This morning, I left him alone for a little while, to attend to two too quiet children at a family friend’s pre-school class. And he flipped.

Two hours later, I finally had time to do what I’ve been waiting for all week, to squeeze in as many texts as we could before he goes off to that jungle/beach — only to find that he had went from, “why are you busy” to “why won’t you talk to me” to “who were you talking to that you can’t talk to me” to “i am glad you have found happiness while i’m gone” — all in the span of hours.

And then in that coy way that jealous partners try to fish for information by refusing to request for details, he had gotten me to report my Monday through Friday. It was pure manipulation how he kept saying, “you tell me, i won’t ask”. But I have no fucking idea what I had done. Then all of a sudden, he said he has to go back to work.

And it was my turn to flip. You can’t kick up dust and just leave. Not having closure affects me. Conclusion, endings, completion, whatever you want to call it — they all belong in the same family. All of them elude me, in little little ways, like how every time I start writing a story, I can never end it. Like how every time I begin an academic essay, the conclusion is always ridiculous because I was forced to end it. Like how in a million other ways, I just don’t forget.

So I got really mad at him because it has been a difficult week and all I wanted was our exchange of saccharine texts and I really don’t need a relationship to be so mentally taxing so crazy so jealous so temperamental. And then right before I fell asleep, exhausted, I realized, all those things that I don’t want a relationship to be, are ironically, descriptions of myself.

Now I can earn money to buy more things online.

Everybody loves the gray colourblock skirt. But I made it to fit a 26″ waist. Fatal error. Fuck. I wished I had a 26 inch waist. And goodness this new business is for me. I love replying emails. I am sorry I don’t pick up my mobile phone as much, bt typin like dis is really not as fun as writing copious emails.

Remember to tell your girlfriends about Skrt//Shop.

Everything seems so okay on the surface, but truth is, he doesn’t believe me. Last night, we sat there in silence because I didn’t want to tell him the full story. But my conscience was breaking under the weight of that glare of his that I couldn’t see — and he could hear it break. So the interrogation took place. When I eventually came clean, it was too late. I murdered trust.

More deception the following afternoon. Here’s a skirt that is so madly photogenic — I was supposed to sell it, but now I don’t think I can.

With the prospects of new beginnings, letting everything else go isn’t too difficult. But a part of me worries about making the same damn mistake again. No matter how much I tell myself that this is a new journey — from my view behind the steering wheels, everything looks uncomfortably familiar. But this is the exact moment when the person in the passenger’s seat speaks, his strange calm frightening my inane fears about tripping over the same stone twice, into silence.

He tells me that the variables are different each time. He reminds me that I steer the direction of where we’re going. He quietly glares at me when I wouldn’t listen.

And then I don’t really remember how the rest of the evening turned out, except that there was a flurry of tears, anger, fear and genuine respect. I am older, but I behave like an insolent teenager who says hurtful things she don’t really mean. He is younger, but always so sure of himself. So composed.

One day, with a dead serious face, he tells me that he likes to analyze people. Oh? Tell me about me, I had said, laughing, because this doubt I have inside, knows me so well he couldn’t possibly do.

He made a handful of guesses; some completely wrong, some blatantly obvious and some easily deducible. I was smug about being right. But a few weeks later, he tells me something about myself that even I would never have thought of asking myself the right questions to come to the conclusion he arrived at. He was so right about me that it took me a whole minute of silence to verify what he said, and even then, I still couldn’t find the courage to admit aloud that he was right.

Here’s to the start of something new.