HOMELAND

There is a man who’s been a regular part of my life. He is one of the two people I was talking to on the dating apps, that I mentioned a couple months ago. The other one was a friend of Dhu’s, but he wasn’t in a good place, to be dating, so we dropped it. The man who’s been part of my life, his name is Jeremy. The first date I had with him was lovely, we had sushi and he got me a rose, etc etc. It hasn’t been all smooth-sailing since then. He builds gundam kits and his room is a mess by my standards, so when I first started going over it would give me a literal headache, because if you’ve seen my living situation, you’d know I’m very particular and I’m the kind of person who makes my bed everyday, without fail. We lead quite different lifestyles, he plays video games on literally every platform you can think of and he doesn’t sleep at regular timings, he has ADHD so his attention flickers from one thing to another. However, when my sisters were here, he helped me coordinate their visit, and he brought us to the Capilano Bridge as well as the Christmas market on another day. His mom knitted me a scarf for Christmas, and he got me a new tattoo (my first in years!!) as my gift. One day when we were walking back from a party at Hannah’s place, he asked “is Joey in love with you?” which made me literally guffaw. I told him, “no, he doesn’t, but I do think he likes me back, at least.” It was interesting, I think we can talk about things and I don’t feel the need to shy away from it. When I was getting together with Lucas, it was very fast and at that point I still thought there was a “happily ever after”, so I thought, okay, I will marry Lucas. At this point of time, I think I’m trying to reconcile between my Malay-Muslim-female upbringing of wanting/almost-needing to get married, and my own eventually-revealing desire of taking things as they are, in the moment. I do want to get married sometime in my life, I think, but Jeremy and I are navigating things very slowly and tentatively. I don’t know if you know, it may not be apparent through my writing (or it might, who knows), I can get overwhelmed by emotion that I lose sight of what’s real, that I think I am my feelings. Last week, even though my inclination is usually to give in to the peak of my emotional outbursts, I went against the instinct and felt safe enough to tell him what I was feeling, despite it probably sounding irrational as fuck. He consoled me and told me it was okay, and then we went to sleep. We watched the entirety of The Good Place together ‘cos he’d never seen it before, and we have plans to see Hamilton live together because he also loves theatre, and sometimes we sing Spring Awakening, and at other times, he picks up his guitar and plays and sings Taylor Swift for me, and I forgive him even though all the lyrics are wrong. I don’t know where it’s going, but I do know I like his company, so we’ll see. Your guess is as good as mine.