One weekend

It was a weekend in Singapore with a girlfriend from the past.  When we embraced each other at the airport we brought with us a suitcase of manners, languages, and stories that we had loved but had packed away to make it easier to go through life. We unpacked them and talked about past boyfriends, past parties, previous dreams, and how far or near we'd come.

She's still in the thick of student life. I stayed at her dorm and met her multinational friends and went to their parties. It was just like old times, but at a different place, with different people.  I remember Mr. Eight used to say, "I'm too old for this" whereas back then I felt like I had just been born. Now I think I understand except that I refuse to say I'm too old for this. I'll call it something else. In Singapore I noticed things I never used to notice before. I disliked the flatness of her dorm room pillows. I disliked standing in a long line just to get free drinks. The music wasn't quite right and I had to get drunk to enjoy it properly. I threw up for the first time in 2 years, out of a cab window. The conversations were as interesting as they used to be, but could not live up to my memories of genuine love at a time and place when my friends were everything I needed.

Still it was different and thus better than most weekends. I bought a hot leather miniskirt on a whim. When Mr. Right came to pick me up from the airport I told him to stash it in his wardrobe because it would be no use taking it home for mother to see. He laughed and said, "do you know that most people start wearing the veil after they get married, instead of strip down?"  He didn't ask me details of what I did that weekend. It is really good to be back.

Morality

The discussion on moral values has made me so sick to the bone that I seemed to have developed a mental immunity strain against it. It has reached a point where if anybody tries to sell me anything with the word "God" in it I will literally turn my ears off.

Listen to the preacher who tells us at the dawn of Eid that we must elect a political leader with the same religious faith.

Listen to the teacher who told his students that if they wish to travel far around the world, they must pray to God.

Listen to the mother who tells her daughter that if she desires to be successful in life, she must respect her parents, not as a a form of gratitude to the parents but as a matter of obedience to God.

Listen to the friend who advises her closest friend that the hardships of marriage are simply natural satan-wrought challenges that come part and parcel with every effort we make to become closer to God, including marriage.

The preacher did not speak of leadership. The teacher did not talk about hard work. The mother did not talk about unconditional giving. The friend did not talk about communication.

My entire being became a blank concrete wall which would absorb nothing. Imagine what this could do to the impressionable. It would result in a society that is happy in forgiving and accepting everything that life gives. Because they can leave the rest to God. They are all so arrogant and complacent with God's gifts.

Comparanoid

I checked her out on twitter and read her bio, opened her timeline, scrolled down a bit to about two weeks worth of tweets.  Nothing special except that she seemed to have good intentions. Nothing threatening.

But it is always the well-intended friendly women who are the most threatening.  They work inwardly, embracing the joy of working, unsoiled by petty ambitions.

Later we fought a bitter war at the interviews and I gracefully admit a truce, if not defeat by a slim margin. It is true she was a threat by virtue of perhaps not intending to be one. She is now doing some exciting project which I always thought of doing but never got around to doing.  I toss my head at this and message her my support.  One must find joy in a world that is full of good ideas and activism. 

But, and I ask you this, what must one do with that quick sting of jealousy?

As for me I have sat here and changed colors for the past hour like a malfunctioned chameleon. As my head starts to boil some ideas bubble up to the surface and demand to be manifested before someone else gets to it. 

This, right here, is a thin line between embracing my passion and posing a threat.

Pulse

It is always dark and a little chilly at dawn. We sit hunched in a circle on our praying mats and, although it is too dark and I am too sleepy, their voices sound like their faces are glowing. Mom asks forgiveness and Dad giggles; it is a half-joking half-serious ritual committed consistently every morning. Dad nods encouragingly at Mom so that she can start leading the prayers - the Indonesian part of the prayers.

She chatters forth quickly, her pauses not delivered at the comas or semi-colons, but at the end of her breath.  Dear God Almighty the most benevolent the most knowledgeable and the most. Forgiving please forgive our sins and the sins of our parents and the sins that we know of and. The sins that we do not know we have committed because we did not know and You are most. Knowledgeable Dear God and thank you we are grateful for all the blessings You have bestowed. Upon us...

The prayer goes on for 15 minutes. It is long and comprehensive. They say that when you pray for something you must be specific, so when people pray for a blessed life they leave nothing out. Not cars and holidays and worldly material, but blessing and forgiveness and health and clear visions and straight paths and, most importantly, "abundant fortune" - which humans can interpret as something material or something spiritual, but God would know best because He can read your soul and is Most Knowledgeable.

My boss quipped the other day during dinner, that we shouldn't pray too much lest God be weary.  "Especially Muslims!", he exclaimed. "we multiply God's chores by five times every day!"  I have that feeling when I am standing up by my office window looking down at the tiny cars and tiny people swarming by below. If I were God I wouldn't care about these ants. They are too many and too meaningless; and their problems are too petty. Unless I were inside them. One with them, part of them, each and every one of them. Then I would care but it would be less a matter of caring and more a matter of just Being.  Pulsating like a vein.

At dawn I appreciate the glow of their faces as they perform these rituals they hold so dear.  With a sense of urgency. As soon as the first calls to prayer can be heard, Mom urgently tells me to prepare. Quick! Quick! As if God couldn't wait. Dad's Arabic prayer and Mom's Indonesian prayer press upon me, forcing me to feel the calm that I should ideally be feeling instead of chilled and sleepy. They don't know that God is closer to me than my veins.

The Questions

There's that book Oprah reviewed several years ago, which accidentally stuck in my mind for goodness knows why.  I don't remember the title, but it was something in the lines of "questions to ask before you get married."

No idea what's in the book. But here are some questions he's answered on different occasions, which I'm listing down for the sake of making lists.

Q: "I don't want to have babies until reeeeeally later.  Is that cool with you?"
A: "Sure. It's your body and your right."

Q: "I don't want to live in Jakarta forever."
A: "Me neither."

Q: "I would really like to have an organic farm."
A: "I would really like to have a brewery."

Q: "If we can't have babies for some reason would you mind adopting?"
A: "Of course I wouldn't mind."

Q: "If our child wanted to marry a non-muslim would you mind?"
A: "Of course I wouldn't mind."

Q: "If our child turned out to be gay would you mind?"
A: "I wouldn't mind. But I would be careful to protect him/her from our parents."

Q: "I refuse to force our child into a certain profession."
A: "I would encourage them into a certain profession so that they can rebel against it and find their own true calling."


There you go.  I'm thinking of having the list registered at a public notary or appendixed to our pre-nup.

Losing fields

There is something about old people that make me feel small, despite their silence, their wrinkles, their poverty, their withdrawal from life.

This particular elder was a landowner. Was, because after we were done, he no longer owned his land.  He needed the money. I got to see his land. Fields and fields of green rice sheaths bending and bucking gracefully with the wind. A symphony of rustles and whistles. A place where the world is too full to talk about, I thought.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, 
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other", doesn't make any sense."

- Rumi-

It was there that I understood what made me feel so small in the presence of that old man.  His body was so, so thin, stooped forwards, his clothes hung off of him sharply, fabric folds plummeting from craggy bone-edges.  But he held his chin up and looked us straight in the eye. He had dignity. If I had a piece of land that beautiful, and I knew my own hands made it beautiful, I would be proud as well.  What could we do but purchase and destroy. We have nothing to be proud of.

He only spoke Javanese. Was he literate?  I don't know.  When he signed the papers his signature was awkward, slow, deliberate. It was so deliberate I could count how many u-shaped curves he made with the pen. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

They had their pictures taken, he and the new owner.  Smiling at the camera. Decaying teeth and white teeth. It's probably just me, but he seemed a little smaller when he left with his hundred-millions.

I went home to bed and cried a little bit.

On networking

It's been a while.

I entered the fray and scanned the vistas.  The place was packed and, like all the trending places in Jakarta when they've just opened, felt like it wasn't in Jakarta.  The girls were not overly pretty but were dressed up nonetheless in business dresses that are quite fashionable it seems at the moment.  I was wearing a silk blouse and a loose tie, because I had felt like it when I left for work this morning.  I forgot to wear my contact lenses too, so ended up wearing my big hipster glasses. Pangs of regret and insecurity, but I sallied forth into the throngs of savvy future-contacts nonetheless.

My first targets were a hit.  One girl was from Peru and the other girl from Mexico.  Perhaps I notice kindred spirits first and foremost, perhaps some maddening radar I had not realized existed beneath my ignorant skull.  But they were of course lovely, happy, and charming. They made me want to talk about beaches and dancing, which of course we ended up talking about.

The next targets were old friends whom I knew from all sorts of places on so many different occasions but who happened to know everybody else on that one occasion. Default exclamations on how the world is so ridiculously small. One happened to be a colleague of Mr. Nine and we had a good laugh at how I used to date him. We both laughed wholeheartedly for reasons unclear to the other. Another offered me an exciting  project, which actually rendered my official task for the night completed, much to my disturbance. What have I become if I join events to meet new projects instead of new friends?

The last targets were the business school types: one boyish young American, one fast-talking Indonesian Chinese with an American accent, one tall Chinese girl whose posture slunked in the sexy way that comes from having had a fourth drink and plenty of nonsensical things to say.  We accused the American of not looking like the Hawaiian he apparently is, because he wasn't wearing a wreath of flowers around his neck. 

The drunk girl put her arm around me before she knew my name and asked the American: "Is she your girlfriend?"

The American said, "No, she's not my girlfriend, and I believe she's engaged."

I laughed warmly and held up my telling hand.  "She is engaged," I said.  The girls tittered over how he noticed.

I felt charmed at how I felt charmed about being engaged.  This was apparently a test that I had unwittingly bestowed upon myself tonight and only realized post-hoc. If I had been single it could have been a game that I had not played in a while. Would I miss it?  As it turns out there were no awkward tugs at my heartstrings.  I was actually longing for Mr. Right to finish his meeting and pick me up from that glitzy place.

They were apparently going somewhere else for the night and asked what I was doing.  I told them I was waiting "to be picked up".

"You're waiting to be picked up?  Girl you should do something about that ring if you hope to succeed in that."

We laughed like college kids and went our separate ways and now I don't remember their names.

On happiness

For a while it was bad and then good and then not so good.  There is no single year that compares to that one year circa 2009-2010 when everything was always so good even when bad things happened. Not being sentimental.  Just remembering that I too can feel alive and had felt alive for a sustained period.  Alive despite the fact that everything was good.

In this country, in this city, in this room where I work and become distracted by my work from the interesting things that should be distracting me from work, I have lost a little something.  Time, perhaps. Imagination, perhaps.

What's been happening lately?  Not much, same old.  They are burning books and banning mini skirts and jailing atheists and harassing lesbians and decrying sex education and attacking churches. The women don't want gender equality because it makes women smarter and leads to higher divorce rates. But everybody is still having sex and enjoying it, thank God. Everything good is a blessing from God, and everything bad is a result of our sins.   Mr. Right seems to think that last bit is a little unfair and innately flawed. We think that the liberal-minded Indonesians are a silent majority but suddenly Kompas releases a poll that shows about 70% of respondents want a more conservative government. Well that's swell.

This country, according to a poll by The Economist, is among the world's happiest countries. I would agree because essentially, happiness is indeed the culture.  It is not like in Russia where it is taboo to say you are happy because that would mean you have individual freedom to acquire happiness and who, in the name of dead communist warriors, gave you that right? No this is not like that. In this country you do not say you are unhappy, because that would mean that you are not grateful for what God hath bestowed upon thee. 

"How are you?"

"Alhamdulillah, thank God, I am healthy."

"And your family?"

"Alhamdulillah, they are healthy too."

You see.

So, since everything good comes from God and everything bad is a sign of ungratefulness to God, everybody wishes to have more God in their lives, in every aspect of their lives, in their spiritual, physical, sexual, and political lives. And to take it to the next level, everybody wishes to have more God in everybody else's lives.  My own mother laments and moans and complains. She worries that if I do not pray five times a day to God, how will she earn extra points to go to heaven if she is deemed to have failed to educate me in faith? And if I do not pray five times a day to God, how am I ever going to lead a happy life when God refuses to bestow me with blessings? It will be a tragedy of the worst kind, she warns.You will lead a miserable life.

I feel alive with anger and frustration and curiosity and the acute knowledge that I am happy of my own volition, even when I'm sick, or sinning.  I would be a little happier if I could make something of this stored pressure, instead of review contracts.

On beauty

At lunch today the friend I haven't met in a while commented on my relationship status and casually told everyone that a couple of his friends sent messages to him expressing dramatic heartbreak because of that relationship status.  His wife then laughingly commented that when I dated the disastrous Mr. Nine, people messaged his ex to say, "are you suffering attacks of insecurity yet?"

The table turned to Mr. Right and demanded to know whether he knows he's got rivals. Mr. Right grinned and said he knew that from the beginning.

I'm starting to feel flattered and uncomfortable with the topic as it is not something I know how to respond to very well, except with good humor, which I manage. I am a little surprised, and if Mr. Eight were reading this he would probably protest and say, "No you're not surprised. You can't fool me."

Mr. Right would often say "I think you're extremely beautiful, but you don't notice that much."

Well it is a moot point to argue, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I have no business beholding myself more than I behold others. And how much I behold others!

I behold others to the point of distraction. I notice when they wear black soft-lenses to cover their black retinas because they do not believe that their black eyes are black enough. I notice when they wear fake eye-lashes to a wedding party and I notice how they do not look more confident than they usually are despite that extra mile, or extra centimeter of eyelash. I notice the bags the shoes the bags the shoes the bags the shoes the bags the shoes. They are not more beautiful.

I notice the tan line on the broad shoulders of a friend who loves to swim. I notice the ridiculously loud laughter of a friend lying in her sick-bed. I notice the little curls on a forehead which escape the straightening iron. I notice how the swing of your hip gives away the comfort level of your shoes.  I notice a curious question delivered with widening eyes. These are extremely beautiful.

Mae

Perhaps 85% of my daily stress involves mother. She often asks me why I am so impatient with her when I can be so patient with other people. I thought of asking her to ask herself why but of course she would not know either.

I thought of how I feel that I would be very stress-free and happy if she did not meddle into my affairs; but a second later I think of how that does not really make sense because without her I would not be this happy person that I am today.

Nothing really makes sense.

On stereotypes

My clients, Americans, took me out to dinner after the negotiations.  They marveled at how Potato Head was so hip and vibey and gushed over the world-class cocktails and raved about Asians in general (except mainland Chinese, whom they "can't break through"). Talk turned to our counterpart, a tricky fellow with more money than he seems to have because he continues scraping at the bottom of the abandoned proverbial gold pit. I told them I used to date someone with the same surname i.e. the same clan and that was the worst relationship of my life. They laughed so hard they almost fell off their seats. Gave them a good lesson or two about tribal stereotypes, at the risk of over-stereotyping, and they absolutely loved it. I complained that Americans are so overwhelmingly over-friendly and they loved that too. They complained that most Indonesians are so afraid of confrontation that nothing gets done.

Apparently people high-up want a share in the deal, but then again that is hearsay and who knows who really knows anything? I told Mr. Right and he said it made sense, because how else would you ensure in good faith that the deal goes through for the sake of national interest, if you don't give the right incentives to the people in charge of ensuring those interests.  I told him that that may be the case for practical reasons based on the realities on the field, but a VIP with integrity would wave his sticks and ensure the deal goes through anyway, with or without rotten carrots.  Mr. Right is like Anakin, and he knows that if he ever goes over to the dark side I would rush over in a space-shuttle to say "you're breaking my heart, Ani". But there rarely is a black or white, I must concede, only a murky gray.

So I met the person who is allegedly the proxy for the alleged VIP who allegedly wants a cut in this deal, who is your typical middle-aged pot-bellied almost-balding ring-wearing gold-buckled slow-speaking businessman who never seems to get to the point of what he means. In the beginning, he played the "I'm not stupid" game. At some point I made him laugh, and that's when I knew things would be okay. After he signed the papers, he took us all out to lunch.

On weddings et. al.

Every so often I get tired of the strange people I encounter every day.  I mean "strange" with shameless judgment; it is my personal view of others relative to my perception of my own self; it is a subjective sentiment of which I do not care to pursue objectivity. 

And my personal preference is to perceive this prevalent strangeness at or around or in relation to weddings. Because at least there is an atmosphere of joy, and grilled mutton. 

My cousin's wedding yesterday was as expected. Food ran out by 8.30 pm.  The bride's face is plastered in make-up and she is wearing a tall shimmering gold crown that must weigh 3 kg because it took her 10 seconds to rotate her head to smile at me. The photos we took look like we could be anywhere in any of the million wedding venues in the city because they have the same chandeliers and the same carpeting and the same bridal stage and the same catering stalls. 

We stood in the middle of it all wondering if we could ever manage to escape being caught in a similar cycle.  We counted our friends (thousands), and our cliques (hundreds), and people who would not be offended if they weren't invited (very few). We want natural foliage and poolside spots but his mother hates sunlight and my mother is worried about flies in our food. We want secluded locations outside the city but my father is worried guests will find it bothersome. The resistance against anything unfamiliar and different is akin to the resistance against winds of reform in the government offices I frequently deal with. Ask why. Why? Why? And they, them, society, will answer collectively, "this is just the way we do things around here."  

And nobody questions that.  The lack of a desire to be individual is mind-boggling.

A friend the other day complained, to the bazillion members of our blackberry messenger chat-group, that she kept getting into never-ending fights with her fiancée.

This was, literally, everybody’s reaction to this heartfelt confession (LITERALLY):

Beyonce: “Be patient. Don’t forget, getting married is part of our religion. And satan does not like when we become religious, and therefore satan will always try to disturb us from performing it.”

Rihanna: RT “Be patient. Don’t forget, getting married is part of our religion. And satan does not like when we become religious, and therefore satan will always try to disturb us from performing it.”  It's just a test! I'm sure you'll pull through! :-)

Gaga: Agree!! ^_^ RT RT @Beyonce: “Be patient. Don’t forget, getting married is part of our religion. And satan does not like when we become religious, and therefore satan will always try to disturb us from performing it.” 

Britney: "Yes agree! Try talking to him, get him to understand, and don’t forget to pray a lot so that Allah shows the way. Don’t worry, in the end everything will be alright." 

This is madness. Utter madness.  


I would have said, wait. I'm sure God is doing His thing but while we wait for Him to sort you out, how about asking a few questions to yourself. Such as "WHY are you fighting instead of communicating?" "WHY do you want to marry him despite the fact that he drains your energy every day?"  "WHY do you feel that you need to compromise your career to make him happy?"


WHY are you all looking at me like that? What, I sound like a wannabe Freud? I'm too "Americano"? I'm too logical and heartless?  Too posh for the masses?  Too classy to invite everyone?  Fuck you. 


Having unique individual desires is the only thing that makes sense. 

Egg

My parents are still discussing how best to say an Easter greeting to my aunt. 

Long ago she married a Catholic and converted. Nobody minded much. Her parents were more concerned that he was of Chinese descent. "Are you sure?" they asked. "You don't want to find a Javanese man instead?" 

She had had the kind of relationship that lasted years. He would get jealous for various reasons throughout the years and she would often sit hunched on the phone with him, crying, silently so that her mother would not notice, but her sister, my mother, always noticed. She could not imagine anyone loving her as much as he did, completely, possessively. In the 70's nobody had yet figured out that possessiveness was a sign of insecurity.

So she converted and over the years his insecurity started leaking out from various parts of him, little by little, like hair that sheds one by one and nobody notices until they see a picture of how the hair used to be. One day his insecurity decided it was comfortable there and enveloped him whole, leaving no cover.  It became his character. He appeared to be a faithless man, or faithful only to the tales he spun to cover his lack of achievement.  My aunt, by contrast, became more faithful.  She went to church, sang praises, sought peace, and new friends. Jesus was her savior. 

My mother went through an entirely different journey and ended up in the same intensity of faithfulness, the kind that is born from a certain desperation.  The only thing that differentiated the sisters were their choice in men, and their choice of religion. They had the same mistaken perception of how different they were from each other. 

My parents are wondering how to say Happy Easter to her in a way which is Islamically correct. The saying goes that if we wish someone a Happy Easter or Merry Christmas, we are somehow acknowledging the raison d'être of their celebration, acknowledging the very fact that Jesus was born and died and resurrected to save humanity and is some kind of God. We could, however, tailor it a certain way so as to merely wish them a happy celebration, or a happy day in which they can conduct their celebrations. 

So far we have journeyed, from the days when my grandparents did not even blink when my aunt chose to convert. These days it is ridiculous.  It is like a different kind of insecurity.

Sacrifice

It was heartbreaking, the expression in mother's face this morning as she picked and cleared away the chilis in my fried rice. But what could I do. What could anyone do. 

She said no child could ever repay their parents and the sacrifices made. They will simply move on and transform from a son or daughter, to a relative. They will probably call or visit now and then but they would mostly forget.  

"It feels wrong if they are unmarried, and it feels wrong when they are married," she said. 

"What do you expect?" I said.

She did not answer. 

I ate my rice in silence.  Thinking about all the things I wish I could say in my capacity as a mechanical voice of reason. 

How could you not have thought about this, this moment in time when your children's wings would span tip to tip and take flight. How can you not feel pride and fulfillment at having brought them up so successfully. How could you have ever allowed yourself to believe that your children are your own possession, instead of a "titipan", an "amanah", a gift that is lent for a short while by God like everything else in life, as those preachers love to say. How could you not have thought of life as yours and yours only to make something of and be happy about regardless of your children.  How can you ever be happy if your happiness depends on someone else. How can you measure your children's love (or suspected lack thereof) by the measure of your own happiness (and lack thereof). Lastly, how can you preach daily about praying to God to manifest gratefulness if you have never looked happy in our eyes. 

But of course I could not say these cruel things.  I am a daughter about to be married, and I have never been a mother.

Heel kick

As in, proverbially kicking my heels off.

Today I encouraged a veiled young lady that being an occasional bitch will save her many times in life.  I then endured an entire meeting dominated by four foreign consultants discussing how to improve Jakarta's water supply system. Letting myself feel strangely embarrassed that they knew more about the system than I, or the other Indonesians in that meeting room, knew.  I then endured a long conference call in which I had to pretend to care about my client's debt-to-equity conversion clause and the numerical base price per share. My mind quietly wandered and decided to remind me that I wanted to lose 5 kgs this year, speaking of numbers.

I'm completely spent.

Interest

People are more interesting when they are interested in you.  By the same token, they would find you more interesting if you are interested in them.  I have unwittingly confused myself by coming up with my very own chicken and egg theory.  Who starts getting interested first in order to trigger interest in the other person?  It could happen spontaneously, or one person could start first and if interest vibrations could be visualized and plotted out on statistical graph then zig-zag lines would be bouncing back and forth from one person to the other, assuming the other is also, coincidentally, magically, interested.

This is basically an attempt to explain (to myself) the mysterious phenomena of why most of my friends are male.

Things

There are days when I wish to be stick thin, dressed in skinny leggings and white t-shirt with all the simplicity of a girl and sexiness of a woman. My general rule is that if I can look at myself naked in the mirror without cringing away, I'm good.  This becomes a problem because I can never see my backside, which mother always points out to me. She would say, "that dress only looks good from the front. From the back your buttocks are stretching it out of proportion". She would say, "you've grown wider ever since you came back from the US. What have you done there?"  She would say, "you should be grateful that you have someone who cares about how you look."  She would say, "If not me then who?"

Such is the happy perfection of my home.

Kindling

The writer Geoff Dyer said "Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."

Which perhaps explains why whenever I am happy - but not the desperate intoxicating happiness that comes from desiring something imperfect and difficult, not the jarring happiness of being an excitingly awkward angle, not the searching happiness of never quite arriving at the wanted journey's end; but the steady happiness of being loved whole and piecemeal, the magnetizing happiness of having an axis around which to spin my unquenchable thirst for life, the liberating happiness of never needing to choose the perfect shade of a sky out of a million, the unboring uneventful happiness that comes from framing laughs around every mundane moment - that is when I cannot write a single page.

Swing

She had a constellation of zits spread out across her forehead and it dazzled him. He could see the orion belt, he could see it guiding him to the right direction without a compass. All that was needed was darkness, and a tilt of the head towards the stars. He talked to her about thought, action, emotion, and she talked to him about the philosophy of swings. She swung in her swing as she spoke and she listened, and he followed the pendulum of her movements, completely hypnotized. Later that night he swung her with his virginal movements and she was saddened by the sexually insatiable woman she had become. They were both rendered insecure by the certainty of the other half's pretenses of security.

"Men do not like girls who cannot stay put"

She was starting to believe she saw patterns in her head. She was starting to give me conclusions. I wanted to tell her that I have no trouble getting men to like me, but the fact of the matter was that I am still single.  I hate that she is implicitly blaming me for being single. It is very unfair. I would never do that to my daughter.  But she's too lovely to hate.

She asked me to explain how I have never regretted all my failed relationships.  I am sure she has never regretted anything either. I am sure it is not an alien concept to her. But she would be ready to feel that regret on my behalf, if she had to, so that I wouldn't. She consoles herself from my refusal to be worried about anything by telling me that she prays to God that I will find the right man.  Amen, I say.  At least that part is covered so I can focus on other things.

Mr. Seven replies to my email later that day. I emailed him because it is his birthday, and I remembered because of facebook.  It is a long delicious email that feels accidentally articulate. On our second date several centuries ago, he was the one who saw the irony of being an atheist eating ice cream on the steps of a church with a virgin muslim girl who wasn't fasting. He was too shy to kiss me. He told me he would never email me once I'm gone because he would not have the stories nor the writing skills worthy of mine, and it would be unfair for me.  He said it with a comfortable confidence, which could only mean he would do anything he could be horrible at because it wouldn't damage him one bit.

I haven't found the right man perhaps, but I've found the right memories.