I was furious about the letter from her lawyer, but my anger and frustration were short lived. Once I vented over the phone and got it out of my system, I know it's just part of life and my bad luck this year. Thank God for friends who lend their ears and their presence.

The status quo is the consequence of possibly the strangest decision I have ever made. Your heart tells you one thing and your head tells you another. 

I just know that you can rip my heart out if I let you. And I won't.

Humans are poor lie detectors. Every single uttered word can be a calculated move. No, I'm not paranoid. I'm just not very gullible. If it were anyone else who said all those things, I would be much more inclined to believe her.

Innocence gives one the entitlement to be righteous, to be harsh, to be unsympathetic and critical. Once upon a time, I viewed meddlers as pathetic, as being dragged by the nose and carrying with them the lack of pride to settle as second best. But as always, once you find yourself in the position previously thought to be unenviable, your minds strives for congruence, justification and peace.

A part of me anticipated this as an unavoidable consequence following that phone call. But another part felt that if there's no room for me to meddle by my mere presence, you would have said no, walked away and I would have found another way to deal with my problem. Desperate times called for desperate measures. And no, it was not an excuse to lure you back into my life.

Would I rather be her? Not at all. The lack of a sense of entitlement means it's all about here and now, and when this arrangement expires, nothing else will linger.

How did I get here?

The last couple of weeks has been exhausting, in part due to my irrational fear of rodents. Time and time again, I found myself stuck in a room that I loved fearing the woman and those goddamn furry things on the outside. Her hyterical screaming and crying were unnerving. I am not devoid of sympathy, I'm really not. If I were in her unfortunate position, I would have bolted from my home long ago. But the way she reacted to the news that she would have to leave when her lease ends was frightening. (I figured back then from the rotten egg incident that little things could tick her off and how unreasonable her reaction could be so in a way, I saw it coming but it wasn't something that I could have avoided doing). I was shaken up by her knocking on my door and confronting me about it repeatedly, saying how she refuses to leave and will refuse to pay rent. Now she has racked up two nights' hotel bill that she wants me to foot.

Their good intention has effectively backfired on me and on them as well. It's probably more bad luck than anything else, but definitely an important lesson learnt as a law student: draft bullet-proof documents and follow the correct procedures to fend of unreasonable people.

Friends are always the ones who save the day. 

"People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch - until there is no skin left. "

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

No one has been holding me back from speaking my mind, but it was out of courtesy and the lack of necessity to pass judgement that I've been doing so. I'm genuinely happy about the news that I learnt of today, you have no idea, however strange it may seem. But I guess I was wrong when I said we're on the same page.

We had a good run, for the past handful of weekends, and hell I had an absolute blast. I don't remember a whole lot from all these alcohol-fuelled nights, but I was so conscious that morning to not let our lips touch, to not make any gesture that suggested any more than a drunken fling, and to fend off questions knowing that the most honest answers I could have given were just something that I should keep to myself.

But I quietly enjoyed you breathing down my neck and running my fingertips down your spine.

Bathroom hook ups and goodbye kisses were awesome, repeatedly awesome. Every now and then, I thought about moments that we shared. We had fun, but from day one, that was all that I'm up for. All along, the rational part of me has been wide awake, so awake that the slightest interaction of you with my sober self rung alarm bells.

One can do a lot, or very little, in two years, it all depends. "Age" as I said it, is half the truth. It's not about numbers. It's just...wrong on so many levels.

Not everything that needs to be said has to be heard.

Rejection, psychologically, is like physical pain: the same part of the brain is activated. And we have evolved to avoid that. What we do instead is to pretend we give less of a sht than we do or we rationalise it and blame it on external factors.

Some people fear rejection more than others, but even the most secured people put on a facade. That's the rule of the game, they know it, and that's why they (seemingly) ace it.

She's so open about her fondness of me, even though we barely know each other (She's not crazy and I hardly deserve it save for the fact that I'm somewhat of a novelty to her, I think), that it's just sweet, refreshing and turns me into a putty. I suspect it's because she knows that it'll never be more than making memories, riding on the waves of what we shared in that brief 72 hours or so. At least that's how I feel.

A couple of messages that I received over the past few days came close to turning my life upside down. What I thought, believed and took for granted as the one stable thing in my life that was my safety net appeared to be disintegrating, like a spider web in gusty wind and rain. I'm far from knowing the truth, and I'm not sure that I do want to find out, at least not right now. It all seems like a bad dream: irrational, out of control and unstoppable. I hope that it goes away, or that turns into a kind of deja vu supported by context, reasons and rationality.

So there it is. Making good memories seems to be the way to go, cos as much as good times' gonna come, the bad ones will stick or come around again.

"I seem to be really good at this accounting stuff," I said. "But I don't like it."
"It's easy to find a job as an accountant but it's hard to be brilliant and stand out from the crowd," he replied. "And if you don't like it, don't do it."

Yes, brilliance is the aim, and let's hope it's worth the pain.