Slowly changing

The emotional flashbacks I had over the week had drained me physically. I needed time to process thoughts and feelings every day and as a result I ended up being very sleep deprived. It’s finally Friday and I’m gonna sleep in tomorrow, but I do have a day of outing with Jinu starting 11am so technically I still can’t really sleep in.

We are going to somewhere far, a different city, to enjoy fine dining again. Let’s call it “ocean to table”, as opposed to stupid Americans’ organic “farm to table”. It’s omakase teppanyaki, and it’s so popular that our reservation is at 1:40pm because all the earlier time slots were fully booked. And yet, we had to pay for the entire meal upfront and if we don’t show up or if we show up more than ten minutes late, then we lose our entire deposit. I have never seen any restaurant this snooty, so it’d better be good.

After that we’re gonna do hot springs at a hotel with private rooms. The highway back to the City of Rain has HOV restrictions until 8pm so we’d probably get home at 10pm. 

This past week had been like a roller coaster ride for me. I feel so unfair that those emotional flashbacks are still following me, haunting me, giving me cold sweats, making me cry. My upbringing is such a costly one—I not only have spent so much time, energy and money on healing myself but also there’s a ceiling to what I can achieve in my life. So many small things that don’t trigger others would trigger me, and therefore I have to do something simply and easily controllable for work because otherwise too much human interaction or uncertainty would completely overwhelm me. Someone’s mindless words or actions could easily haunt me for days and I don’t want to live like this anymore.

I have two BFFs at work now; both of them are about ten years older than me. One has never been married and never had kids (let’s call her Cat Woman because she has several cats and two dogs at home); the other one is married, has two boys too, but her husband had a stroke a few years ago and she’s been the only one making money supporting her whole family for over a decade. Today at work I told Cat Woman my upbringing, because she told me most people had the impression that I grew up wealthy. I told her I was born a love child, grew up with domestic violence and had to pay off so much debt for my parents. Everyone who’s known my story would be impressed by how much I had overcome and how capable I am, but who knows how tired I am and just want to be held for once?

I’ve also been thinking about Jinu. We didn’t talk much at work over the past week. Well, I’ve been busy grading and I guess he’s noticed that I’ve been busy, but I’ve also noticed that he’s often not in the office. Maybe he’s socializing in his free periods too. I sometimes feel nervous about our trip tomorrow; other times I just want to be carefree like a little girl and enjoy the fact that there’s finally someone who can afford (or actually it’s not about affordability; it’s more about whether they enjoy good food enough and understand the beauty of good food) fine dining with me. In the past if I wanted fine dining with anyone, I’d have to be the one paying for everyone because if I don’t, no one would want to go there with me because it’s not worth it to them. I’ve also learned from Angel that Jinu is going to Palau with a few other coworkers who don’t have kids or are single for spring break, and one of them is a female teacher in his cohort. Sometimes when I think about this I feel that his life is so distant from mine. I think he’s looking for someone young, someone who can travel with him every break, someone free. I don’t know what I mean to him and why he likes to talk to me.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Maybe something in him might repel me and then we go back to being strictly coworkers, and not even friends. 

I’ve also thought of Eric a few times this week. He’s feeling so distant to me now. A part of me feels tired that someone who already knows so much about me is gone again and I have to start over and keep telling new people about myself and what I’ve been through. That’s quite time and energy consuming. I’ve know Cat Woman for five years for me to tell her all theses things about myself. If I ever want to have a partner, I not only have to repeat these conversations with many different people, hoping that one of the will choose me and stay. On top of that I have a full time demanding job and two kids with special needs, one of whom is partially homeschooled. I also need time to sleep, eat, write, get a massage and fine dining. Mathematically speaking it’s just very hard.

Just like Gen. I spent months writing emails to him, rewriting his lyrics and telling him my life stories so that he was inspired to write a couple of songs for me. In the end, he started to reply to my emails using ChatGPT, and he very rarely shares his personal life or inner world with me so now we’re not talking. We haven’t sent anything to each other since Blue’s concert because he wanted to “pick my brain” to give him advice on his lyrics. The Chinese version of Chasing Time got the most hits on YouTube and Spotify, and I rewrote the lyrics for him. I started to see that some of his lyrics must have been written by ChatGPT, even tho he told me at the beginning of our correspondence that he would not use AI, stubbornly so. I feel used and fooled so I don’t email him anymore. He’d asked me to write to him when I could, but he never writes anything personal to me, not even small things that happen in his life. His long replies often were just reflecting my emotions without providing his own experience, exactly like ChatGPT. And now all the personal stories I shared with him have to be shared with someone else again and I’m getting tired of knowing new people.

Today I’ve found out that Gen took down all the songs he had released on YouTube and Spotify, so I can’t even hear the ones written for me and one of which had a singer say “Feel Better Kendra”. I don’t know what he’s thinking and why he had to do this.