Karma i

Chuck Klosterman confidently stated that [north] Americans have lost the ability to experience an earth-shattering romantic affair, and that no woman will ever satisfy him. These days I believe that he might be right. How is it possible for one person to wholly satisfy another’s multifaceted, multilayered, multi-tiered, overlapping multiplicities as we drown in the banality of daily agenda? Reaching my mid 20s, I have convinced myself that this romantic heart has suffered enough disenchantment and heartache to form the cracked calluses around it. Trust, loyalty and infatuation - everything associated with textbook love - were pretty much my tools of manipulation as I trudged through puberty.

By the time I was 14, I had walked all over multiple adolescent male hearts via txt and grossly false convictions of independence. At 14! (One might argue that this standard doesn’t apply to kids-these-days, but I was pretty advanced for the 90s in Asia). My portrayal of loyalty had merely been a wildly inaccurate card I played according to the cultural rules surrounding me at the time to maintain a specific social status. This is proof that knowledge is power. Power is offering the potential to satisfy but never really doing so - whether out of inability or sheer selfishness - only to whet the idealist appetite, back off, and enjoy the attention.

There was no magic, other than the fact that I grew up in a Southeast Asian country, there was no metaphorical Santa Claus or Easter bunny. I traded my luxury of innocent disillusionment for the projection of ideas from the books I shouldn't be reading. The first time I had sex was as significant as the first time I tried vodka – the experience was a little invasive, with a glimmer of the promise of adulthood’s freedoms, except my stomach didn’t agree with vodka. I used every excuse in the book and got away with everything. It might just be this experience, and logic (or cynicism?) that has led to this crippling disability Klosterman speaks of.

And now I think I am in love – naturally, with someone I will never satisfy.

Word on the street is karma's a bitch.