, dark, handsome, athletic, friendly, sweet. I also believed he would never be interested in someone like me, a friendly if sheltered nerd with pimples and minimal fashion sense. I thought for sure he’d go for the pretty receptionist who modelled part-time. But in the end, it was me, and it would be us for the next 5 years, across oceans, through Uni and army and everything in between. Letters and late nights, long drives and picnics in secret spots and backpacking across Europe, me being a bitch and him being an ass and mounting friction that eventually sanded us down till we couldn’t hold on to each other anymore.
The first time I met H, I don’t remember it, and I would bet good money that he doesn’t, either. I was 19 (and yes, dating M), and we’d both bagged scholarships to study overseas. In classic government style, this did not merely involve a straightforward ‘take the money and go’ approach. The year’s cohort of scholars had been rounded up for some sort of orientation programme that included 3d2n roughing it out at OBS, a variety of tea sessions (some of which, perplexingly, did not offer any form of tea at all), and culminated in a scholarship presentation ceremony where all of us fresh faces put on our best blogshop dresses and Bugis Street blazers and staged a toe-curling song-and-skit act, the tune and lyrics of which is, regrettably, lodged like Excalibur into the rock layers of my psyche. I have a vague memory of maybe having a short conversation with H then, but he was off to the US and I to the UK and there was nothing much to exchange but polite pleasantries.
Fast forward a couple of years and we’d all been gathered back from the ends of the earth to do our postgraduate diplomas together in a godforsaken corner of the island. Initially filled with doom and dread about being wrenched from my happy life in London, I’d quickly found solace in the other art school graduates in my cohort, who were fun, fabulous, and effervescent, a great joy to be around. One afternoon we were crossing an overhead bridge together to get lunch, and a boy walking in the opposite direction waved at us, then locked eyes with me and said hello again, this time specifically. He looked familiar; I said hello. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked one of my friends as soon as he was out of earshot. ‘That’s H! He went to Boston.’ Charming and handsome, I’d once again written him off as another popular-type who wouldn’t be bothered with me. I was no longer as nerdy or as sheltered, and my pimples had cleared up, but I was still pretty rough on the edges and far from the prettiest in the bunch. Yet, our paths kept crossing, and the size of the groups we hung out with kept dwindling till it became just us. Even then, I’d tried not to entertain the possibility that he could have been into me, until one night, as we sat on the SOTA steps chatting after dinner and drinks, he popped the question, ‘Do you want to go on a date?’. I said yes and shortly after hopped alone into a cab and my heart thundered in my chest the whole way home and continued its boisterous beat as I lay in bed, fully awake and aflutter.
I say I see myself in Carrie, but even more than that I see H in Big. Wonderful to date but frustrating to love, emotionally opaque, greedy for the best of both the worlds of the single and the attached. We had a fun few months together and I still think of him sometimes, but always with the conclusion that we would never have been able to build anything lasting together.
The one that matters the most is meeting J, now my husband, father of my child. Of the 3 relationships that have shaped my adult life, this has the least romantic of beginnings. We met on Coffee Meets Bagel; I’d been using the app for years by that point and had actually deleted it, disenchanted and increasingly at peace with the desperation that gripped me. It was however my birthday month and I thought to treat myself to a quick look at what was available on the market. J had actually been on my ‘discover’ page instead of the main one, because while he’d liked my profile, he was outside of the age range I’d specified, since I’d been averse to dating anyone younger. We struck up a lazy conversation, sometimes replying days later. As the chat was closing we made plans to meet for dinner the next day, a Saturday. We’d planned to get burgers at Shake Shack and that’s where I was waiting in a cropped top and my too-short denim skirt (‘what a tease!’ J would say) when a cab pulled up and J got out. He had a nice smile and looked disconcertingly youthful, but spoke with a maturity far beyond his years. We ended up getting pasta, then embarked on the first of many long walks to come. Impressively, J had brought a tumbler of homemade soursop kombucha, and whenever we found a nice spot we paused to sit and have some. We walked and talked till 2am, eventually meandering our way to the Marina Bay area. Somewhere along the way we found out we both loved ’13 Going on 30′ and could read lines from the film, which I would later tell people was what sealed the deal for me for a second date. Truth is, it was how warm and at ease he’d made me feel. Helped that he was pretty cute, too.
I’d been on countless CMB dates by then (‘Hundreds!!’ J would say – a gross exaggeration) and hadn’t expected too much from this one. Like so many others, our dinner date could easily have faded into the background, become an anecdote I’d tell my girlfriends over drinks while checking his Instagram to see what he was up to right now. Somehow, we clung to each other, a little half-heartedly at first, then as if our lives depended on it. And now there are no more first dates, no more first encounters, just the magic of forever.
Well, there are still some first encounters. Catching my newborn’s eyes for the first time, her tiny hand grasping my finger. Different, but equally majestic, equally shimmering and wild and momentous.
And just like Carrie, I’ve gone and condensed my life in the past 13 years into a catalogue of relationships with men. Shallow as it may seem, I think we’ve all experienced the exhilaration of meeting, knowing, loving, and then perhaps leaving someone, and only discovering in retrospect the magnitude of their impact on your life.
Medium Delirium 