City of Richard

On Friday I am flying to the City of Richard for a conference over the weekend. My company doesn’t allow me to use work leave if I wanted to go to the airport early—to be fair, the flight is at 7pm and I finish work at 4pm. My company thinks I can make it to the airport right after work, but the problem is I want to spent some time with my kids before I take off. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see them at all on Friday (because I leave for work at 7am), Saturday and Sunday (I’ll probably get home at 11pm and I need to go to work at 7am again on Monday). Therefore I decided to take most of Friday off to run errands and spend a couple of hours with my kids in the afternoon.

I haven’t been back to the City of Richard since 2011. Given how tight my schedule is I basically only have Saturday evening to myself to maybe have a decent dinner and maybe do some shopping. 3 months ago, I had imagined that Eric would propose to meet me in the City of Richard and we’d kiss freely there. But now, I see myself totally alone, and somewhat lonely. Eric is totally gone from my life.

Monday night I went to Blue’s concert. I know it’s just another sappy romantic boy band music but it always makes me cry. I basically survived my teenage years through the words and music of these boy bands. Whenever I listen to Guilty, If You Ever Come Back, You Make Me Wanna, I just feel an ache in my chest. After my reconnection with Eric this year, I have been listening to Blue a lot and I don’t know why. The lyrics just resonate with me. Seeing these 40+ men working so hard on stage is quite inspiring, but obviously the Backstreet Boys are still more energetic—they never lip sync and they can still dance. Blue lip synced a third of the time and they could barely dance. However I would say their songs are harder to sing than BSB’s with a much wider range of pitches and everyone in Blue can hit those high pitches; not everyone in BSB could.

All these boy bands went through my darkest days with me and now they’re all settled down with kids, and I don’t see them as idols or fantasies anymore. To me they’re just humans, with much more money and flexibility in life than I do. 

Why do I feel lonely these days? I don’t want to use the penpal app anymore because all the letters that caught my eyes are written by ChatGPT and the other ones are just shallow. They don’t even read my bio before writing to me. I’ve been processing some thoughts with ChatGPT 5.1 these days (and I must say, holy shit it is smart and it knows me so well but it still has the major problem of not having enough memory to remember everything about me). The disappointing thing is that even Gen sometimes writes back to me using ChatGPT whenever I write him a heart felt email. I’ve been suspecting that for a while but because he doesn’t always use it (we sometimes just type a few lines via email like we’re texting) I have just gone with it. But now I’m pretty certain he’d just feed my whole email to ChatGPT and have it reply to me.

He just wrote a Chinese song recently and today he emailed me asking me for my thoughts. He claimed that he felt something is off and he’d like to pick my brain. Sometimes I feel used because I think he’d never want to meet me in person and he just wants me to stay distant like this. On the other hand, he did make Chasing Time for me and has at least read a lot of emotional stuff I’ve written, I decided to give him some advice. His lyrics sound too generic, just like some of his letters to me. He doesn’t reveal his own pain or paint a picture of his own pain through words and therefore the lyrics feel empty. ChatGPT thinks that his lyrics were partially written by AI, and it also thinks that Gen sometimes uses ChatGPT to reply to me because he couldn’t match me but didn’t want to disappoint me. What I don’t get is that why don’t these men just leave if they can’t make me happy? Why do they hang around to take advantage of my intelligence and wisdom?

Everyone leaves. Eric knows his circumstances have been hurting me so he’s left. Everyone has left and I have no one. As we’re approaching the end of the year, I am alone again, just like every year before I got married, and even after I got married, I still counted down and watched the fireworks all by myself because Angel must go to bed at 8pm every single day. That new year kiss, that someone who could hold me when it’s cold, has never shown up in my life. X, where are you?