Retired One-Night Stand Girl

“I’m scared,” I told my mother. “I have nothing to offer him.”

“You are pretty,” she replied.

“That’s not enough,” I said.

“You are a girl,” she asserted. “That is enough.”

Yet, unlike other men, he was not shallow. That made it ever more difficult. He sees me too deeply, which makes me shut down emotionally. I could never love someone when it costs me something—when something is at stake. My initial sexual attraction towards him morphed into debilitating anxiety at the thought of him knowing me further. I was fine with physical intimacy, but nothing more.

Relationships, to me, are like learning a foreign language without being told in advance the meaning of words or the rules of grammar. For example, I did not formally learn Javanese, my third language. Since I was never taught the proper definition of Javanese words, I could only try to pick up phrases and words used by the people around me, approximating their meaning and usage based on emulating how others used them. There are a lot of words in my vocabulary that I knew how to use by parroting phrases in contexts where it made sense, but if someone were to ask me for the definition, I would not be able to answer.

One such word is bejaji. It is more common to use the word in a negative form, by adding ra or “not” behind it. The phrase ra bejaji is often used to describe something unpleasant. To say someone is ugly, you say: Rupane ra bejaji (rupane = their appearance). To say someone has an untrustworthy character, you say: Uwonge ra bejaji (uwonge = that person). To say a house is poorly constructed, you say: Omahe ra bejaji (omahe = the house). So, I know that ra bejaji means to describe something negative, but I hardly ever hear anyone say bejaji by itself, without the ra or “not” behind it. I am not sure why this is the case, and when I asked my mom—who grew up speaking Javanese her entire life—what bejaji meant by itself, without the negative modifier ra, she said: “I don’t know, I never used it by itself.”

Similar to how I learned Javanese through parroting others, whatever attempt I did to become a normal girlfriend were just poor impersonations of my partner’s actions towards me. At first, saying the phrase “I love you” felt empty because I did not know what love means or how it feels like. I only did it because he and everybody else in romantic partnerships did it.

In truth, I feel scared he is going to see me for the fraud I am and leave me. I am scared he will get the “ick” when he finds out I can barely speak the language of affection he is so fluent in. I am scared he will get disgusted at me. I am scared he will stop loving me—whatever love feels like, because I know that love is the thing that maintains his affections towards me. For a long time, I stuck to shallow arrangements, one-night stands, hooking up with stranger after stranger until I recognized each man more from their cock than by their name or face.

“Who was that guy last night?” my friend asked one morning.

“Ah… Adria—” I scratched my head. “Actually, that was last week.”

“Don’t tell me you forgot his name!” she gasped.

“I didn’t ask.”

My life is a barren wasteland, marked by sterility and scarcity. I had to fight tooth and nail for every bit of fleeting, Pyrrhic victory accessible to me. I wasn’t very smart, burdened with an array of mental disorders and learning disabilities, so I had to redo the same question over and over again in a dimly lit bathroom my mother locked me in—as if I could emerge from it a normal student. My father didn’t think I could read so I had to cry, begging him to buy me English books, on which he would make me recite from the pages to prove that I wasn’t just wasting his money. I had to wrestle for drops of love from my parents, like desperately squeezing juice from a dried lemon.

In contrast, my partner’s life seemed like the Garden of Eden, teeming with life, so fertile and abundant. He has two loving parents. He has a close supportive relationship with his brother. He is very educated, financially privileged, and has all the right social connections that would make failure impossible. And above all, he respects himself. He approaches life with an ease and confidence that suggests the right cultural and psychological education afforded to only a select class of people. The sort of confidence that is uncanny to anyone who has ever experienced a life outside a sheltered gated complex.

That ease was uncanny to me, as someone who was forced to eat her own vomit from the floor as punishment for spoiling it. That trusting nature felt bizarre to me, as someone whose father strangled and slammed to the floor when I caught him cheating on mother. That self-respect felt alien and impossible, as someone who was fed rice with gravel and had to bathe in black, sooty water as a child, breathing asthmatic miasma from dusty aircons, while living in a dilapidated mansion, forced to wear designer items when out in public. I had tasted both “wealth” and poverty.

Growing up, I had no idea whether I was wealthy or poor. I had chauffeurs, drivers, maids. There were a dozen cars I used to go to school with on rotation. The mansion I used to live in had a sauna, outdoor jacuzzi, gym, swimming pool, cinema room, six dining rooms, eight bedrooms (two for the maids), decorated with tacky chandeliers and cheap replicas of Greek statues. “Is that an imitation of The Three Graces?” my art history enthusiast friend laughed, pointing at the slightly moldy statue behind the gazebo. “Probably,” I replied. I had no idea—and neither did my grandma, who commissioned the piece.

But I also had a father who refuses to financially support his wife and children, is pushing sixty and never held down a job in his life, still receives monthly allowances from his mother, constantly loses money to alcohol, gambling, and sex workers, collects freebies and haggles every chance he gets, like haggling over two dollars with ladies at the market who earns less than two hundred dollars a month. His lack of basic financial literacy led to very strange behaviours such as collecting free toiletries from hotels at the expense of overweight luggage, leading to extra charges that would be more expensive compared to buying decent soap.

My paternal family is really fucking weird. We have generational wealth, yet everyone still holds on to a working class mentality minus actually working. Apart from my paternal grandmother, who started the business, almost nobody on my dad’s side knows how to work. To be fair, they grew up with a highly controlling, micromanaging mother who never gave them the chance to develop their own critical thinking skills. My grandmother was a successful businesswoman, but she completely neglected her role as a mother. In her attempt to convince me to reconcile with my father, she consoled: “You ought to forgive your father. He has always been stupid since he was young. I left him in a bucket and he ate his own shit.”

Perhaps I could forgive him, had he not left my mother on the brink of death. When I was 13 or so, my mother suffered medical malpractice—a very common occurrence where I am from, given that we live in a village with poor medical competency—where the surgeon accidentally burnt a hole through her small intestine, and without realising it, sewed her up and sent her home as her intestine was bleeding digestive contents and pus. She grew weaker and weaker as her stomach swelled day by day.

Eventually, my maternal grandmother insisted that we do something about it. Like sending her to Singapore instead of the village doctor, for example. My father refused, saying that that was unnecessary and that my mother was being spoiled. For days, I sat by my mom’s side, crying as I held her hand, life draining out of her. Father still insists that she was just being dramatic. However, unable to witness her daughter’s condition any longer, my maternal grandma paid for an air ambulance to Singapore. Immediately upon arrival, as he saw mom’s condition, the doctor told my grandma: “If you arrived even one hour late, your daughter would have been dead.”

So, to my lover from the Garden of Eden: Can I borrow your land to grow an apple tree? A square metre will do. Or even less, for I can grow some green beans or a rice paddy. I would not burden you. I would not steal from your blueberry bushes, mango trees, or grape vines. I would tend to my own germinating seeds, in the little corner tucked away behind tall evergreen pines so as to not disturb the beauty of your abode.

“You are always free to dine with my family,” he said. But I felt like in the past, I had taken the apple from the snake, and thus been prohibited from entering the garden. The snake made for more familiar company. I am quite certain that if I were to dine with his family, I would feel so anxious about having to perform the appropriate consecutive actions: Wear something nice. Put shoes outside. Smile, bow, and say excuse me. Speak in a soft voice. State your credentials and educational attainment. Mention subtly that your family has money so that you won’t be seen as a gold digger. Eat little. Keep your plate clean. Offer to wash the dishes and clean up after. “My family is super chill,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about stuff like that.” But I do. This is a job interview—just like how every encounter is with my own family.

I want him around. I want him to stay. That is a scary thought from a retired one-night stand girl. To secure a man’s commitment, one must bear his children. Growing up, it was not uncommon for me to witness newly wedded wives of wealthy husbands rushing to get pregnant on the first day, so as to secure his loyalty. Meanwhile, I did not want children. I was scared of ruining my body, and subsequently having him leave me for a younger, bouncier, more fertile woman. At the same time, I thought that having children would be the glue to keeping a marriage together, just like with my parents’ long drawn out marriage that should have ended much sooner were it not for their offspring. My mother waited until my sister and I turned legal adults to divorce my father, out of fear of losing custody to an abusive, albeit wealthier man.

My lover liked me for my dominant, independent streak, which was the whole reason why he was attracted enough to pursue me. But the longer I dated him, the more I found myself becoming submissive to him. I liked being told what to do, so that I did not have to think for myself, because my own thoughts are awful. I had no idea how to keep him around—what the right actions are, and what the wrong actions I should avoid. This felt like a reversed ending to Animal Farm, where instead of the pig turning human, the human slowly crouches and begins crawling on all fours, waiting for daddy to whip her butt, pull the leash, and instruct her to pull his zipper down with her teeth.

Ultimately, my negative, cynical, and—according to my boyfriend—“hateful” schema about the world stems not only from trauma but from a lack of exposure to good behaviour. I read about a study that investigated how some individuals manage to develop strong emotional resilience in adulthood despite having had an abusive upbringing. The study showed that what built emotional resilience was not raw grit or determination, but a strong support system outside of family. The group that had strong emotional resilience in adulthood had substitute parental figures outside their immediate family during key developmental milestones. Meanwhile, the group that ended up as alcoholic or drug-addicted adults were shown to not have had that luck. The role of community was as important to these individuals’ developments as are family, and especially pertinent when family is not an option.

Despite knowing about my profoundly damaged, fucked up mind, he still somehow manages to love me anyway. Because of that, I see it as my responsibility to be able to be vulnerable to him, despite it being painful—as a former one-night stand girl. I feel scared whenever he sees me without makeup, yet I meet him anyway. I feel scared whenever he reads my unedited, unpolished writing, yet I get his feedback anyway. I feel scared whenever he sees me cry, yet I show him anyway. I'm scared to send him my book, and yet I send it anyway.

So, why bother with all these ‘anyways’? Because, despite my overwhelming fear of belittlement, a part of me trusts him to hold my fragile heart and not drop it.