Separate Lives- forever.

"We live our separate lives
And go our different ways
Cause we don't see eye to eye
And we can't stand face to face." - Separate Lives by The Alan Parsons Project.

Going for another sweltering, strength sapping and mildly torturous 90 mins hot yoga session after a two week hiatus was on hindsight not the best way to kickstart the flagging exercise regime. But as everyone knows, sometimes one simply needs a good shock to jump start the engine or risk succumbing to the eternally attractive 'Oh maybe just next week' excuse.

So while the rapid sequence of postures in the hot house left me a little light headed and totally baked towards the end of the class, the feeling after taking a shower was pure bliss. There is truth after all to the age old observation of that feel-good sensation and utter satisfaction after a good hard work out. Pleasure after the pain.

Exercise like sex, which of course is in itself a most pleasurable form of exercise, does work up a healthy appetite. Which is where one needs to curb the craving to stuff your face silly with all that horribly tempting and artery clogging fried stuff or perhaps the odd dessert or two. Kinda stupid to detox and burn calories then retox and pile on more calories faster than you can say 'cake'.

Thankfully, the only eateries open at a very ulu Valley Point were Starbucks and a small family Japanese restaurant. No brainer about dinner. I had a Tekka Don, raw tuna on sushi rice with pickles, roe and a generous serving of pink ginger and a salmon skin temaki. The Tekka Don was passable, not half as fatty as I would have liked it to be and the rice was just a tad too clumpy but the food was on average, well above average. That and possibly because I was positively famished.

Sitting there and trying my darn best to chew through each mouthful, not out of any particular need to appreciate the food but rather the more pragmatic and mundane reason of filling the stomach, I pondered just how in the short span of a few months, how used and comfortable I was to being alone. Having a quiet meal, savouring the food, watching the world go by.

Sure sometimes the conversation, the company is missed. A heartfelt conversation, the ripostes and parries as both parties interact and simply enjoy the company. But these days solitude is a familiar solace, not one that is actively sought out as a panacea for any perceived loneliness from being alone but a solace that has become comforting in its familiarity. You observe more, you think more, you do what you want, when you want, you impose less. Of course the very same reason for the aforesaid benefits is also a necessary downside, you remain alone.

And when one realises that irrefutable fact, one can either choose to remain wretchedly single or recognise that fact and make the best of things. Or you can, anti-social as it may sound, enjoy the solitude while remaining cognizant of the fact that the occasional fleeting pangs of loneliness are natural and by no way indicative of a need to rush into a relationship with someone else. A nice warm body in bed undeniably tempting yes, but to enter into a relationship or seek solace in the company of friends, no.

So now I've gotten quite hooked on cedele lunches and other decidedly less 'manly' (as termed by a few dear colleagues at work on the account that lunches which involve copious amounts of meat and preferably half of it nicely fried are substantial and manly) lunches at sandwich bars and ramen shops while trooping about the central area for lunch if I'm not forced to lunch in due to work.

Which means I haven't been joining the gang for lunch for a while but all's good because lunch doesn't have to be a give or take kind of decision and it's not nice to expect people to have sandwiches, salads and other decidedly unmanly food on a regular basis. Making and/or expecting them fork out the amount you're willing to fork out for the aforesaid grub is certainly unacceptable.

But really, despite the rambling diversion, the focus of this entry was never meant to be about Yoga, sex or food. Not even solitude as solace though that is certainly a necessary incidental. It's to explain to a certain once beloved individual in very clear, unadulterated terms just exactly why the prospect of convenient amnesia and maintaining the masquerade of a 'friendship', emotionless and superficial is not an option for yours truly. And to lay bare just exactly why I think your random off the wall shot that your 'heart has been hurt once more' is just a load of horse shit.

You knew things were coming to a head. Ever since that utterly disastrous Bangkok trip ("I know you didn't enjoy yourself" must have been the biggest understatement of the year), with the oh-let's-all-move-on-I-fucked-my-colleague-so-I-made-my-choice-but-let's-still-be-friends-cause-I-really-care-give-it-thirty-years-and-we might-be-together crap. So yes you made your choice didn't you, you wanted to move on didn't you but we still have to be friends, cause really I want you to know who I'm fucking cause I care for you.

And you wonder why I remained so cold and distant after you had so brutally told me to move on, the lies you tell with a smile and in the same breath profess care and concern while extending what you undoubtedly perceived to be a very sensible and generous offer of friendship. One that remains utterly superficial, that veneer of artificiality glaring without the need to scrutinize, a blase emotionless friendship of endless small talk and superficial concern but never lancing the festering boil beneath.

I don't know how anyone who ever felt a fraction of what you claim to have felt for the relationship, towards the other party, could readily just release it all and adopt this convenient amnesia, flash your idiotic grin and presume we could ever be 'just' friends as if that phrase of life, those years never existed. I don't even know if you genuinely feel that way or it's your way of coping. I don't care now. But if you ever genuinely did feel that way, I can only say it has to be your biggest blessing or foulest curse.

Suffice to say, I am not blessed with such a delusional view of things. For the only logical conclusion I can come to, if you do not indeed possess the aforementioned unfathomable mindset, is that you surely never cared, never loved like you said you did. To be able to release so callously, to be able to settle for a friendship as superficial as it is unsatisfying, to be able to sleep with a colleague 'you think is nice' and speak of your 'concern' for me in the same breath is an irrefutable indication of the depth and strength of your purported feelings.

None. Zilch. Zero. An utter and complete fallacy. And I'm sure the part about how you never really forgot your first ex too was meant to be comforting in your warped sense of logic which fails me. Something about moving on and remaining friends I believe. But perhaps the idea that if you loved a person so much, so desperately, so consumingly, there will always remain that underlying tension of unspoken emotions especially when the breakup was never due to cheating or a fatal disinterest so much so that remaining 'just' friends is all the more untenable, never ever crossed your mind? Perhaps not on that halcyonic, delusional world of yours.

So when finally unable to bear the constant, frivolous attempts at initiating superficial small talk about work and weather despite my numerous indications that I was not in the least inclined to do so (conveniently ignored as usual), I lambasted you on Thursday, telling you in no uncertain precisely what I thought about your ludicrous and downright unwelcome attempts at remaining 'friends', you went dead silent then played the part of the maligned virtuous hero, the wronged, long suffering been-dumped-boyfriend. 'But I tot we can be frens...'

No we can't. Not the kind of compartmentalised GI Joe you can take out from your toybox when the mood for some company comes on you and which can be shut away when you please friendship you envisage. Not some cheap, plastic bauble. Unlike you I cannot forget the past six plus years, better you be an eternal stranger, dead to the heart, those years a monument,a chapter of my life, testament to my folly, than have some pseudo- half-baked- superficial- acquaintance when I don't want to know who you're screwing now and you think it's good I should know.

And then you went " Once again you have cut deep into my heart." There is nothing to cut, I have no wish or will, nothing to cut it with and with you so brutally declaring to move on and spewing copious crap about releasing and remaining friends, what is there to cut when your heart has already died on this relationship when you uttered those accursed words in Bangkok. "I made my choice when I slept with him, you should make yours." Then live with it. YOU made YOUR choice.

Or was your heart hurt because you thought you could release yet still remain as friends, superficial though it may be, which you found to be gratifying and acceptable and I flatly rejected that? Then it can bleed dry because I have no intention of being a party to your deluded scheme.

I will not wish you well, because I have no inclination to do so. Neither will I wish you ill, because I'm not going to waste my karma on someone who is totally not worth it. In fact I will be very honest and state for the record that right now, I really dislike you. But I will remember the times past, how you used to be, not the you now or whatever you may be in the future.

Because as far as I'm concerned, you've died to me and the next time (if ever) we pass by on the streets, it shall be as strangers, oblivious, uncaring, indifferent. Goodbye Mr Ho.