NS22

So it's a date, then.

No, wait, not a date. Just a meeting.

He said both sentences in less than ten seconds, as if reflecting the indecisiveness of his feelings for me. At one point a hurricane, at another nothing more than a sudden released breath.

This was late 2014, when I was only just discovering the world with me in it. When I finally figured out that he was the wind and sky and birds. 

I almost didn't recognise him because he looked so much lighter, in his face and weight. It was about five months since we last met and talked. Maybe I was lighter too, so I was able to look at him in a different perspective. It was so much easier to forgive back then.

He had on a light blue t-shirt and I was in grey, no cardigan. I'd described it as going back home to Pasir Ris after a year: the familiar outline mixed with something new. I didn't follow my instinct to run as fast as I could when he said You just can't easily forget someone you were with for so long.

The main objective of meeting was to follow him collect his pay, but that was exactly what we did not do. Instead we had Pezzo and took a weird elevator with only two buttons: the fourth and fifty-fifth storeys. Why is it so dark?! he exclaimed, but I could barely hear him with the air pressure kicking in. 

We both hadn't been there before, and I remember wishing there were other things we were both experiencing for the first time together. But there weren't. 

There were poems about clouds and wherever you looked there were just sky and skyscrapers. If only it wasn't an air-conditioned place but open, with natural wind. It would have made it perfect, with the hurricane running shy beside me. 

He only held my hand when we walked through the bookstore and never once did we kiss. And that alone made the entire day flawless for me. I wish it'd stayed that way.

Orchard, where we messed up our first few dates very early 2013. Where we fell back together almost two years later to mess up everything else.