ONE.
When did our story begin? I would argue that it would be Ignire 2016, the first time we met. We were partners for some stupid game (also, this was the first time we held hands LOL), and then after that I felt compelled to tell him about my brother. I had never opened up so quickly to anyone before, but I felt like I could trust him.

TWO.
And then we were placed in the same TBL. We sat next to each other for virtually every lesson. He let me listen recordings of him singing, because he said he trusted me. I laughed internally because they were awful, but tried to be as kind as I could with my words. One night, while I was studying in the Hall 11 RR, it struck me just how much love I had for all my friends. “I love Liang Wei”, I texted Angeline. And I knew it to be true. I loved my friends and cared for them deeply.

THREE.
Out of the six of us in the TBL, I was closest to him and Shao Kai. We hung out together, the three of us. I always enjoyed their company. One day, over supper, he told us that he liked this girl, Joey. When I heard that, I felt my insides twist funnily. It was odd, and I had no idea why I felt that way at all. “Wah, I never knew you were capable of liking girl leh,” I teased him, to cover up this strange new feeling.

FOUR.
Over the holidays, we texted often. Usually initiated by me. He probably thought me as some annoying fly he couldn’t get rid of LOL. I found him interesting and I liked talking to him. I was dating James at that point, and was going through a lot of internal emotional drama. I liked asking advice from him, because he always gave clear, logical answers that cut through my emotional bullcrap.

Some time in Sem 2, he asked me to help him with the P&G laundry project he was involved in with DS and the others. One night, we worked all night long in the REP room. In another instance, he set me up with a poster design gig, which paid me $50. He told me that he had a lot of respect for me as a designer and thinker, told me to go for CS if that’s what I really wanted, and I really appreciated that.

FIVE.
Summer break. James and I ended things, and then went on a confusing as heck Russia trip. I was a mess the entire time. At the airport one night, I was pulling an all-nighter looking after the bags while Jireh and James slept. He kept me occupied over WhatsApp the entire night, and I was telling him just how bad I’d been feeling on the trip. That was also the night right before Star Wars. He told me he was busy and gave me his NTU login details so I could help him do Star Wars. That coming semester, we would have the exact same timetable, right down to our UEs.

SIX.
The semester that started it all. We took part in PSA together, which was intense. We took Jap classes together. We were in the same group for OODP and RE Design. We literally spent next to all of our waking hours together. Given our chemistry, how not to fall in love?

Let me tell you how. By being broken-hearted. By letting yourself think that you still had a chance with a person who had already very clearly told you no. By making the same stupid decision over and over again, to stay over in his room and letting your heart get fucked up beyond recognition.

That semester, he fell in love. I didn’t.

One night, I stayed up awake unable to sleep, and amidst the all too familiar emotional cocktail of missing James and hating James and hating myself, there was a new, unfamiliar feeling.

I thought back to the time he drove all the way to my house in Newton from NTU to comfort me at 1am, on one particularly bad night I was having. I thought back to all the times he patiently helped me with all my homework questions. All the times we stayed up till sunrise together, working on either PSA or OODP or Jap homework. All the times I needed to rant, and we would Jalan all around Jurong while he listened to my struggles.

What was this? I thought to myself. Could it be …? But no, I brushed it off. I was in no emotional state to even be considering a romantic relationship, so what was the point?

SEVEN.
November the seventeenth, 2017. He told me afterwards, that it was the best day of his life. I wouldn’t exactly say the same, but it definitely was a very memorable day. It started off with us working on our Geraldine Song essays together. Typical me, I got distracted halfway and was looking for every excuse to not do work. “I’m bored,” I turned to him and whined.

“Let’s take a break,” he replied, and so we left our seats in the library to walk around the school.

As we were walking around, he decided that he wanted to find and climb up to the highest point in NTU. We spent half the day exploring the school, picking locks and walking past security barriers. Finally, we found a water tower at the top of the SCSE building. The ladder was locked up, but there was a way to climb around the locked gate to get to the top.

“We should leave like, a time capsule here and come back in the future!” I suggested.
“Like after exchange?”
“Yeah!”

And so we started planning everything. We went to Prime to find some food we could pack in it, food that wouldn’t expire before 17 November 2019. And then to Giant to find Tupperware we could put everything in. Went back to the library to craft letters to ourselves, to be read two years later. We bought a thumb drive to store some old photos and videos of the two of us. And throughout the day, we video-recorded every moment and compiled it into a vlog that we put in the thumb drive too.

At 12am, we Jalan-ed over to North Spine to put the Tupperware at the top of the SCSE tower, but it started raining. We sat at Macs, eating supper, waiting for the rain to stop. I think it was our first meal together alone, because it was slightly awkward. The only people around us were couples, I remember noticing at that time, which did not help with the awkwardness at all. The rain didn’t let, so we decided to go back to NH to finish up our essays before depositing the time capsule. We ended up taking ~3h to finish our essays, and then Jalan-ed back up to NH at around 5am. By the time we climbed up the ladder to the very top, the sky was beginning to lighten with the first streaks of dawn. We stayed up there to watch the sunrise. It was beautiful that day.

After that day, it felt like it was getting more and more probable that he liked me. He started using the winkyface emoji more and more often (LOL) and I was getting low key creeped out. I consulted our mutual friends about it, but all of them said it was only possible at best. “I think he’s just weird, don’t think too much into it.” He didn’t make it overly obvious, you know, especially given his personality. Their advice was just to hang out normally, and enjoy his company as per usual.

“But do you like him?” they would ask.
“I don’t knowwww,” would always be my response.
“But I definitely know I really don’t want a romantic relationship right now.”

We had a couple more adventures. More Jalan-ing in the middle of the night. He took me to see the glowing stones at the rail corridor. We went out for wine and steamboat with the sashimi gang (sneaky sneaky, all of them were his wingmen). We went for the Christmas fair at GBBT, and tried to sneak up the super tree by telling the guard that his daughter (me LOL) had run into the lift without him. He told me, it was his first time ever celebrating Christmas and thanked me for having spent such a special day with him.

And then that fateful night that changed everything. We started off the night by walking to the very middle of a busy highway to look at the night lights at Marina Bay. He started to say something, but the sound of traffic was too noisy for us to have a proper conversation. So we went down to the barrage. Climbed over a ‘NO ENTRY’ gantry to get to a floating platform. We sat down at the end of the platform and as I dipped my legs in the water, he said …

“Faith, I have something to tell you …”

What followed, I think, should be self explanatory. He went around in circles, trying to get me to draw my own conclusion, but I kept my silence to force him to say it out loud by himself. With every sentence he took an exaggerated swig out of his Thermos, which he had filled with Bailey’s. For a long time afterwards, we sat side by side on the pier and I stared resolutely down at the water, creating ripples with my feet. I didn’t know what to do. All of the sudden, we heard an angry “OI! EXCUSE ME!” behind us, accompanied by a ball of light. A security guard stood across the gate from us with a torchlight, motioning to us to get off the platform. Whoops. We walked to a nearby bench, and he plonked himself heavily onto it, obviously still very drunk. He asked if he could lean on me. I said no and stared into the distance. We sat there for a while until he sobered up, and then we decided to have one last adventure together before his confession irrevocably altered the dynamics of our friendship. We mobiked all the way from Marina Barrage to my house in Serangoon. I remember, distinctly, that he helped carry my heavy-ass bike up onto the overhead bridge. That moment was when I realised, for the first time, that he had always gone out of his way to do nice things for me. I’d started to take his kindness for granted.

That bike ride was probably one of the most physically challenging things I’d done that entire semester. By the time I reached my house, we were totally drenched in sweat and it was almost dawn. I invited him into my new house for a glass of water - my first visitor! - and we sat in the kitchen, the space illuminated only by our phones’ flashlights. I didn’t turn on the lights for fear of waking the rest of my family.

“I have to admit - I purposely led us the long way back from Marina Barrage,” he told me in the semi-darkness, “cos I didn’t want this night to end so quickly.”

“Don’t be angry,” he implored after five seconds of silence from me.

I shook my head no, I wasn’t angry. I didn’t quite want the night to end either.

EIGHT.
Year 2 Semester 2. That was truly a weird semester. In reply to his confession, I had told him no. On the grassy slopes of ADM, where we met alone for the first time since the confession, I begged him, for his own sake, to cut off all contact with me, just until his initial feelings subsided. He refused, and that strained our relationship beyond repair. I would always give short, snappy replies to his texts asking how I was, which came in once every few days. I knew I was hurting him, but I truly felt (and still feel) that I made the right choice pushing him to cut off all contact with me. I know, until now, he’s still a little salty over this. But. Like come on lah, I have more to lose than you by cutting off contact with you okay. I’m not the bad guy here. I know it must have hurt, but I wasn’t pushing you away for no reason, and I stand by my decisions.

His persistence in asking me out rubbed me the wrong way and I ended up ignoring him more and more often. There was once he bought me a bottle of YoyiC. I couldn’t bring myself to drink it, so I gave it to Pei Xuan. That was just how upset I was with him.

One night, he came by Hall 11 and asked me to come down. He asked me why we couldn’t hang out as friends, like how we used to. He said he missed all the adventures we used to have. I told him, with all the honesty I could muster, that frankly I didn’t think it would be healthy for him to hang out with me right now.

“Why?” he asked, leaning heavily towards me, and that was how I knew he was drunk.
“Because … tell me honestly, do you still like me?”
He hemmed and hawed, but eventually came up with a small "yeah".
“But I don’t want to!” he followed hastily.
“I know. But until you’ve gotten over that feeling, I really don’t think it’s in your best interest to hang out with me alone.”

NINE.
Berkeley - a period of healing for me. I was finally free of any temptation to pursue toxic FB relationships, and I felt happier than I ever had been for the past two years. We hung out a few times. We went on a trip to Tahoe for my birthday, where we went outside to admire the stars together after the others went to bed. He bought sashimi for me and brought me to the top of Big C to enjoy the view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We explored San Francisco together. Took a few late night walks around Berkeley. The night before I flew off to Vancouver, we spent the entire night at the Parsons piano, playing JJ Lin tunes while he helped me finish up my meal prep. It was almost 7am when I went back to my room, and I had to be at the airport at 9. When I woke up, there was a letter sitting inside my Tupperware on my desk, from him. I read it and held it close to my chest. That was when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I liked him. But I also knew that I’d told him no, so many moons ago. I’d pushed him to get over me. So no matter my feelings now, it was unfair to him to pursue this in any way.

After Vancouver, I was a wreck. Whatever healing I thought I had been going through seemed to have been all undone by that one short trip. He asked me how I was and I told him some stuff, and what little I said troubled him, so I didn’t tell him more. Somehow, after that trip, our relationship wasn’t the same again. In January, I heard the news that he was chasing some girl in IHouse. Okay then, I thought to myself. That’s that.

And that was that.

TEN.
He ended up getting together with that girl. He ended up leaving the church. He’s changed so much, and so have I, since we shared all those adventures back in Singapore. But what hasn’t changed is that I will still be here for him, no matter what. I told him as much during our conversation a few days ago. My brotherly love for him has never wavered since day one (except when I was upset that he wouldn’t leave me alone), and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. I have deep respect for him and wish him all the best, whatever he chooses to pursue in his life.

可惜不是你，陪我到最后。
感谢那是你，牵着我的手，还能温暖我胸口。

Thank you for our friendship.

Labels: friends, happy memories, love, pulau ntu, rep, school