I truly hate pretending. That is one of the things that people know about me - that I’m always real. So it bothers me that I have to pretend that you do not exist. Yet I have chosen that because the alternative would be for you and me to exchange benign smiles.
The Benign Smile is one you give someone familiar (because you’ve passed them a hundred times), but yet unfamiliar (because of a lack of shared memory).
That is why I cannot give you the benign smile.
Because in the year of our alternate-friend-zone, we have shared quite a lot with each other, and spent enough time together to develop familiarity, enough for me (and some friends) to sometimes wonder if we were actually dating.
Indeed, we were not dating. You made it clear in January that we are chums. Nothing more. I always look back on that lunch in that strange Thai cafe with a playlist of songs that had not been equalised, with vinyl stickers of a random water market plastering the walls, and wonder if I should have been honest that day and say that indeed I did have expectations of our relationship, because it had seemed that you were opening that door for me to walk through.
How else could I explain going to your mother’s house for lunch alone, or having endless conversations every day, or your hanging back to accompany me when the rubber wore off the trucks of my longboard and I skated like an inflated balloon man? Could you explain?
Indeed, we are chums. I told myself clearly after that day, over and over again. Even while we kept up the endless conversations, hardly ever failing to say goodbye before we logged off each day. Even while we met almost every day for breakfast or tea or a garden walk or plant shopping or for dinner with friends.
We are chums, i told myself clearly on Valentine’s Day after praying hard that morning for a sign from God if we were meant to be. But then you asked me out for bubble tea, to tick another one off the list on our shared mission to conquer all the bbt stores in Singapore.
We are chums, i repeated to myself again when the endless conversations began to end. But the mantra did not work.
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