A Love To Remember

Dear C.,

Last year at this time, I quoted the Gwen Stefani song The Real Thing in the card I bought you from Prints in CityLink Mall - just before I brought it to Purple Pots to be delivered with flowers and a huge teddy bear that reminded me of you.

""I've held you too many times to count, I think I know you inside out,'' went the card. ""And we're together most days, but I still love to have you around.''

The lyrics were corny, I know, but on that day, they rang so true. And I knew them by heart, for I had played the song over and over again in the car all the way to the mall.

The card, the flowers and the bear were way overpriced. But a day before Valentine's Day, sitting in Pacific Coffee Company writing the words with the pen I had specially remembered to bring with me from the office, none of this seemed to matter at all.

This year, with the season for love round the corner again, S.C. asked me whether I thought romance in Singapore was dead.

Everyone does the dinner thing, and the card and flowers thing, but there's no real spontaneity in us, she lamented.

I had no real answer to that, except to uselessly point out that one of the most romantic places I knew of was Jurong Island in the dead of night - basking in the artificial twilight of the tall twisted structures of steel and concrete.

But later I thought: To hell with romance. It's enough that people here in busy Singapore even want to pay tribute to their most meaningful relationships and remember why they are still in them.

So this year, I've decided to celebrate by doing just that - remembering the story of us. And to have it published for posterity, or at least, for however long this Internet server keeps these blogs.

For life's best moments are as fleeting as they come, and I want to forever remember how, in one strange twist of fate, I ended up experiencing happiness for real.

I want to remember how we first talked to each other in an Internet chatroom one rainy July morning, when I had taken the day off from work.

And how, when we met, I loved the way you carried, child-like, your ATM card and identity card in a clear plastic case around your neck. How you mixed a certain kookiness with an obvious maturity of thought, and I instinctively knew that I had to see you again.

I also want to remember how I waited every night after that in the same chatroom for you to appear. And how, when you did finally appear at two or three in the morning, I pretended I hadn't spent the last four hours doing absolutely nothing but stare into the screen waiting.

I want to remember how I was still in another relationship when I met you - the type of relationship, which after four long years, had a certain stability that segued easily into marriage.

But I wasn't really in love. And I want to remember that it took a strange film called Magnolia (which ended with frogs raining down from the sky) to teach me that you could mislead someone in life and love with falseness, but you won't ever be forgiven for the lie.

Finally, I want to remember the endless hours I spent driving around in my car thinking about what I should do next, and a hit Mandarin ballad on the radio that helped me make up my mind.

""Eventually I learnt how to love someone, but you had disappeared into the faceless crowd,'' sang Taiwanese songstress Renee Liu. ""And so I came to understand that you can let a person slip away, but that mistake will be for life.''

Playing the song almost six years later, two days before Valentine's Day, I marvel at just how close I came to missing my shot at happiness. And I find myself hoping that the memories it brings back will always remain as fresh as the day they were minted.

That I will continue to cry at movies only because I imagine that onscreen break-up to be with you, and how empty life would be without you by my side.

That even though we may, like other couples, eventually spend our urban nights at the gym, or watching television or glued to our respective computers, the bond between us will remain wordlessly strong.

And that whatever life throws in our way, I will never stop being proud of you. And us.

For in a world that teeters daily between rationality and insanity, you are undefinably the greatest thing to have happened to me.

Happy Valentine's Day.