Spending More Time Separate From Each Other (聚少離多)

I've been quite sensitive these days about relationships in general. Principe told me an actual time that he thinks he may leave - August. It's only six months away. I told myself not to think about it, whatever happen happens. But sometimes I can't help but feel sad about it.

In these days and age, it's hard for anything to last long and maybe it's because I knew from the beginning that it won't last forever that makes it so good. I cherish the little bit of time that we have together, with him working long hours everyday and knowing that one sday he will go back to Argentina and most likely never coming back.

Last night during dinner with my colleague ES and my former colleague MP, we got into a discussion about relationships. ES being the modern independent family woman, she gets to saying how she needs personal space from her husband and the whole reason why her marriage works is because her husband provide her with space. She says if her husband was the touchy feely time that spend every moment by her side, they would have broken up a long time ago. But she don't have the same attitudde towards her son, she actually enjoys her son's company a lot more than her husband. I think I'm actually the type that like to spend most of my time with the person I love, but I don't think I'm that good with build a relation to start with.

Lately I sense some tension between me and ES. I think it's because our personality is really different from each other. She is the "typical" Japanese: upbeat, extroverted, cheerful, sociable. Me being the shy, pessimistic, cynical, romantic. I guess my latest attitude at work has been bringing her down. I think I might have lost my ability to make friends, maybe I never had them. But after the period that we get to know each other and find out all the things that we have in common and get really excited of each other's company, it'll eventually get old and grow stale. And after that we start noticing and obsess over our differences, desperate to find our own identity.

The four Chinese characters in the title describe how us as individuals spend more time apart from each other than we do together. I think it's true, most of us thinks ourselves are unique and different but failed to see that those differences are so minimal until we step out of our own point of view. It's not until I come to the United States that I become a minority and hear that we Asians look all the same. "Well, I thought you see that northern Chinese, Japanese and Koreans usually have a bonier cheek and has paler skins, and people from Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia tends to have darker skins." In our fight for individualism and our struggle to define our own identity, we lost the bond that we have between people. "You don't know what you've got til' it's gone." Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life alone?