I can’t remember when was it that I started to become curious about his past.
The girls he was with. No, the girl.
Somewhere along our easy dating days of eating roti canai at the mamaks, enjoying ice-cream sticks while holding hands around the vicinity of his awesome neighborhood, teaching him how to drive a shift stick, of watching foreign movies and discussing cat litters and vets, I wondered about the one who was before me. How did it end? Why? Because he made me happy, and was awesome as orange juice in the morning. He was capable of loving someone, even someone who is incapable of loving like me. Why did it end?
One night over the phone I asked him. She cheated on him, he told me. Twice. And that despite that, he loved her still. I remembered a picture of them I came across the Internet, where my mind imagined a tagline underneath it saying, “The couple in happier times.” He was laughing to the ceiling and she had a scrunchie on her wrist. I tried to remember if he had ever laughed that hard when we were together. We’ve only started this thing for less than two weeks, I consoled myself.
Sometimes I wondered would our relationship had survived if I wasn’t so fixated with his past. She was beautiful and smart and everything I didn’t have, eventhough I have enough. Them being friends didn’t really bother me. I knew he was on the way to love me, except that I keep going to that night we were on the phone and he said, “I guess I’ll still love her,” and the picture of them laughing over a joke. They were really the perfect couple and anyone after that wouldn’t do him any justice.
I am bigger than him anyway.
