#danreimold

Okay, here goes. I have something more important to do, but this just has to be done.

I briefly dated Dan Reimold around 2011-2012. It was a long distance relationship for the most part. He was my professor in NTU for 13 weeks, and we continued being friends after, even when he went back to the US. The flirtation just developed into something else. He and I would mostly communicate via email, chat and phone. I was very confused. I didn’t know where to take the relationship, whether it was worth turning into something serious. He was a very charming guy who can just get any girl he wants. The man is damn smooth.

It was pretty on and off. It was also very, very exhausting. I’d tell myself that I’m over him, date someone else, then communicate with him when it doesn’t work out. He pretty much treated me like shit, too. You know what I hate about him? He would tell me he would visit me, act excited, talk about all the fun things we’re going to do, and not show up. And he would tell me, “I’m stuck in this girl’s house!” (That girl, he insisted, is just a friend. He said he couldn’t see me because he couldn’t get away from her. Turned out he was dating her! I swear to freaking God!)

But while we failed at being a couple, we were great friends. He was my trusted confidante. For the past 6 years, I would tell him everything--people I’ve met, places I’ve been to, jobs I’ve had, jobs I’ve left, bosses who treated me kindly and badly, my mom’s accident, my brothers, getting my wallet stolen in Manila, the haze in Singapore. He just knew everything. The past 6 years, for everything that happens to me, I’ve made it a habit to message him online and tell him about it. Not a day goes by that I do not check my email for his replies.

Now, what would you feel, when the person you’ve loved and hated with so much passion for so many years, who makes you smile with the most dumbest things, whom you curse non stop on emails and Skype and just takes it like a man, is declared dead?

Before, when I message him and he doesn’t answer for days, I always assume that something bad has happened to him. I always think, “Is this guy dead or what?” Last week, he was ignoring me, but I thought that he was just busy. But on a Saturday afternoon, I received a message from a classmate whom I haven’t heard from in years. When she first wrote Dan’s name, I knew that my fears came true.

I didn’t want to cry at first. I convinced myself that he was a good for nothing loser who lied and led me on. But even so, it does not make things hurt any less.

Grief is a strange feeling. It haunts you in the strangest places. It is a black cloud hovering above you which you can’t escape. I would cry in the bus on the way to Orchard, in front of my computer, in my friends’ house. I can’t sleep well and would wake up at 5 AM. I would jog around the neighborhood fighting back tears in the early crack of dawn. I cried in the middle of a restaurant when I had some work related event that I wanted to email him about--then realized he’s no longer around. 

I would give anything in the world for him to be alive--break up with him one last time, and maybe give him a hard slap across the face for having a girlfriend and lying about it. I’d rather have that, than this.

PS

Less than a week has passed after I’ve written this, and I am amazed by how little I knew Dan. I am actually glad that we were more friends than an actual couple, and that I did not take the plunge.

Dan was a complicated man. How many of us truly knew him? What was he really like? Did he treat the people who loved him with kindness and respect? Beneath the facade of the respected professor is, I believe, a man full of self-doubt who needed everyone’s assurance that he was wanted and loved.