but then i don't imagine i would feel this way if it were desmond, with whom i'm still fairly close, and still see whenever i'm home and generally have a lovely time together. we like to say that we are a lovely example of how to be friends with your ex - there is a great deal of genuine affection still on either side, and ease that comes of sharing an intimate past once. after spending some years apart there is much to learn about the other - not simply what is called "catching up" but in some senses, learning anew, and yet there is much that hasn't changed - you still understand each other well, part postulating from knowledge of habit, part from natural intuition. you can even talk about the past - there isn't really even any need to apologise for the past - it really doesn't seem to matter - (she has forgot, how many a woful stowre / for him she late endurd; she speakes no more / of past.) and one laughs - about the happy things and the silly things - do you remember the time we did this, or that, and laugh about them without pangs of self-pity or nostalgia - simply shared, happy memories remembered in the right spirit.

i found from an unfinished (and so unposted) entry i wrote in my last semester at virginia: "i saw desmond twice in the summer, and then once on this last trip home. i haven't thought about him for a very long time, but when i met up with a bunch of people at an new hawker centre, i suddenly realised i haven't been in that area since i left jc, because i didn't have to take 165 through thomson anymore, and in the years with kg i was always in the east. but what really pushed me to call him was that his new apartment, the one i've never visited, was right across the street from the hawker centre. i had to look in the rj directory for his number: he'd moved after we broke up so i never committed his new number to memory. he didn't seem that surprised it was me. we went for a walk along kallang the first time, and talked vaguely of going to see some arts feste performance together, though we never did - i think i wasn't that comfortable then, yet, to be out in public with him - as if so soon after - seven months actually - was still not quite decent. and then with more ease, the second time, a few days before i came back to school, had cake at an old thomson cafe we used to go to when we were in secondary school, only it has a new name and new proprietorship. but this last january trip home was good. i think i feel good about him now, becos we're at the point where there is no hurt or blame or fear. i don't mean we've suddenly decided we're the best of friends. we probably wouldn't think of each other first when we want to do something, and we are no longer close. we haven't been keeping in touch - and a break of several years can make too much of a difference. but i know now that when i'm back home in future we can meet up and have lunch, or go for a walk, and that we'll both be pleased to see each other."

it's all worked out better than that, though, these three years past - it's been more than easy to rebuild a friendship - and how quickly too - over the one year i spent at home - and he was a houseman then, and his irregular working hours were actually helpful - we could go out on weekdays when other people were working 9-5 - he got a full day off the day after his calls - we saw each other fairly often then. and i was wrong too - true, we aren't the first people we would think of - but there were some things for which we were the only people we could possibly have thought of. and we walked for hours - all over the island, and talked and drank tea and had chocolate and walked some more. there is much unaffected ease, simple trust. the cozy familiarity comes back steadily.

once poach and i were talking about how we treat relationships very differently. she says that she takes a long time to reach closure but once she boots the guy from her life she'll never think two minutes about him again. when you look back on some relationships you can't for the life of you fathom what you ever saw in the men. i know what she means and of course i've liked quite the wrong sorts before too, and those indeed are all yan xiao yun san too (vanished like smoke and dispersed as clouds. i like chengyus.) but i was also recounting how many of my close guy friends today are people i used to like at one time or another. i think with me it's hard to make a separation between friendship and romance? you care too much about the friendship to lose them altogether even if the relationship doen't work out - and the attraction you felt at first makes you regard them in a fonder light. with each of the people i've really cared about, even though it's clear as daylight why i wouldn't be with them now, i can always still see exactly why i fell in love in the first place, and that these things are somehow the constants in them - and are what make friendship so pleasant and possible. they don't change the fact that the relationship had failed. they don't make whatever wrongs you had done to each other better either. they aren't even necessarily the things that make you want to try again - that much is over. really is. we now have almost no common circles of friends - but that may be what makes things easier - you meet with no histories except of what the two of you shared, and you meet in a space defined without reference to anyone but your own selves. but there are things that never change - lively intellect, thoughtfulness, gameness, compassion, capacity for laughter, perception.