Two Lucky

Merry Christmas, Rusty

The plane landed. From Changi International Airport, I hailed down a taxi, and gave the driver the address of my parents’ apartment. I didn’t realize how much I had been holding back until the driver asked me: “Are you coming home, sir?”

I didn’t see it coming; I was overcome.

Where is home?

In the years Rusty and I were together, we had several - and in different cities: New York, Seoul, Singapore. During doctors’ appointments and between rounds of chemotherapy, home was refuge in hotels, friends’ houses and hospitals. We were always taking trips, if not for the cancer, then to take short vacations from it. But most of the time, we would be flying to see each other; until the last six months we spent in New York together, we had lived mostly apart in Asia: he in Seoul, I in Singapore.

To live at one time so entwined with someone, yet separate from his person, was difficult. At night, alone in bed, to have our heartache consoled by each other’s voices, yet not by its curing warmth - that was punishing. In the year of lost touch, each reunion, each embrace, was the prize of our longing: in all the trips I took to see him, waiting at the interminable terminals, walking from gate to gate, one, and only one thought sustained me:

I am finally coming home to my man.

After all our days apart, it was always knowing I would soon rest by the hearth of his body that kept me going. I longed for the clasp of his chin, the pillow of his chest, the quiet breathing we’d learned - after so many years of fighting - to be grateful for. The moment he takes me in his arms, I am safe; and in the nascent light of departing shadows, I know it without doubt, and beyond question: I am home.

After he died, I vanished into our apartment in New York. For days I was unable to leave the bedroom. I slept on the same side of our bed. I searched for his smell in the sheets; I crawled into imaginary nooks, positions I learned by heart to remind myself the shape of his body. It was no use; I had never felt more homeless.

In the past year, an aspect of my grieving process was to find for myself a new home. In the first blur of grief, I sought it in the unknowing hands of men I solicited in bars and on the Internet. I was desperate for impersonations of love, no matter how unconvincing, or poorly rendered to life.

Each man who came into my bed was unfamiliar to my body; our limbs pieces of jigsaw that didn’t fit.

It took time, before perspective gave clarity to my wounds. I began to see that no man held the salve to my pain. I realized the haven for my anguish I pursued with such dogged blindness was no further than the tip of my nose. It was me: I was my new home.

Guided by that epiphany, I decided all that I had left of Rusty wasn’t the apartment, or the clothes and books he left behind, or the letters, or the ring he gave me the week before he died to seal our rendezvous in the afterlife. What he left for me instead was a country filled with the domiciles of our love. His love would be my shelter until the time came for me to join him in our final home.

I held my tears until I stepped out of the taxi and pulled my suitcases into the apartment. It was 7am. My parents were still asleep. Quietly I lay down on the couch and searched in my mind again the feel of Rusty’s body behind me - his arm around my waist, his hand I hold to my lips. It was then, carrying all of him in my heart, that I heard him say to me: I had not lost a home. I had now become one for him.

“What is your ideal last meal?”

This was the question posed by reporter Serene Lim to seven renowned chefs in Singapore in the most recent issue of 8 Days magazine. In the article, Ms Lim asked the chefs, among them including Messrs. Eric Teo of The Mandarin Hotel, Edward Voon of Aurum, and Willin Low of Wild Rocket, what their ideal last meal would be, and why.

The point of the article, though unsurprising, is a good one. At the end of the day, what these truffle-hoarding and foie gras-packing cooks yearn for is a dish brewed with love and steeped in old memories. The best chefs, in their collective opinion, are mothers and wives.

“Nostalgia plays a big part in how I view food,” said Mr Low, 45, whose last meal he hoped would be his mother’s cabbage porridge with dried shrimp, mushrooms and minced meat. “It’s a powerful substance which brings you back to a particular time and space.”

To others, what ends up on the plate is less important than the hands that put it together.

“Any fish dish prepared by my wife,” said Mr Ronnie Chia of Tatsuya. Added the 40-year-old, whose Japanese restaurant ranks among the top in Singapore: “If it’s your last meal, don’t you want a loved one to be cooking for you?”

We respond to food - the smell of it, its color and flavors - in the most visceral way. Food moves our bodies, but it also nurtures memory. You don’t have to be a critic to remember how a dish made you feel. In a way, it is the most complex of emotional triggers - put aside your paintings, songs and letters - nothing quite warms the soul as food prepared especially for you by a loved one.

I was unprepared for the emotions that welled up as I read Ms Lim’s article. I remembered in the last weeks of Rusty’s life how food, or the lack of it, had become an indicator of his dying body. I watched with horror his bones jut out from under his skin, tracing their sharp edges against his jaw-line, ribs and elbows. He had not eaten in days, and when I asked him if he were hungry, he replied, as if it were the most reasonable answer:

“But I already ate two slices of cucumber.”

Two nights before he died, I made for him a meal of steamed halibut, with a dash of white wine, sesame oil and lemon juice. I served it with his favorite tea - mint with cucumber and honey. He ate only half of it, but it was the most he had eaten in over a month. As he sat in his chair, pushing each small bite into his shrunken body, I was overcome with joy and despair. I knew he was eating to make me happy. “It’s so good, baby,” he whispered to me from across the room. He raised his thumb up. He winked at me.

I did all I could from breaking down. That was Rusty’s last meal.

The day he died, I couldn’t stop worrying if he would have enough to eat, or drink. I wondered in the days after the fact who, among the angels and demons, would make sure he had his water by his bed, or a slice of toast for him in the mornings. The idea of a “last meal” was blocked from my mind. Of course, of course, he still needed to eat.

Since then, I’ve grown sensitive to many different foods, all flavored with the memory of our lives together. Not a moment slips by - in restaurants, in friends’ apartments, or at home - as I’m eating, do I not think of Rusty, and wonder if this or that dish is something he would like, or not. I now eat for the both of us. In this small way, I continue to nourish the memory of the man I love, and take some comfort knowing he has yet, and never will, come to taste his last meal without me.

In two hours I will be on my flight back to Singapore.

It’s been a long year. A year ago I moved back to New York with Rusty, and though I had an idea I might be leaving this city alone, I never imagined this day would come with such… calmness.

The man I pledged to spend the rest of my life with, the man I swore to save, I lost him. Kant once said that true love occurs only in a condition of complete sacrifice, when one person gives to another the totality of his being, his raison d’etre. If so, in Rusty’s death, I have lost myself forever, too. At least, that was how it felt when he died. Since the day, my journey of grief has been a process of piecing myself together again; in a way, grief is not so unlike amnesia.

In finding my way back to myself, New York has been a knowing guide. I live daily in pockets of moments, walk among memories that pop up around New York streets like wild, fantastic flowers. These flashbacks - his smile on 11th Street, his fingers under the table at Piccolo Angolo’s, the corner on St Mark’s Cathedral where we sat waiting for him to catch his breath - come back to me as little gifts, tiny bookmarks in the grid of our New York life. To have had this past: to have had the time to spend with Rusty, to have had our home, and finally, to have had the gift of saying good bye - how can I not be grateful?

When Rusty died, leaving New York seemed impossible. My instinct was to possess everything, keep everything still. Don’t change, I pleaded. After so many months, so much has changed. I’ve learned to respect time. I’ve learned to let go. I’ve learned to say good bye.

So good bye, New York. And thank you. You’ve been a great lover, a good friend, and a beautiful home to Rusty and me. I’m sorry to go, but it will not be so long before I see you again.

Seven months

It is hard for me to remember a time of men before Rusty.

It is not for a lack of suitors, because there were many. What I mean to say is that it is difficult for me to imagine the person I was - with regards to men and sex - before I met Rusty. After all that we had been through, it is without hesitation that I say in the final months leading to his death, Rusty and I had become each other; we survive, even today, because we carry a part of ourselves as we go on - for him, in death; for me - in life.

Perhaps I also mean to say it is difficult for me to imagine the man I am now, what with so little of Rusty left.

On hindsight, the string of men I kept - and my experience of them - were episodic, vignettes of bodies and easy conversation. I learned the game well. I sought each person out. I derived pleasure from the heaviness of our bodies held only together by the very lightness of our devotion. Our affairs reached as far as the walls that enclosed us. It would not be inaccurate to describe my proclivities as lascivious, though it was not that no man satisfied me, but that no one man could. I had just come out, and sexual liberation for me did not stop at owning my orientation; it extended to understanding what power I wielded as a sexual being. I was determined to command my sexuality as I would a knife - deftly, skillfully and with practice.

I selected my lovers with care. The first man I made love to was a slender Iranian architect who kept only eggs and bottled water in his fridge. After him, there was a muscular Spanish lawyer who worked on weekends as a personal trainer. The Italian model who liked to watch MTV while he was being serviced. The myopic Swiss entrepreneur I trapped and kissed in a phone booth; the Brazilian professional basketball player whose touch felt like old leather on my skin.

Man after man, I checked off continents, cultures, determined the language of love on different tongues and in different hands. I was a deviant will-o’-wisp, dipping into men like bees into honey. I could never have predicted then that the one man to stump my wings would be an American electronics consultant who grew up on a farm.

Since I met Rusty, my impressions of the men I slept with have faded; since his death, the men who have come into my bed leave faceless and without imprint. What they leave behind, their scent on my body, is washed away. What the walls enclose now, what bodily heaviness it observes, is not without the same emotional lightness.

But there is one difference. In the same room, there will always be one other: that lingering absence of love.

Two days ago marked the seventh month since Rusty’s death. It was then - and after I moved out of our apartment - that it occurred suddenly to me that I was now single again. The idea struck me with an inexplicable, oblique force. I had never considered myself “single” until then. I was grateful that the word came to me when it did. It meant another part of me had woken. In the company of men, being newly single, I tested my body and discovered unexpectedly what power remained in the languor of my legs, the firmness of my bottom, the delicacy of my fingers.

Again, the knife in my hands.

The first snow fell last night in New York. Fall is coming to an close. So begins a new season in this city.

I, too, am starting a new chapter. Since Friday, I’ve moved out of my apartment on East 11th Street to shack up with my brother Zack on East 4th Street. I’m here for two weeks. I’ll spend next weekend with Rusty’s mom in Virginia; the weekend after that, I’ll be at Newark International Airport on a flight back to Singapore.

As I move out of this life, and into the next, I imagined myself feeling lost and depressed; but I feel neither. I am not nostalgic, I am not disappointed. I am not even sad. Right now, right this moment, all I feel is a sense of anticipation.

This surprised me. Before yesterday, even though I felt I was ready to leave New York, I wasn’t completely sure I would be all right. The first step was leaving the apartment. I predicted a teary good bye. But it was as normal a day could be. I waited in the morning for the movers. I loaded my boxes onto the truck. I lugged my suitcase to the door. There, I said “thank you,” and “good bye,” kissed the red walls, and let the door close behind me.

In the afternoon, I took a nap at Zack’s apartment. I missed it, but it was no longer the same home Rusty and I built together. I had no desire to return to it.

When I saw the snow fell last night, I felt a question had been answered. It was a mark of time; it seemed to me the earth had been waiting for that first snow-flake. I realized I had been waiting, too. I understood the necessity of snow. Unwelcome though winter may be, it has its place in life’s measure. There is some comfort in the steady, knowing cycle of time.

So it is with my imminent departure from New York. The day is around the corner. I no longer feel conflicted about leaving. In fact, I find myself looking forward to it. I have everything I need with me. I’ll be okay.

So, let it snow, let it snow. Let it snow.