March 25th, 2010
Singapore Vegetarians in Love
He was never much of a meat-eater to begin with, and unusually sensitive to the inner nature of things. Constantly drawing relationships between history and the human body, he had developed a complex system where one could explore the story of human civilizations on the planet by spending an hour stretching every morning. He always thought it was funny, in an ironic way, that he would have forgotten the lessons of history by lunchtime, and find himself face to face with the same walls once again.
Walls were always a perfectly fine metaphor for the relationships between people, and sometimes, when memory and history was involved, it became a curious exercise to measure the will of a couple to examine the historical moments that passed between them in the history of their brief love. In the grander scheme of things, every love is brief, and every lover is here for a very short time, and this used to make him sad.
Lately, however, he’d been wondering about the way his new romance had come about on the edges of a hurricane, one that took the world by surprise, like they always do. He wondered that the marks of history might leave their traces here, putting them in the position of forgetting each other utterly, without any warning.
Stranger things had happened before, and they would surely come up again in the grander scheme of things. These thoughts were too much to bear over a vegetarian lunch in Singapore of all places, where so much history and water were under the bridge but never really gone. If the lover were to show now, it wouldn’t be as elegant as he imagined it could be, because he was still in the midst of putting himself back together after a long morning of forgetting.
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