Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Stories from the past - Feb 1998


Quantum Leap
I woke up to the storm, wind blowing curtain and rain hitting the bedroom window. It was already half past ten. He left around 4 in the morning, the last thing I remembered before drifting into to heavy sleep was the way he easily lifted me up, I had my arms around his neck and legs wrapped around his outer thighs, he carried me to bed with such an ease, tucked me in and kissed me on the cheeks, where tears were still present.  "I have to go now, I have to get home before the kids wake up." And  there he was gone, just like he eased out my life years ago.  I lay in bed, gradually senses were coming back, so was reality. Last night was a dream.
 
We must met years ago. He was moving from back east to California. I was constantly on the road doing consulting work.  He was the kind of men women would remember – a manly man, a man who has fully grown up and carried responsibilities for years. I fell for him with a school girl's enthusiasm, and in the end he chose to ease out my life like other men did.
 
It was those small messages on my answering machine kept me up all night. Sometimes from Paris, sometimes from London or some small town in Germany. I’d drive for  three hours to see him for a night before he takes off again. I played Cindy Lauper's CD and only listened to one song - “I drive all night, to get close to you, I drive all night...”
 
I was addicted to the way he embraced me when I showed up to his door. He had strong arms, and seemly genuinely cared about me. There was this intensity and seriousness about the way he made love to me often made me wonder if he could very well be “IT”.
 
And one day, after my last visit, I feared that he’d never call again. And he never did.  Perhaps it was woman’s intuition, perhaps it was all written in his eyes. Perhaps it was simply not meant to be.
 
Few months later I met another men who resembled his looks and his body frame, I felt madly in love with him - perhaps unconsciously seeking for a closure from the suddenly ended affair, only to find it was yet another life long lesson some women forced to go through in life.  Passionate, maybe, intense, maybe, but definitely not healthy.
 
Relationships is all about trial and error. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you simply accept the losing card the fate dealt to you, and pick up where you left at and move on.


Haunted Soul
When I was about eight I had a dream, in this dream I was kidnapped with a few other childhood playmates, and I did something terrible as a girl, I sacrificed my body to the kidnapper and rescued all of us. At the age of eight, I had no concept about sex but I knew men liked women for a strange reason, they wanted something women held quite precious.
 
A year later a playmate’s father held me down in his bedroom and forced his lips and tongue into me as his son and I were playing hide and seek game. I pushed him off and ran away and never stepped into his house.
 
At ten I was attending a prestigious elementary school. It was very far away and only one public bus took me there. There was an man in his late twenties who seemed to always shared the same bus schedule with me. He got on one stop after mine and every time he got on, he’d sought me out and move himself close to me, occasionally he’d sit down next to me and press his body against me, I could feel him growing between his legs each time and I panicked. It was so gross that I wanted to vomit.
 
Back in the Orient,  sexual assault was a taboo not mentioned in the family or among friends. Women simply try their best to avoid them, but nevertheless they were often found helpless in such a situation, because once they were assaulted, they were considered the dirty blood and unclean bodies. Therefore they were the bad influences to other women.
 
Around the same time as I attended this elementary school,  I had a little girlfriend who took vocal lessons with me in the children’s palace on the weekends. One day she confessed to me, “Our teacher has been putting his figures into my vagina, is that normal?” At age ten I was becoming a veteran in handling men with unclean hands and mouth, I told her to tell her mother and stop coming to vocal lessons. I never saw her again. Even though I missed her dearly I felt quite proud for having saved her life. I was lucky that the teacher never took interest in me, maybe I was too chubby for his taste.
When I was twelve Mom had a student from her Chinese class, sixteen at the time, came to our home one day, with tears dropping like the spring rain (where I was from, it rained continuously all spring) , she claimed that she had been raped multiple times by her forty four years old neighbor and  thought she was getting pregnant. An mandatory abortion was later executed. She lost a lot of blood during the abortion.  She was then four months pregnant. She became rather withdraw and eventually dropped out of the high school just before graduation.  Her father didn’t know what to do with the neighbor.  The family was at lost - they didn’t know how to sue for something like that because they were also convinced it was the way their daughter acted that caused the trouble. She was a very pretty girl with long legs and big eyes. I still wonder till today where she had gone. This neighbor was later discovered a continuous sex offender.
 
At sixteen I met my college boyfriend in America, who later had grown obsessively abusive. One time he had a knife next to my throat and declared that if he saw me with another men, he’d kill us both. It was America and later he was summoned by the police with a restraining order from another woman whom he assaulted. His sister was the sweetest woman I’ve ever met, she later told me that he had molested her when they were young but she couldn’t tell her parents because he was the oldest son from a very traditional Taiwanese family. I stopped dating Asians all together after that experience.
At twenty two I felt in love with some white guy who worked in the intelligence. He swore that he’d love me till death do us apart. Three months later one night he punched me with his fist and knock my front tooth out. He claimed that I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. I was in the intense SAP training camp. I lost ten pounds in three weeks. They later found him suffering from some psychological problems.  I never pressed charges. I  thought I loved him.
 
Sometimes I contemplate whether I was actually lesbian, or at least bisexual. Perhaps my luck with woman would change.
 
I love men. I can’t deny that. I strive on intellectual stimulation with men who mentally challenge me.  But at the department of relationship, it has been rather empty shelves one after another.   I was told by one of my boyfriends that I easily gave up.  Somehow I felt relieved when I broke up our relationship. I was bored and simply ran out ways to persuade myself from staying.  I’d rather be reading a book, sipping tea, watching an old movie than being with him. I’d rather be alone.
 
I am also tired of telling my involved girlfriends not to worry about me. They think a woman without a relationship is somewhat delinquent because they were once without boyfriends and they were terribly lonely. A friend of a friend from Australia recently told me, “I don’t understand California girls. They seem just want to get married and have kids. I hang out in Palo Alto a lot and when I tell a woman that I worked in the computing industry, all of sudden their eyes lid up and they want to know if I’d care to have coffee.” He’s strikingly good looking. All of my single girlfriends want to find out if he was gay because he was never seen with a woman. I asked him if indeed he was gay. He laughed. He simply didn’t want a relationship with any particular woman.
 
If my girlfriends tell me - “Don’t worry, you will find someone very special soon.”, I’d say as this Australian man did, “No worries.”  For all I know, this man is probably out there, except he’d live at least thousands of miles away or better yet, in some foreign country with an accented voice, drinking martini, smoking cigar and watching the snow falling at this very moment.


Crazy Head
I subscribe Architectural Digest and Information Week all at once. I want a relationship and not want a relationship all at once. I snowboard all day and try to learn how to carve, then I’d be wondering in the city with a book in my hand and coffee in the other, thinking how I wish there is someone to talk about the art, the world and the life. I am constantly living in my head. Where I sleep it doesn’t matter as much as whether I will have access to the internet, or at the bare minimum, a laptop with Microsoft Word installed.
 
On week days I’m trapped in the world of computing, where the syntax of the coding makes a difference in the expected results. Sometimes what seems unexplainable and garbage like to others excites me so much because it is how the machine wants to read it. On week nights I surf the net and dream about retiring at age thirty five to a tropical island and be a writer. I can careless whether I succeeded in the computing field or not, I can use a sun bath and a pina colada just about right now.
 
One night in my favorite spot of the city, sitting down was a friend who I crossed path with many times, “What type of men are you attracted to?” He asked. I answered, “someone who can inspire me”.
 
I hang with my friends. They are the greatest, most reliable people. They take me in when I am down. A  flat in inner Sunset, where I spent days and nights mourning the ending of my relationships with men who I loved once.  They can’t provide the answers I need, they too are singles just like me. I can just sit and  listen to the heavily accented voice, talking casually about their past lives in the East Coast.  They love San Francisco and adopted the city as their own town. They don’t know why I stayed in an abusive, largely sexual but emotionless relationship, or for that matter, why I walked away from a relationship that provided stability and peace.
 
I envision my head. All divided up into different compartments. One longs for a stable family like life – and this one meets a man who can’t spell romance but knows how to fix the garage. One yearns for the intellectual stimulation – and this one meets someone who's three thousands miles away and lives with his a girlfriend. One craves for the glamorous romantic nights in a dark elegant hotel – and this one meets a man who makes her feels like a princess, but only for a night and never calls back. Then there is naive one who meets a man that looks and acts like the dream of her life – and he leaves town and casually slices up the heart on his way out. And this very last one decides to venture out in women, since men are so insanely predictable yet impossible to get close to, perhaps women with similar outlooks in men should all get together and make crazy love in a big soft leopard-looking leather sofa while those men who hurt us get to watch, but not touch.
 
Still, there is another...this one is waiting for the right key to open... I don’t even remember what’s exactly in it, maybe you could be the key smith ...
 
 

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