From The Straits Times    |

There is a framed quote in my kitchen that reads:

“Soon we will be like strangers.

No, we can never be that.

Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy.

We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

It comes from a book called Intimacy, and it was placed there by my housemate who read the book many years ago and felt it struck a chord. Visitors would always stop and stare at it in rapture, reading and re-reading it like it contained some kind of eternal truth. Some whipped out their notebooks and pens, others snapped photos with their mobile phones.

So one day, wanting to understand how this quote so profoundly moves people, I bought the book and read it. It was in short about a man who was preparing to leave his wife. And after many breakfasts spent mulling over the first line in particular – becoming a stranger – I started to see the tragedy behind the words.

What seems to strike fear in the hearts of everyone who reads the quote, is being forgotten. After the death of a relationship, there comes a point where all the courtship rituals, sweet nothings and happy memories become nullified, and a person’s significance becomes reduced. That period just before it is all forgotten, right before something becomes nothing, is the most heartbreaking. Get past that point, and the mourning is over. You’ve moved on.

“To move on is an infidelity – to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself,” the author writes on the next page.

Hanif Kureishi sees the act of moving on as an optimistic step towards the future. That’s probably true. But what scares me is that most professions of love essentially have indefinite use-by dates. More often than not, utterances of affection don’t stay true. Moving on says “I meant those words then, but I don’t feel that way anymore.” It’s all easy come, easy go these days. So… I’m just wondering here… If people considered the ephemerality of words and emotions, would it change the dynamics of every relationship? Do you think if we forced people to stay true to their utterances of affection, we could somehow bring ‘forever’ back in vogue, and we’d never have to be strangers to each other?