'No' is a Complete Sentence

"Of all things that drive men to Sea, the most common disaster,
I have come to learn, is women."
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage.


Asking a girl out is a new thing for me.

The experience is a whole new bag of emotional highs and lows. It is exhilarating, tiring, confusing, satisfying, titillating, frustrating, embarassing and incapacitating - a nerve-wrecking ball of bouncing, bubbling, shape-shifting expectations, of pull and push, full of the rare wonders and mysteries of the genders, of boys and girls and the long chase from here to there, of playful preys and persistent predators.

It is the feeling of the coquettish, the cunning, and the cowardly. It is the adrenaline rush of the racing heartbeat, the falling anvil, and the churning, twisting, bile-boiling, rollercoaster ride from hell.

When you ask a girl out, her answer is always never a clear Yes or No. It is often a hesitant Hmmmm, or a long-drawn Ngaaaa, or a fleeting Hoo hoo hoo, or the worst: the eyes bulging, jaw dropping, pupils dilating, the echoes of her head, pinging, pinging, pinging, the soft thudding of trapped gases hammering the walls of her veins, the screeching stop of all electrical signals in her brain - the nonverbal siren, the cannot-compute, cannot-compute, Holy Jesus Fuck Me He Said What What?!

Or her answer could also be, and in my case, often is, Hahaha jangan nak buat lawak lah, Faizal. Kita kan sepupu. Mak ayah kita kan adik-beradik.

Today, a first, I asked a girl out.

She kept cool, she was calm, I was calm, we were cool. She thanked me in the most polite manner for asking her out, that she appreciated the gesture and the thought.

But she said she would have to decline.

A solid punch to the jaw, pow.

I took it nicely, thud, ouch that hurts, and I felt only slight pain. I was still up and standing. That's good, I thought. I started to move my feet a little, do a little dance, hop hop I am a butterfly baby hop hop hop. Oh, I see. She was wearing those kiddie boxer gloves. Very nice, very soft. She got that ruffle-ruffle thingies hanging from around the edges, the colors matched quite nicely with her hairband...

Okay, concentrate.

She continued by further explaining why. She is not yet ready to go out with guys, she needs some time and personal space, she needs to think what matters in her life now, her priorities need to be straightened out, she thinks all this is too fast, too rushed, it should just happen naturally, like chemistry. She repeated the not-ready part again, ok, ok, I heard you the first time lady, I was listening, I was listening. I didn't know where this was going, she had been--

A Disclaimer! She is citing a Disclaimer! Oh my god, how did I not--

She continued by saying that although she is not yet ready to go out with guys, she hoped that we could still be friends, and that we would still be cool if we were ever to stumble upon one another in town or somewhere, shopping at the Mall, having lunch or dinner with other people. I nodded politely, ahah, ahah. Where is this going? She said although she is not yet ready to go out with guys, she does go out with some of her best friends, who happened to be guys, like [dropped a guy's name] or [dropped another guy's name].

I nodded understandably, ahah, ahah. Hey, wait a minute, those two-

You are blowing me off so that you could hang out and have dinner with a soon-to-be-married coworker and a closeted in-denial gay?

Why?

I mean, you can't mean to say that I am that--

In that exact moment in time, somewhere down in the basement of an old and run-in commune factory in China, a dim light bulb was lit.

Faizal, I would rather date a married man or a wuss.

The light bulb flickered for while, flick, flick, flick, and then poof.

Upon this divine revelation, I staggered to find a nearby chair and I slumped into it like a deadweight stopper, gasping for air, reaching up to the surface, swimming as fast as I could to shore. Reeling from the pain of rejection, terribly shaken, all that I could think of then was, "Oh God, no wonder a lot of guys join the Navy."

After full fifteen minutes of silent pathetic pondering, reflecting on past mistakes, painful regrets, failed jokes, bad cheques, wrong passwords and other such milestones, I leaned back into the chair, popped open an imaginary can of spicy mexicano Pringles, and I imagined that I was in a cinema with my best friends, watching the best film of our generation, The Story of My Life, in DiGi IMAX.

This had caused a lot of rumors in the office. This story is purely fictional. I wrote this after watching a Judd Apatow movie.