Glitters and Gold

tom -


i thought of you again in the sea, all alone, when the riptide was sending me north and south all at once. it’s funny how the mind associates things with other things, how i associate this near-death experience with mischief night on your bed. i cried after we’ve made love, thinking i had a tumor in my stomach, and that would be the last time we had each other. you held me close from behind and said we would go through this together. that night, surfing in your blue, stained sheets, your breath in mine, i couldn’t help but feel estranged.


do you remember resting your head on my lap, it was a tuesday after our regular nine to nine, still in your wrinkled shirt and green tie - my favorite one that brings out the emerald in your eyes, you told me about the things you saw through the keyhole your father did with his mistress when you were a child? you said you had stopped believing in love since then, and some months later you said to me, you loved me. my heart stung.


it’s been close to two years since we were in touch. the rain in spring gets me out of bed every time, awakening a part of me i hid away. the moist air of april smells as if fresh blossoms have filled this armful of nothingness with bouquets. there is so much to reminisce about, call me crazy, stupid and impulsive, sometimes it still baffles me why i left.


and in some ways, i don’t want to look back on my bashful meltdown, the time when we were surfing in cheung sha. how the tides rose, the sun pierced through my eyes, and i could feel myself sweating inside my wetsuit. how i wasn’t far from giving up when the current choked me with a passion. the grunting of my disbelieve and the roaring of the waves harmonized, performing beethoven’s “ode to joy”.


you used to make fun of me and call me d minor, remember?


how ironic, because d minor is the most melancholy of all keys.


that was our second time surfing together, the second time you witnessed the monstrosity in me breaking out and breaking down violently. you fought your way back in the ocean to grab my board. you said it was alright, and that you would stay right beside me to keep me safe. then i said to you, a rhetorical, « mais pourquoi sommes-nous à mille océans l’un de l’autre ? ». your face, perplexed, not because you didn’t understand my french - the french i learned from classes while i burned the midnight oil, from conversing with pretentious parisians i met in wine tasting, from studying the classical tragedy to master the art of realism.


what i said, it is unswerving. i have been roaming the world. drenched in south beach in miami and drove recklessly in california; floated in the clear blue in the bahamas; been in the mountains in japan and seen snow for the first time; sat in absolute stillness in the bali bushes and listened to grasshoppers escape from the cobweb; drank the world’s best baijiu in china and danced with the local tribe. i have been half the globe away, by myself, yet it made me feel whole.


our fickle feelings mirrored the uncertainties of your new found business. i tried to hold it all together painstakingly, because a love like this was hard to find. i asked if you were happy when we were eating at the restaurant, you said you were half happy. i bit my tongue as my heart twitched. it’s funny how the mind associates things with other things, how i associate the closing with the opening scene, how it all started when you bought me a rose before you walked me to dinner. it was a young bud yearning to bloom. then it started to drizzle - on my handbag, on the jacket you used to shelter both of us from the rain, on the lonely sprout in the plastic wrap. it smelled like spring.


i joined a book club a few weeks ago and picked up reading again. today, i was reading “the merchant of venice” and in the original editions of the book that was published in 1596, read, “all that glisters is not gold”. romanticism is weightless but love is what grounds us. i chose myself, i will always choose myself, because i love deeply - you and me, and it is more than the weight of gold.

- demi