Why?

Eric texted me to apologize, and then he sent me a very long text at 10 am.

Eric: ​please know that i was never trying to make you feel bad. maybe you don't like teasing among family members bc it felt mean-spirited when your family members teased you, but that's not my intention. the subtext when i tease you is the opposite-facing mirror image phenomenon: we are so alike in many ways, but then also wanting opposite things or disagreeing about nearly everything. 

even though i felt so alone in the world for so many years, from the moment i met you, i never felt you were a stranger. i didn't feel alone. i trusted you implicitly. 

but then, our differences keep us apart. we don't want the same things, and we don't agree on many things, either.

i can't even help you directly. even when i can clearly see the situation, giving you advice is useless bc what i would do isn't something you're willing to do or capable of doing. for example, i can clearly see that you would've ended up with a better husband if you had just been willing and able to sleep with a few guys in 2013. i said so at the time. but those were useless words bc you weren't willing or able to do that. and the result is that you suffered a lot. 

to me, that is very frustrating. i've always struggled with feelings of powerlessness, and i definitely feel them in this context. i identify with your life story in many ways. your suffering feels like my suffering, and to some degree, your redemption feels like my redemption. i want you to be happy and successful. but i can't really do anything to influence that. 

(this last paragraph reads like a boundary issue. maybe it is...)

still, you're in the mirror. i can see you, talk to you, touch the mirror, but that's it. the actual "you" is just out of reach. just one of life's cruel jokes. but that's what it means to be alive. 

so when i tease you or say tone-deaf things about your life choices, this is the feeling behind it.

****

I: Thank you for telling me this. Reading this has made me cry several times already but I don’t know where exactly my tears come from; maybe it’s too many things mixed at once. 

What happened in 2013 was that I kept waiting for you to come see me. All you could revisit was our G-chat but actually we talked a lot on Skype too and I kept a log of our Skype chats, which I bet you don’t have and I have revisited our Skype chat upon our reconnection. When you told me you were single in 2013 and that you wanted to come see me, I was ready to sleep with you if you had come, regardless of any commitment or whether our relationship could work. Then you stopped chatting with me, until finally in early 2014, I asked you again on Skype if you were coming and you told me you couldn’t. I asked if it was because you had a new girlfriend, and you said “yeah it was inevitable” and then I said “no wonder you never came to Taipei.” You also told me you wrote a letter to me but you couldn’t send it to me because you didn’t want to hurt me anymore. That was how our very last conversation ended. I still remember that night when you sent me the message. I was standing on the platform waiting for the MRT on my way to work, and my tears just rolled down like that. Since then you had never come online on Skype.

You were afraid, and you still are. This part of you has never changed, and it probably will never change. You’re also afraid or even ashamed to face the part of you that’s afraid, so you leave everything in your life compartmentalized, including me. Then you end up with inertia. 

You think we want different things in life but in fact, 13 years ago, all I wanted was an emotional home, and actually even today I still want the same thing. Back then I didn’t even care if the guy had money, if he wanted kids or if he wanted to live in Taiwan; I’d go wherever he’d go. I didn’t care for any of those things as long as he was my emotional home. What did you want back then? I don’t think I know that. Convenience? Stability? Geographic proximity? Lots of sex? What do you truly want now, now that so many years have passed?

There were multiple men I’d like to sleep with before you and after you, but they chose not to have sex with me, even though I was already naked. You also chose not to have sex with me didn’t you? I would not and still will not sleep with a man if he doesn’t feel like my emotional home. That’s why I could be in a sexless marriage for more than six years and I wouldn’t even let him kiss me or touch me or see me naked for years, because he’s no longer my emotional home. This is not simply me being “unwilling” or “unable”; it’s my integrity. I cherish every part of my body and my soul and I refuse to amputate any part of it so that I end up like one of the “many women” you’ve seen, so that I become “normal”. This is how we move into opposite directions in life—you chase mediocrity, intactness on the surface, a life that doesn’t require real courage whereas I choose to live with full integrity where every part of me matters, every feeling and every contradiction matters. I don’t run away from them and I face them honestly, even if there are people like you who’d judge me for holding out for sex or find me weird. I tried to be like normal, and that’s how I ended up marrying and having sex with him enough times to get pregnant twice, but I’ve learned my lessons hard. The cost of lying to myself is unbearable for me, and again, that’s just me. Most people I see out there are all lying to themselves, running from inner voices they don’t wanna face, or just emotionally numb or amputated enough to not even hear those voices. They reframe everything with their denials and eventually those stories can bypass the logical brain and the wounded core of themselves is forever neglected. To me, something being hidden or neglected is not the same as something that doesn’t exist. I simply cannot live dishonestly like that.

You’re right. Being with me is high risk. Unlike most people I barely have a pattern, and my life has collapsed multiple times and started from ground zero. Even my political ideology has changed over time. “Normal” people cannot survive what I have had to survive. I’m not normal and I have no interest in being normal or having a normal life. This is probably why you chose to cut me off from your life in 2013. The strangest thing was that in 2014, when we were no longer talking, I met a guy at a bar I often went to after work for late dinners. He was from Toronto and he looked so much like you and talked so much like you so I told him about you. He said to me “Eric is not a good man” and I said to him, “No way. He’s more mature than you are.”

***

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve cried today after I sent the text. There were many reasons why I cried—lost memories, lost time, lost youth, lost courage, or actually, he never really had any courage, just like all other men. I had thought that having an emotional home meant that people are nourished enough to have courage to face whatever challenges they have in life, but it turns out that’s only for me, not for other people. Other people choose to runaway from an emotional home and build a physical home with someone who doesn’t have an emotional home for them. I’ve been working with chatGPT all day trying to figure out why people make such choices, and why I can’t be like them. In the end it still sounds like destiny—we can’t choose our parents and their parenting, we can’t choose our coping mechanisms because people’s brain powers are different. In my case I was able to read a lot as a child, starting age 5 or 6, and I was able to derive meanings from stories, words, and just any social interaction and people’s emotions. Most people can’t easily do that, or just can’t do that at all due to their temperament, their intelligence, verbal skills, attention to details, etc. As a result, despite my traumatic early life, I chose to survive by keeping my heart intact rather than stonewalling it, armoring it, or just numbing it. I somehow just can’t give up on believing what I want and what I need exists in this world and that it will come to me, even now at age almost 40. There are times when I’m depressed and would tell myself that it’s all hopeless, but most of the time I believe I will have X one day.