Dominica May

This is a challenging thing for me to write about. I’m absolutely devastated, but I followed my fear to seek clarity and answers, and as hard as it was to go through, I got what I needed, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Now, I write a final goodbye.

Sometimes we must take the difficult paths to find the lessons we must learn. This is a follow-up to Closure Encounter of the Ghosting Kind (if you haven’t read that post yet, you should probably start there because this post is over 26,000 words without me recapping that one). I’ve been back to Malaysia twice since I wrote that post. The first time (Dec 31-Jan 10) was to enjoy the company of the subject of that post, and the second (May 18-Jun 3) was to primarily try to deal with the fallout that I unintentionally caused right at the end of that trip.

I had permission to share my last blog post. This time, I again asked for permission and was told, “You don’t have to ask my permission, just share what you need to, just don’t share it with me or tell me about it.” He vaguely knows what I want to say, and that I wanted to include photos of us, so I’m going to go ahead and get everything off my chest so I can move on with my life.

If you’ve been following along and wondering, “Who’s this Lee fellow Dominica keeps writing about?”, I won’t be holding back. The reason I’ll be sharing photos of us together is because that’s all I have left that remind me that what we had was real, and so others can see how happy we looked together, I wasn’t just imagining things. I still won’t use his real name (thereby avoiding the possibility of people coming across this blog post if they search for him online), but if you know him, you’ll recognise him.

Before I get into what went wrong, I’m going to focus on what went right, and why this relationship, friendship, situationship was so impactful to me, because that’s what I want to remember. It’s also important for me to share so friends, people, understand why I was with him even as there were challenges, and why I would forgive him when he behaved in a way that made my friends question why I still wanted to be with him instead of letting go and moving on when he’d disappear. I’ll be starting with a few things from ten years ago that I didn’t go into detail about in the last post, and mostly go into detail about the four months between my September 2023 trip to Malaysia and the memorable ten days I spent with Lee in January.

But this will be, ultimately, a story of how devastating an impact that unhealed trauma can have on even the most positive experiences. He and I both seemed to have boat loads of it, but I’ll primarily be talking about mine since I don’t know much about his, but what I do know isn’t my story to share. I will only speak to the impact it had on how he behaved, and how that’s why I had so much compassion for him that I kept trying even when things were hard.

Fair warning: this is an 18+ blog post, I provide too much detail of some of my intimate relations with this person, and I swear more than I usually would in a blog post. If that’s not your jam (if you’re reading this, I’m looking at you, Dad 👀), you can step away from this one.

Those Early Days

I mentioned in the last blog post that Lee and I started out as friends who connected primarily around movies. What I didn’t mention was that we also connected over stand-up comedy, because if I’d have identified that, it would’ve made him easier to identify (there weren’t a whole lot of stand-up comedians in KL back then). I wasn’t performing stand-up comedy at the time we met, but he was, and he had previously seen me perform it years before we met. I was still part of the scene, though, and regularly went out to One Mic Stand, a weekly open mic night, and would stay at the mamak afterwards until late and everyone else was leaving because I didn’t know how to excuse myself if I wanted to leave on my own (if you’re a non-Malaysian reading this, a mamak is a Tamil Muslim open air restaurant generally open very late or 24-hours a day, so it’s a common place for Malaysians to meet when everything else is closed). By 3-4am, it was only a handful of us left, and Lee was generally one of the last. After a while, I started to notice he’d been trying to include me more in those late-night conversations, and that was what led to me eventually reaching out to him about hanging out one-on-one, thereby beginning our actual friendship.

Our first friend date was at TGV One Utama, seeing Ender’s Game in November 2013, and then we went somewhere for drinks (and maybe food) afterwards and talked for hours about some really personal stuff (mental health related) until One Utama closed. I was battling anxiety and depression really badly back then, and my opening up to him about that made it easier for him to open up to me about his own struggles. I don’t think he’d ever talked to anyone else about those issues at that point, or if he had, not at the depth he did with me. I hope it’s okay for me to mention this; I don’t think I’m saying anything about him that he hasn’t talked about on stage in his stand-up, or maybe one of his livestreams online.

Over time, Lee would often come over to my apartment to hang out and we’d just talk for hours. This is where I learned he’d seen me perform stand-up comedy well before we ever met. It’s where I learned we both loved A Goofy Movie and She’s All That (it had been a long time since I’d had a friend I could geek out about movies with like I did with him). It’s where I learned he’d studied in the same city I’m from in Australia, and we both attended the same movie screening of Super Size Me there, with a Q&A with Morgan Spurlock, and we might’ve been sitting pretty close to each other too. His time in Australia meant he was also aware of one of my favourite Australian comedy groups, the Doug Anthony Allstars, which I was really impressed by. He shared things with me about himself that made me think there was no way I’d want to hook up with him or have a relationship with him, but I liked to flirtatiously tease him anyway because it was fun to watch him squirm, and he let me get away with it.

The fact that Lee had seen me perform stand-up comedy in February 2010 and liked me intrigued me. I was sure I’d bombed that performance. And yet, somehow, he developed a crush on me that night anyway. Knowing this about him helped me trust his encouragement when he insisted that I get back into performing stand-up myself. At one point, since I knew what he enjoyed, I surprised him by dyeing my hair back to red so that I could bring back my anime schoolgirl schtick.

Not too long after I began performing again is when I learned that I’d be moving to California with my now ex-husband. By this time, though, I had actually developed a crush on Lee that I was trying so hard to fight. It was only with the news of my impending move that I decided “To hell with it” and see if I could take advantage of my polyamorous marriage by letting Lee know I was attracted to him as more than friends. He was shy but also interested, so we took things slow. There were a couple of weeks of build-up where we’d be sneaking off to secretly make out in the back of his car during the break of a One Mic Stand show, or at the end of the night after the mamak session after everyone had left. Given I was living with my then-husband and two kids, and my then-husband’s girlfriend was also around a lot, we didn’t really have space for privacy anywhere else.

Before my ex-husband left Malaysia for good, there were a few shows in which Lee and I were both in the same line-up. I remember the April Time Out KL Comedy Thursday when I went on stage right after him and roasted him a little before I started my own set.

Planning our first time going all the way together was an event. I asked him if that could be my birthday present to him with plenty of time for him to think about it, and he agreed. He wasn’t big on birthday celebrations but he was adamant that it would be the best birthday ever, and he’d have to figure out how to deflect any other celebrations that people might want to throw him.

I distinctly remember a conversation that was had a few days before his birthday when there was a ladies show at Comedy Kao Kao that I performed in, and he was the only man in the line-up (besides the host), in which he dressed as a cow. People were asking him about his birthday plans, and he did a good job of deflecting. My then-husband had booked us a room at the Eastin Hotel, not too far from where I lived in TTDI. I mention this specifically because when I finally went back to Malaysia in September 2023, I was regularly driven past this hotel, and I could not go past that hotel without it being a reminder of that night we had together.

Looking at these first two photos, it’s a wonder no one suspected we were a thing, honestly. Although to be fair there was a point after we’d gotten together that a mutual friend had approached me and told me I should see about getting with him. I remember joking with him, “What makes you think I haven’t already?” and then instantly regretted even suggesting it since Lee had wanted to keep things about us quiet.

In addition to going all the way together for the first time at the Eastin Hotel on his birthday, Lee also showed me the only Wes Anderson film I hadn’t yet seen: Moonrise Kingdom. I loved that he was also a Wes Anderson film fan and that I could share that with him.

When Things Were Good, They Were Really, Really Good

2014

After Lee’s birthday, the next time we got together was also something of an event. It had been a busy week for Lee, with a TV show taping in KL and a show or festival in Singapore. Meanwhile, I was on vacation with my kids in Cherating while my then-husband was somewhere else. There were only a couple of days in between those two events Lee was involved with where he’d be available to come up to Cherating to see me, and I desperately wanted him to do so. After a couple of days there, I’d been dealing with a major depression blow, bordering on suicidal, and talking to Lee about it. I really needed his support. He told me he couldn’t promise me anything but he would try, and he’d be offline for a while. I prepared myself to be disappointed, but it turned out he framed things that way so that he could call me up later and ask me where I was, then surprised us at the hotel restaurant while we were eating dinner. By this point in time, Lee was already on great terms with my kids. He’d regularly come over and play video games with them, something their dad didn’t really do. To be honest sometimes it seemed like he had a better relationship with my kids than their dad did. So, when he came up to see us in Cherating, he didn’t just spend time with me. He gave me a break from the kids and took care of them so I could chill out. He spent two nights with us there, and during the full day he was around, we all went to the beach together, and he played in the sand with my kids, and pushed them on the swings in the playground while I watched.

Over the couple of months that we were secretly a thing, we saw a bunch of movies together. I can probably list off most of them for you, and where we saw them. There was The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which we saw with my kids (and he talked about on an Instagram live last year) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier that we saw at the GSC at the then-Tropicana City Mall. At GSC One Utama, we saw The Wind Rises, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

In addition to nerding out over stand-up comedy and movies together, we also shared a love for video games. I mentioned previously that he played video games with my kids, but we reached a point where I’d brought my retro Nintendo games to Malaysia from Australia, and he loved me showing those games off to him, and we got to share them with my kids and our friends, too.

Lee was generally great with helping me out with so many different things in my final weeks living in Kuala Lumpur. My then-husband moved to California about six weeks before the rest of us, so Lee basically became my primary partner during that time. I gave him spare keys to my apartment and keycard access to the parking so he could come and go as he pleased. There was one night I was throwing a party in my apartment and I don’t think anyone noticed that he let himself in. He’d often stay and look after the kids for me on the nights I was performing and he wasn’t if there was no one else available to look after them for me. He picked us up from the airport after we returned to Malaysia from Australia to handle the US visas (which was where my then-husband and I parted ways before the move, because he flew to California from Australia). He helped me sort out finalising our car sale. Honestly, as I list off all these things he did for me, it’s a wonder I didn’t realise acts of service was his primary love language, the way he shows he cares, all the way back then. I’d only really come to realise that when I visited him during those ten days in January this year.

Knowing I was leaving Malaysia might’ve been the best thing for my friendships there. Not just with Lee, but all my friends, because suddenly we were all putting more effort into spending time together. Maybe that’s why my relationship with Lee flew under the radar so well. I was getting close with a lot of friends. I also think my relationship with Lee, and how close we were, made it easier for me to get to know my other friends better too.

Oh, and I was falling madly in love with him and developing a deep attachment, probably in part because we were not remotely careful in the way of using protection. This is an important piece of information because up until Lee, my ex-husband was the only man I didn’t use condoms with. For me, unprotected sex is a sign of trust and intimacy. I won’t go into the reasons why I decided to (suggested I?) go without with Lee (and yes, it had been my idea, I never felt pressured into anything with him), but I will say that we did have a conversation about what we’d do if he accidentally got me pregnant. Because if I did get pregnant, it would’ve been his—my ex-husband had had a vasectomy by then. And I did have a late cycle at one point, so it became relevant (I tend to freak out when I’m having unprotected sex and my period is late).

On my final day in Malaysia, Lee saw us off at the airport. Our flight had been later in the evening though, so after we left our apartment in TTDI, Lee drove us to his place in Subang to hang out since it was closer to the airport. I got to meet his dog and see his home for the first time. Then he drove us to dinner, where we clearly looked close because our server asked him, in Malay (I’d been able to understand some of their conversation and he filled me in on the rest), if my kids were his. He had to comment on their hair and eye colour being the obvious reasons why they were not. Chinese people tend not to have blond hair and blue eye genes 😆. I liked that she thought we looked like a family though.

2023

Seeing Lee for the first time in over nine years when we hadn’t spoken in just as long was something else. He seemed nervous, and I honestly didn’t know what to expect.

One of the things I left out from my previous blog post about us reconnecting was the stuff related to stand-up comedy (again, it would’ve been too identifying). The night we saw each other again for the first time in over nine years, I told him all about SF Sketchfest, which I insisted that he apply to (and he said he’d maybe try next year), and he told me about an open mic night he was doing a few days later, essentially inviting me along. I didn’t have plans that night so I went. Before the show started and after it was done, we chatted a bit about movies and what I’d been up to in California. I got a ride with him to the mamak afterwards, and we sat next to each other and just talked about a whole host of things. I recall telling him about how romcoms had screwed me over in terms of my expectations of romantic relationships. He said he felt the same way. He started telling me about a joke he’d been doing on love languages, and then wound up being like, “Actually, I’ll just perform it for you tomorrow night,” since he knew I had a ticket to see him the next night as well. I was flattered that he was clearly trying to impress me. It’s not really what I’d anticipated at all. It was making me want to be with him again, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I hadn’t been remotely prepared for this; I’d just wanted to reconnect as friends.

It was raining as the mamak session ended and, even though I had my own umbrella with me, he didn’t know that, so he sheltered me under his as he walked me to his car, then caught me when I tripped trying to get in. He drove me back to where I was staying, even though Bangsar wasn’t exactly on his way home. It was on this drive that we started opening up a bit more with each other. It’s also when he asked me how I’d be getting to the airport and offered to drive me.

The following night, I did indeed get to see him perform the love languages joke just for me, and I enjoyed it a lot. He didn’t hang out for the mamak session that night, though, because he had shows in Ipoh and Penang that weekend and was driving up to see his family in Ipoh the next day. We made plans to get together once he was back, on the Monday, my second-last full day I’d be in KL before I headed home.

It was that Monday that I wrote about us spending eleven hours together in my previous blog post, when we’d been able to talk through some really difficult and vulnerable topics. This is where I learned about some of his personal trauma, which I really valued that he trusted me with. It was that conversation that allowed us to reconnect emotionally and, frankly, what led to us ending up in bed together again (yeah, I left that part out of the blog because I didn’t want to reveal how far things had gone so quickly), because I need emotional connection in order to sleep with someone. To me, it didn’t feel like it was just going to be a hook up. And I didn’t want to be the one to lead it like I had been in the past, I wanted to know how much he wanted me. So even though I teased and flirted with him and could tell he wanted me to make an actual move on him, I didn’t. So, as he tried to hint, even though I knew exactly what he wanted, I said to him, “What are you trying to say, Lee?”

“I want to kiss you,” he replied. I actually got him to express what he wanted, hot damn!

“So, kiss me, then,” I replied. Our hormones took over from there.

Something that I think is important to understand here is that I don’t easily jump into bed with people. Lee is the first and only person I’ve been with since before my divorce—I genuinely hadn’t been with anyone since 2019, and not because there hasn’t been other interest in me. I’m generally really careful with my choice in partners because I know what kind of impact it has on me. I probably should’ve been more cautious in this situation… I mean, just to start, we again didn’t have protection and we didn’t have a conversation around STDs—I knew I was fine, but I didn’t know how many partners he’d been with since me or any of that history. We also didn’t talk about whether or not this could lead somewhere or the emotional impact it could have on us. For my side of it, I was primarily just thrilled that he was still attracted to me after all those years apart, and I wanted to make the most of it. But by that night, I also already knew I was still in love with him. I knew I wanted a future with him. After we slept together, I went as far as telling him I’d marry him if that’s what we needed to do to make things work for us long-term, because long-distance wasn’t going to cut it (this has become the basis of one of my stand-up jokes, which you can see in part in this Instagram reel). I really thought I was laying all my cards out on the table, though I later learned he thought I was just joking about the marriage thing. Still, the fact that I could just vomit up all my weird thoughts that were too early to say and he didn’t run away made me feel like that was a good sign for our future.

Now that this had happened, we knew we’d be in bed together one last time before he took me to the airport. I had one more night in KL, and he had an open mic night he was performing at, so he invited me to it, and I went, joined by another friend I’d planned to have dinner with. When we went to a mamak afterwards, I was able to get to know a couple of the newer comedians a bit. It had been mentioned I needed to get to the airport early the next morning (my flight was around 6am, I think). So, when I yawned, one of the comedians I’d just met said I should go get some sleep before my flight. All I could do was nod because I knew I would not be getting any sleep. We’d have just enough time to do other bedroom activities before I had to check out and have Lee drive me to the airport.

After I was all checked in at the airport, we hung out on some seats just talking for as long as we could before I worried about how much time I had to get to my gate. We took some photos together, and he let me share one on social media. “You’re not worried that we look kinda close?” I asked. “Don’t worry about it, no one’s going to read anything into it.” So, I posted a picture as evidence of him sending me off (which is why I didn’t write about him taking me to the airport in my last post, because that would’ve made him really identifiable). Just look at him holding my bag and taking care of me!

It was a sweet send off, though. He kissed me goodbye before I went through to immigration—something he’d never done in public with me before. It really felt like we were starting something fresh that would last.

We managed to do the long-distance romance thing for four months. I was already booking my next flight back to KL less than a month after I got home because I immediately needed more, and the opportunity was there for me to do so because my ex-husband would have the kids with him in Australia, so I had all this time to myself already anyway. Lee agreed to set that time aside for me, and we’d get to spend our first New Year’s together. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect way to ring in the new year.

During those four months long-distance, we usually managed a video call at least once a week, averaging about two hours long. Sometimes a second one came in for special occasions, like public holidays so we could call when it was my morning and his evening, and also my 40th birthday, which he specifically made an effort to make sure he celebrated with me the way I wanted (fitting also because he was one of the few people who celebrated my 30th with me). I’m not going to lie; it was still challenging to make things work given the time difference and the fact his easier times to talk tended to be my work hours. It was also challenging because we desperately wanted to be together in person. Thankfully we had my upcoming trip to look forward to. I don’t know if we could’ve survived those four months otherwise.

During that time, he also described me as perfect. I quickly asked him not to see me that way because I really wasn’t and he knew that, he knew the mistakes I’d made in the past, but that was still how he saw me at the time and I couldn’t help being flattered. The way he looked at me suggested he only had eyes for me, I had no reason to think he might be seeing anyone else back in KL. He was putting in the effort to make time for me, and that mattered a lot. He was genuinely interested in everything I had to share with him about what I was up to, asking questions to get more out of me. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had someone that interested in me and what I was up to, but I credited that to the fact we share a lot of the same interests so it was easy to have those conversations.

I convinced Lee to join me for one of my LEGO livestreams, and I couldn’t even watch it back because I’m so giddy around him. This is the only place you’re likely to get a taste for how we were as friends though.

I debated whether or not to bring this up but I suspect it’ll end up in a stand-up set sometime in the near future, and it kind of impacts part of the end of this story, so here goes… We wound up having a conversation about birth control for my upcoming trip, because he’d mentioned his preference against condoms (and given our history, you can tell I was aware of that), and so I’d been contemplating going on the Nexplanon implant for him. I didn’t want to worry about any pregnancy scares like I had in the past, and I felt pretty serious about him in a way I hadn’t with anyone else, but I didn’t know how he’d react to it. It turned out that he was thrilled I would do that for him and I said, “I mean, it’s for me, too. I want to enjoy our time together.” The more I told him about this form of birth control, the more he was thinking about how to write some jokes about it, and I really wanted him to follow through with it. It would’ve meant a lot to me to have him do jokes that related to our relationship in some way and that he workshopped with me. I think he only ended up trying it out once.

When late December finally rolled around, we were getting particularly antsy. We didn’t have much planned that was set in stone beyond him picking me up from the airport and taking me back again, and where I was staying, where he’d be joining for however many nights that he decided he wanted to.

The Highs and Lows of the Incredibly Memorable Ten Days from New Year’s Eve to January 10, 2024

I arrived in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve. We were so excited to see each other that we wanted to get to the apartment I’d booked ASAP. We didn’t even kiss until my luggage was all packed in his car and we’d left the parking garage, and he pulled off to the side of the road to program our accommodation into his map app on his phone (to be fair, we were also both masked until we got into his car). Lee just really wanted to get me somewhere he could undress me.

I’m not going to go into detail about every encounter we had in that apartment (after all, our relationship was built on way more than bedroom intimacy), but you can assume it was plenty, and earthshattering, because our chemistry was magnetic and the emotional intimacy enhanced that. I didn’t know how much time Lee would spend with me on this trip because he’s the kind of guy who values his alone time, so I let him lead and decide how much time he’d make for me. We wound up seeing each other every day, with a schedule that was essentially two nights together in Bangsar, then one night off where he’d go back to his place and I’d stay in Bangsar.

I’m not sure I can remember the order of everything that we did together because I didn’t take as many pictures as I would’ve liked, but I’ll do my best at least to piece things together from the journaling I did and the photos I did take, and will recount the most relevant details.

New Year’s Eve we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t even go out for dinner, instead opting to order food via Grab, because we just wanted to enjoy each other’s company after almost four months apart. You can assume most of it was spent in bed together since that was how I wanted to celebrate bringing in the new year. No need to elaborate beyond that. Aside from spending most of the night in the bedroom, however, I also got to treat Lee to the homemade butterscotch and chocolate fudge I’d made and brought for him to try. Earlier in the year I’d been messaging him while I was grocery shopping and sent him a picture of the American fudge I was buying. He’d never tried fudge before, so I planned to bring some along for him to try. Unfortunately, in the week before my trip, there was no fudge available in any of my local stores, so I decided to make it for him and bring it instead. I made so much that he was snacking on it every day that I was in Malaysia on this trip, and there was still some leftover for him to take home afterwards. This wasn’t the first time I made food for him though. That was something I’d done for him a few times back when I lived in KL, too.

The following morning, we had the free breakfast in the complex we were staying in, and I think that might’ve been when I took out my Switch that I’d brought so we could play video games together, but he wound up just watching me play a game on my own instead. You have to understand, Lee’s not the kind of person to do something that he doesn’t want to do just because someone else wants him to do it, unless there’s some kind of duty or obligation associated with it. This will be more relevant later on when I talk about some of my confusion and his mixed signals.

When lunch rolled around, we finally ventured out into Bangsar where he treated me to lunch. Then Lee walked me through to a couple of grocery stores in the area so I could look for food items I wanted to take back to the US with me since there are things I like in Malaysia that I can’t find in the US. Primarily I wanted to get rose syrup so I could make bandung for my daughter, and pandan flavour. As we went to cross a busy street to get to one supermarket, I saw a car stopped to my right in front of me, so I walked out behind it. Lee had seen another car pulling up from the left, which I didn’t notice, but freaked him out so much that for the rest of my time there, he grabbed hold of my arm and made sure I only crossed the street with him when he felt like I was safe. I’ve never felt that level of protective behaviour from anyone, let alone a romantic partner, and it made me feel really safe with him, like he really cared about me.

Whilst at the grocery store, we also picked up some food that we could eat in the apartment, and then headed back there. I think this must’ve been the day that, when we got back, there was a cleaner in the apartment, so we dropped things off then headed down to the pool area to talk. I distinctly remember reminding him, as we headed back upstairs after that, that I had fallen in love with him ten years ago. He said he remembered. I could tell him that because it was common knowledge between us, but somehow I couldn’t get out the words that I was still in love with him, and that the more time we spend together just makes me love him that much more. That my love for him is fed by the way he is with me.

Most of this day was more reacquainting ourselves with each other, and having some deep conversations. One of my goals for this visit was to figure out if Lee would be open to seeing a future with me like I already did, because after four months of seeing each other long-distance, I really wanted to know if he was going to be able to make things official with me. One of the questions I asked him was, “What holds you back from having a committed relationship?” Lee spoke of feelings of unworthiness, like he didn’t deserve that level of relationship, in part because he wasn’t as successful in his career as he wanted to be. I knew then that I was going to have my work cut out for me if I was going to have a chance at the type of relationship I wanted with him, but at least he was opening up and being vulnerable with me, so I told him about my own experiences being more the opposite. This bothers me less now than it used to, but I have found that some of my relationship trauma has been more around feeling like I’m not seen as worthy in a man’s eyes if they’re not willing to commit to me, and all they really want is the sexual encounters. I told him how tired I am of having men tell me they don’t feel worthy of me, because surely the fact I’m choosing to be with them should be enough to show that I find them worthy of me? After all, I am damn selective about who I let into my pants. In reality, I know it doesn’t work that way, and men like this need to work on their own insecurities. I can’t fix it with my words, but it’s still something that frustrates me.

At one point, Lee told me that he didn’t know why he didn’t feel as strongly toward me as I felt, though he was trying to get there. I told him that his behaviour toward me felt like more than what a man would do if all he’s interested in is sex, with how much he does for me. He acted like that was no big deal, like that’s just what kind of guy he is, which made me question whether or not I was actually special in his eyes.

We had a conversation on gender roles, because the way we were, those traditional gender roles were somewhat reversed. Lee would make me tea and bring it to me, and was doing the dishes for us in the apartment, and I felt like we could have a more equal division of household labour than I had with my ex-husband if Lee and I lived together. I so much wanted that. And yet, there were also traditionally male things that he felt like he had to be responsible for. It seemed to bother him that he couldn’t better support me financially, even though that wasn’t something I cared about—I told him about how my mother was the breadwinner in my household growing up, so it really didn’t bother me to think about me supporting him while he better established himself. He never asked me to pay for any of our dates and seemed to want to treat me to a lot. It was only when I insisted on paying for things and helping out that he accepted that—but he paid for more of our meals than I did, and covered all the local travel and parking expenses until I asked him if I could at least give him some cash to pay for some of those expenses, several days later when we were leaving Sunway Pyramid. He shared things with me about cultural expectations and his family that I won’t go into (as I mentioned before, not my story to tell), but allowed me to better understand him and why he is the way he is. I valued every time he shared anything about his family with me. It was one of those things that really helped me feel close to him, but also, really made me want to properly meet and get to know his family. I had, once, ten years ago after a show he did at PJLA (where he had given me a backstage tour), met his mother and to this day I still remember how he talked me up to her even as he didn’t disclose that he and I were kind of a thing at the time.

During this long, vulnerable conversation, I added, “Hey, can you promise me one thing? If things don’t work out between us, don’t disappear on me again?”

“It’s the least I can do,” he agreed.

That night, after I’d shown him the movie Joy Ride on my laptop, I was tired earlier than he was, so I was falling asleep on him. He got me to go to the bedroom and laid me down on the bed and comforted me by laying down next to me and started brushing and tapping my head with his hand in a fashion that he described his grandfather used to do for him when he was a toddler. I was so overwhelmed with emotion I didn’t know what to do. It scared the crap out of me because I felt so cared for in a way that I hadn’t been since maybe when I was a child? I was so used to taking on everything on my own (since well before my marriage ended) that I didn’t know how to handle having someone who actually put in effort to care for me. I didn’t know how much I wanted—no, needed that until he was giving it to me. I think what scared me the most is that I didn’t know how long it would last, because it didn’t seem like a committed relationship would be forthcoming, even if he acted like that’s what we already had.

The next morning, over breakfast, we talked a little about the future. I once again reminded him that he’d be able to develop his career faster if he was willing to come be with me in the US. He agreed, and it seemed clear that he had the goal to one day end up performing in the US—unlike the other Malaysian comedians who seem to have their sights set more on Australia. I brought up the Malaysian comedians who were living apart from their wives, who’d been establishing themselves in Australia, hoping he’d make a connection that we could be doing the same (but with me in the US instead). He mentioned that there are Asian people who will make those kinds of living apart sacrifices when the eventual outcome is really worth it, but didn’t indicate whether he felt that way about us. He did, however, show me some of the notes he’d been making about jokes he wanted to do in the US and I liked that it was something he was actively working on. He still seemed to be blocked from actually taking action in that area though, whether it be financial because he didn’t want me to financially support him doing that, or emotional, because he had cultural ties to Malaysia that he felt like he couldn’t really get away from. As I thought about this later on, I realised this was an area in which we differ greatly—I don’t have the same kinds of familial obligations that he has. My mum passed away 19 years ago and I haven’t lived near my immediate family in almost 16 years, so I no longer know what it’s like to have to consider family ties beyond my own kids.

I asked Lee if he’d ever just made a major decision to act without knowing what the outcome would be, or whether it would be positive, and he asked me to clarify. I told him about many of my experiences from the last few years, with my decision to end my marriage and pursue different opportunities. I told him about how he was my current “leap of faith” decision. I had no idea how things were going to work out between us, but I wanted to believe in us and try. Lee told me he had never made any major decisions like that. It seemed like there was a part of him that wanted to be inspired by my own actions, but it would take a lot for him to actually get there. Lee seemed to prefer to plan for a more tried-and-true path, with the goal of doing more local shows and getting back out to doing international shows across southeast Asia, since it had been a long time since he’d done that (I do recall he performed in Vietnam at one point when we were together ten years ago, but I don’t know what other international shows he’s done since, beyond the Melbourne International Comedy Festival after he stopped speaking to me, I think back in 2015). He shared that it would be nice to make enough money from doing those things in order for him to be able to pay his own way to the US.

We went back to the apartment to hang out until lunch time. I think this might’ve been when I pulled out some relationship cards with questions on them so we could dive deeper in getting to know each other. I don’t remember most of the questions we asked each other, but I do recall one that asked something to the effect of, “What would you do if someone wanted a threesome with you two?” and I was so comforted by his answer that he didn’t want to have one. Unless it was with a clone of me, because then he could have two of me. When I’d been quietly freaking out about the fact that we hadn’t discussed exclusivity, it felt reassuring to hear that it seemed like he was only thinking about me.

I recognise that my inability to properly speak up about this particular issue stemmed from my own insecurities and fear that I’d scare him away if I asked for too much before he was ready. He preferred a slower pace than I was used to, and up until this trip, that had seemed like a good thing because it meant that he wanted to be patient and let things develop naturally, just as they had when we were together ten years before. I didn’t want Lee to see my insecurities because I’d been like that with him ten years earlier and things got weird when I got too clingy and needy with him, so I was trying to do things differently this time. Thus, it didn’t matter that Lee outwardly appeared to only be interested in me, and was willing to wait four months for me for us to see each other in person, and he’s too shy to approach women most of the time, I think I was naturally going to be worried that someone more local to him would eventually get his attention. It was obvious to me that other women were attracted to him, even if it wasn’t obvious to him.

Lee said he’d take me out for lunch before we parted ways and he’d go back to his place to recharge. I wanted roti telur, and the first mamak we went to wasn’t serving roti at that time, so he found us a different one that was. We could’ve just stayed at the first one and ordered something else, but he wanted me to be able to have the food I’d wanted to have.

After lunch, Lee dropped me back at our accommodation and then we parted ways. We’d successfully spent around 48 hours in a row together. It feels rare to find someone who wants to spend that much time with me, and I in return. Like Lee, I am also generally someone who likes their alone time and need time to recharge. Having the break was useful for me too, because it gave me some downtime to process our time together and recharge. I was able to accurately cover much of the above content because I spent that night journaling about those couple of days.

Our plans for the following day (Wednesday Jan 3) weren’t to meet up until dinner before he planned to perform at an open mic, which I specifically requested he put his name in for because I wanted to watch him perform while I was in town if at all possible. Since he needed to have time to prepare to perform, I had lunch with some other friends. One of whom had read the “Closure Encounter of the Ghosting Kind” blog and had her suspicions about who I’d written about narrowed down to two. Lee, and one other person. Naturally, her curiosity got the best of her and she kept asking me questions about it and how I was enjoying my time with my “special someone” while I was there. Even though she had originally been certain I had been writing about her other guess, by the end of lunch she was convinced it was Lee. I still tried to act nonchalant because he wasn’t ready for people to know, but I think my face gave away the truth.

I wouldn’t have brought up this situation except for the fact it’s relevant to when Lee and I got together later. As I got drinks with this friend after lunch, Lee started messaging me with frustration because the open mic got cancelled due to lack of ticket sales. I asked, “Was there even a way to get tickets? Remember when I tried to find a ticket link so I could buy one, and I couldn’t find it?” So, there was a bunch of back-and-forth about that while he tried to find things out. He hadn’t even originally wanted to perform, but now that it was getting taken away, he was pissed off. He told me that some of the other comedians would be getting together for a mamak session that night instead, and asked if I’d like to go with him, so I said yes of course. I mean, getting invited to hang out with his friends while I’m with him? So, he wasn’t hiding me away and pretending we weren’t spending time together? Yes, please! He told the guys that he’d be bringing a +1.

I headed back to Bangsar and then waited for Lee to pick me up for dinner. Though he’d been in a bad mood about this, seeing me perked him up and made him feel a bit better. That is, until I felt like I had to let him know that this one mutual friend had figured out he was the person I was in town to see, and her husband, also a mutual friend, also likely understood that. He went silent on me for the rest of the drive to dinner except when I asked “Are you upset?” and he said “Yes.”

Once we got to dinner and ordered, Lee was talking to me again, albeit completely ignoring the issue that had caused him to go silent. In my mind, I compared the situation to how my ex-husband would’ve behaved, in which I would’ve likely been driven back home and ignored for several days because I’d done something so upsetting. This kind of history made me happy that Lee was at least trying to get things back on track with us, even though he was upset. We ate at Damansara Uptown Hokkien Mee, and he kindly de-shelled the prawns for me (something I absolutely hate having to do – if a meal comes with shelled prawns, I’m usually unlikely to order it). By the time our meal was over, things seemed back to normal. We still had time to kill before meeting the other comedians at the mamak, so we wandered around Damansara Uptown. This is where I first noticed how protective he got of me crossing the street. Again, compared to how my ex-husband would’ve gotten when he was upset with me, polar opposites. The only store that we wandered into as we walked around was Drop By Vapor, not because either of us vapes, but because the store also sold nerdy figures, primarily Funko POPs, and I wound up buying a few.

Once we made it back to Lee’s car, it was time to head to the mamak. The comedians who showed up were a mix of those I knew from when I lived in KL, one or two I had met on my previous trip in September, and I think just one who I hadn’t met before but was familiar with through social media and maybe watching a show from the former Crackhouse Comedy Club on Zoom during the pandemic. This one asked Lee what he did for New Year’s, and I was surprised when he answered honestly and said he’d been with me. Compared to when he hid his birthday plans with me ten years earlier, this was an improvement. He was also bragging to some of the guys about the comedians I got to see in the US since my previous trip out there, and I remember turning to him and asking him to remind me about things I’d told him. He wasn’t obviously in everyone’s face like, “Oh by the way, this is my girl,” but it was starting to feel like a proper relationship where he wasn’t hiding the fact that we were spending time together and he knew a lot about me. It gave me hope for our future, that I might get what I was looking for if I’m patient enough.

By the end of the night, he asked a couple of our mutual friends who were there, who we’d discussed inviting to bak kut teh later on, when would be the best time for us to do that. Bak kut teh is a famous Malaysian dish that I’d never tried before, so Lee had wanted to make an event of it by inviting a bunch of our friends. Day and time for that set, we headed back to Bangsar for the night.

It was probably between 2-3am by the time we were back in our apartment, but we didn’t go to bed right away. We organised our plans for the following day (deciding what we’d do for lunch, and buying movie tickets) then scrolled through his movie/TV streaming options before settling on him showing me the first episode of Schmigadoon!, something I had been curious to watch but didn’t have access to because I don’t subscribe to Apple TV+.

Since we went to sleep so late, we didn’t bother getting the free breakfast the next morning, opting to sleep in instead. Also, because we’d planned to have dim sum for lunch (because I’d never been to a straight up dim sum restaurant before, even though I’d had dim sum elsewhere), which was likely going to be very filling. Once we were awake, I thanked Lee for how he handled things after I’d upset him the night before. I knew he could’ve very easily shut down and stayed that way instead. He replied, “I just wanted to make the most of the limited time you’re here.”

We left for One Utama around 1pm and headed straight to the dim sum restaurant Lee had picked out. When we arrived, I let Lee pick most of the dim sum items himself. I mean, trust a Chinese guy to make the best dim sum choices, amiright? It was delicious and, in fact, very filling.

After Lee paid for lunch, we did some window shopping for a while (and I might’ve bought some things) but still had time to kill before seeing the movie we had tickets for, so I took Lee to a kopitiam I’d gone to with some other friends on the previous trip so we could get something to drink while we waited. Given that Lee was still quite tired, it probably wasn’t the most appropriate time for me to attempt another conversation around commitment, but damn it, I had goals. There were a couple of things I flagged here, and I don’t remember in which order. They were a) commenting that the mutual friend who’d figured things out the previous day had mentioned that I should be taking a lot of pictures of us together for evidence of a bona fide relationship should we seek the relationship green card route (I’d actually already been ahead of her in thinking about that considering I’d had to apply for a green card for my ex-husband in the past, so I knew the process and expectations) and b) asking him what he thought was missing from what we had that he thought was necessary for an official relationship. I was thinking about things like “exclusivity” or “a label.” His answer was essentially just “both people agree to it being an official thing.” His answer didn’t feel like an invitation to discuss things further and make that agreement to me, so I dropped the topic, but I genuinely couldn’t comprehend at that point what was wrong with giving our relationship a label.

I feel like I’ve always struggled to understand his difficulties with listening to me talk about mutual friends being supportive of our relationship when they’ve found out about it. Because this latest friend wasn’t even remotely the first. There were a handful who knew about us ten years earlier, and they all thought we sounded great together. I hadn’t bothered to update any of them on the current situation though because I was trying to better respect Lee’s privacy this time, but boy did I really want to talk about it.

We headed to TGV to see The Boy and the Heron next. I’d already seen it in the English dub in the US beforehand, but I had wanted to also catch it in Japanese with English subtitles, and Lee hadn’t seen it yet. As I mentioned earlier, we had actually caught Miyazaki’s previous film, The Wind Rises, together ten years earlier in the other cinema in One Utama so it felt appropriate for us to catch this one together too. Lee had booked us couples seats for the movie, something that I’m not sure we’d done since we went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier, also ten years earlier (I remember that experience because he said it was the first time he’d be sitting in couples seats in the cinema). I think I had my legs on his lap for at least part of the film. Meanwhile, Lee was asleep for some of it due to not having had enough sleep the night before.

After the movie, we went to his favourite popcorn place to pick up some popcorn to take back to the apartment with us, then went to another store I liked so I could buy the plush Lapras I’d coveted the last time I was in town before figuring out what to do for dinner. Originally, we were going to get Thai, but when we found the Thai place we’d looked up in the directory, Lee said actually it wasn’t a good choice, so we went upstairs to a Vietnamese restaurant instead.

Over dinner, Lee asked me to catch him up on the parts of the movie he missed, which was probably made easier by the fact I’d seen the film twice now. We had a good conversation about the film though. I always enjoy discussing movies with Lee. This was the first meal I insisted I paid for since the Grab meal I ordered for us on New Year’s Eve.

Once we were back at the apartment, I really struggled to open up about the emotional crap I was dealing with. I really wanted to talk to Lee about what I wanted in moving our relationship forward, but I went nonverbal instead, and holed myself up in the bedroom while he watched TV in the living room. I’d wanted him to follow me to the bedroom, but that didn’t happen. Eventually I made it back to him and just laid on his lap for a while. I could tell in his face that he was confused about what was going on with me, but all I could manage was saying “I’m finding it difficult to communicate.” I finally reached a point of dragging him to the bedroom so we could get some sleep.

The following day, Lee dropped me off at Bangsar Village II so I could meet a writer friend I’ve known for years but had never met in person before. Lee and I planned to get lunch together afterwards, so he hung out at the apartment organising plans for our bak kut teh dinner with friends while I did that, until I messaged him that I was done and he let me know where to meet him at a nasi kandar place for lunch afterwards. Words can’t really express how much I appreciated how much he was organising for me or doing on my behalf.

When Lee dropped me back at the apartment after lunch, as I got out of the car, he said, “I’ll miss you.” This hit me deeply, though I kinda laughed it off and said something to the effect of, “You know you don’t have to leave.” Here’s the thing… he knew he’d be seeing me again the following day. Also, during our time together in September, one of the things he asked me was “Why do girls ask you if you miss them?” so I was kind of under the impression he doesn’t really say things like that, let alone actually miss people when he’s not with them. For him to say that he would miss me when he’d be seeing me again maybe 24-30 hours later actually meant something to me. It felt like a rare moment of verbal vulnerability about his feelings towards me.

I didn’t bother to make plans with anyone else that night because I really needed the downtime for myself for processing. I journaled some more.

Saturday the 6th felt like the day where shit really hit the fan. I was out with a friend for afternoon tea when I started receiving WhatsApp calls from my former mother-in-law. Since I was on mobile data at the time, I didn’t want to answer the calls (and couldn’t really hear when I did answer) so I messaged her instead. I knew she was with my kids in Australia so I was worried what this might’ve been about. She gave me a brief overview of why she was calling (it was only tangentially to do with my kids) and asked me to call her for more as soon as I could. So, I cut my afternoon with my friend (who happened to be the mutual friend I’d told about my relationship with Lee ten years earlier, that led to Lee ghosting me back then—this is relevant, I promise) at Bangsar Village II short and asked him to drive me back to the apartment I was staying in so I could deal with this situation. I asked him to stay with me in the apartment while I made the call, but was meanwhile also messaging Lee to see if he could come by earlier than originally planned so that he could support me through this trying time. He dropped everything and said he’d come right over. I asked him if he needed me to get rid of the other friend before he arrived so he didn’t think anything was going on between us (knowing Lee had a keycard to let himself in, that would’ve been a pretty obvious sign we were a thing) and Lee said don’t worry about it, I come first.

I won’t go into detail about what the call with my former mother-in-law was about, beyond saying that it had to do with my ex-husband needing to stay in Australia instead of returning to the US with our kids as planned, so I would have to deal with writing a letter granting permission for my kids to travel back to the US with my ex-husband’s girlfriend instead. Up until then, my ex-husband and his family had no idea I was in Malaysia at the time, so it was interesting having to coordinate everything from there.

When Lee let himself into the apartment, he found me laughing with our other friend, which confused him given the distressing circumstances, but humour is how I deal with stressful situations like that. I filled him in on the new information, and then we wound up just talking about random things like video games after that until our friend left shortly before Lee and I would need to leave for dinner.

Lee had planned to surprise me with a date that night, and wound up getting me a ticket to a stand-up comedy show, Just Jokes. I had previously asked him if I should get a ticket to go since it was the only comedy show I would’ve ended up being able to see the entire trip and it had a couple of friends on the line-up, including one I hadn’t seen perform last time I was in town. Originally Lee hadn’t been interested in going with me so I’d been like, “We don’t have to go, we can do something else.” Then he ended up changing his mind anyway, when he couldn’t find anything better for us to do. He drove us into KL early enough to get dinner at Quill City Mall first, and we found a Thai place that was nestled away upstairs. We ordered a couple of dishes to share and they were both delicious, even if one of them was particularly spicy for me. I think Lee was amused by how I reacted to the spiciness, but then he ended up also agreeing it was quite spicy.

When we finished dinner, we headed out to MoMo’s so I could get a seat at the show. Since Lee didn’t have a ticket because as a comedian he could go for free and stand, he didn’t sit with me during the show, but he still tried to be attentive toward me by asking if I wanted any drinks during the show. He’d actually WhatsApp’d me the drinks menu while I was sat in the audience, but I hadn’t seen it so during the break in the show he instead came up and asked me if I wanted something. Maybe it’s my lack of history with dating men who are considerate of what I might want, but I appreciated the thought, even though I declined. I think what I liked most was just that he was still showing that he was invested in me while we were there, amongst his peers. Again, acting like a boyfriend again without us having any labels, and not hiding the fact that he brought me. There were some comedians there who’d met me on my previous trip in September who seemed happy to see me again, and it’d been interesting to me that no one really seemed surprised to see me back again so soon.

After the show, there were vague plans that some of the comedians were making about what to do next, and I was asked if I’d be going, but I replied simply that “Lee’s my ride, I’ll be doing whatever he’s doing,” and someone said he’d said he was tired so he wouldn’t be going out with them. Indeed, we didn’t go anywhere after the show except back to the apartment in Bangsar, and Lee commented on how I’d been shifting his routine. Without me around, Lee had a tendency to go to bed after 3am. While I’d been there, his bedtime had been shifting closer to midnight, even the night before when he wasn’t even with me in Bangsar. The way he described it made it seem like I was having a positive impact on his life, helping him make that shift. To be fair, I was generally awake before he was and I had a bad habit of waking him up because I wanted his attention. Not that he complained about the way I woke him up.

The next morning, we got breakfast in the complex restaurant then hung out in the apartment for a little while. Lee had made plans to hit up two shopping malls with me that day. The first one we went to was one that I’d gone to with a mutual friend on my previous trip, Amcorp Mall, which I’d been to plenty of times before because my Malaysian therapist’s office was right there when I lived in KL. But Lee, who’d lived in Malaysia all his life, over 41 years (except when he went to university in Australia), had never been there. I liked to muse about the times when I had done things there or knew about things that he didn’t, considering that I’m really not a local. I was amused when Lee parked the car outside of the mall’s parking lot and said, “I hope you don’t mind walking a little, so I can save on parking.” We both have a tendency to try and be cheap and save money wherever possible so I commented on that and my appreciation of it. I think he liked being with a woman who was happy he was cheap. I didn’t buy as many things at this mall as I did the previous time I visited, but I still picked up a couple of nerdy things.

The second mall we drove to was at my request, Sunway Pyramid, because it was a mall that I liked but didn’t get out to last time I was in town. I wanted to see if I could find some cool fashion there because it’s where I’d bought the top that became part of my anime schoolgirl outfit from my stand-up comedy when I lived in Malaysia (not the one in the above photos, you’ll see it in some photos later on because I’ve been wearing it on stage again). Unfortunately, that store didn’t seem to be there any longer when we visited Asian Avenue.

We stopped for a light lunch at Genki Sushi, not wanting to eat too much since we had big dinner plans, and this place was super cool because they served you your food and drinks on little bullet trains. Lee took some video for me of them approaching us, including commentary, so you can easily hear his voice on the video (you can find it on Instagram here).

After lunch, we wandered around the mall and popped into a few places. He took me to a Japanese grocery store, where I bought some treats for my kids and he bought some treats for his dad. We went to Popular, where I picked up some local books and a plush Chinese dragon for my son. Finally, we went to a grocery store so I could pick up some kaya (coconut jam) – something I’d forgotten I should take home with me when I bought the other groceries the previous week.

Once we were done with that shopping, it was time to head to Kota Damansara to meet our friends for bak kut teh. Parking was really hard to find in the area, but we still managed to reach the restaurant (BKT New Klang Lek Bak Kut Teh) on time and before anyone else. We got a table that would fit everyone he expected to show up, but when our friends took their time arriving, Lee started stressing out and let me know this was one of the reasons he didn’t like organising things. I hadn’t even been aware it’d been such a big deal for him to do since it had been his idea to make the bak kut teh meal an event we invite our friends to. We made passive bets on who would arrive first after one of our friends ended up cancelling and another one told Lee they would be late—and that friend ended up arriving earlier than one who didn’t say they’d be late.

While we’d waited for our friends, Lee pointed out a store across the street called Ninjaz and said he’d like to take me there to get me something later. This did not end up happening due to how late we stayed out with friends.

It was only during this meal where I finally had a friend ask me, “So why are you back again already?” I couldn’t give my honest answer and say it was Lee, so I just said, “Because I can? Because my kids are in Australia with their dad so I had the freedom to do so?” That answer seemed to suit him fine though.

During dinner, Lee videoed me trying bak kut teh for the first time. I don’t have that video and have no idea if he did anything with it because I didn’t see him posting it—I think I didn’t give an interesting enough reaction as he expected me to. He kept making sure my bowl was full of bak kut teh and my cup was full of Chinese tea, which I’m sure to our friends just looked like casual hospitality but to me felt like boyfriend-y type stuff, since he was the only one doing that for me. And I did in fact enjoy the food, so I’m glad I insisted that I got to try it on this trip.

Lee treated everyone to dinner and at this point I’m just wondering, who is this guy who usually prefers to be cheap but is willing to cover this whole meal for everyone? Or maybe I was thinking, I’d rather he saved his money to come to the US with me rather than impressing me with all of this extra stuff, but I didn’t want to say anything in case it impacted his ego. He seemed to like putting in effort for me.

After dinner, we wandered around for a little while to try and find somewhere for dessert. One of our friends peeled away before we found a place, but then we came across a niche little coffee shop, where we got cakes and hot beverages.

We stayed at the Vintage Kiss Audio Café until it closed and we were kicked out around 10:30pm. I found myself feeling surprised when Lee mentioned we’d gone to see a movie together, as it came up in conversation. You might think I’d stop being surprised at him not hiding spending time with me, but you have to understand that in the months we were together ten years prior, I’d gotten it so ingrained in me how much we had to hide what was really going on. But no, then, as we left the café, Lee asked for advice from our friends on where to take me for banana leaf the next day, too. We got a couple of recommendations and decided on the one that was closest to where we were staying in Bangsar.

That night, when he’d put the TV on, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was on and we started talking nerdy and reminiscing about how we’d seen that movie together in the cinema with my kids. When I was clearly beginning to fall asleep, Lee said, “Come on,” then made me get on his back so he could carry me to the bedroom. I had to push the door open with my foot.

The next morning, Lee talked about wanting me to be his personal alarm clock because he liked how I woke him up, and I asked how he was going to be able to handle waking up without me after I leave. I think he made a comment about suppressing his feelings.

We skipped breakfast due to our banana leaf plans and took our time getting ready in the morning. I needed to deal with finding a notary public to help handle the situation with getting my kids back to the US, so we found a place in Bangsar we’d try to check out after the banana leaf. Lee went to the reception to print out the document I needed witnessed by the notary public while I was in the shower (also I asked him to because I was too nervous to do it myself), but I began to feel like I was asking too much from Lee as I handled these things.

We headed out to the banana leaf place, Maya, around 11:30am. It had a very quiet atmosphere, which was nice.

Conversation here drifted to Lee asking me where I would’ve gone if I hadn’t come to Malaysia to see him. I told him probably either southern California where I had theme parks I wanted to visit, or I’d have just stayed home and been bored while my kids were in Australia. Was he fishing for something?

Toward the end of the meal (Lee had finished eating, I didn’t have much left), Lee asked me about my dating habits back in the US and I started internally panicking, not understanding why he’d ask such a question. “I’d rather be single than dating random people,” I said. “Besides, I know what I want, and what I want is you.” He talked about being single and dating himself, and my stomach sank. My anxiety took over and all I could think was he wants to be with other people besides me, and/or he thinks this thing we have will be over once I leave Malaysia again. That’s quite the contrast from him pulling a seat out for me as we arrived at the restaurant, a gesture I am so unaccustomed to that I was surprised when it happened and he insisted I took the chair.

Lee taught me the custom of how to fold our banana leaves to indicate that we enjoyed the meal, then we left and walked across the street to a different Ninjaz store, since we hadn’t been able to go to the one the night before, so he could see if he could find the thing he wanted to get for me. It turned out Ninjaz is a store that sells a whole range of mobile phone covers. My phone cover was falling apart so I instantly realised exactly what Lee had been planning to do, and I sadly had to disappoint him as I’d already learned he wouldn’t be able to find a phone cover for me since my phone isn’t available in Malaysia. Lee still asked a store clerk about it but he confirmed what I already knew. Lee looked absolutely defeated and his mood had shifted. Meanwhile, I was trying to thank him for being so thoughtful because even though he hadn’t been able to follow through, in my mind, this felt like a gesture beyond what any romantic partner had done for me before, i.e., noticing I had a problem and wanting to fix it for me. He later talked to me about how much of a failure he felt like not being able to achieve what he wanted to. I had a really sensitive man on my hands.

Next, we tried to find the notary public nearby. Though we found the place it was supposed to be at, there was no signage and no answer on the phone. By this point I could tell that Lee needed to leave to be on his own and recharge, so I told him he could take me back to the apartment and told him I’d sort out the notary public stuff on my own. When we headed back to the parking, Lee was back to trying to impress me again. I couldn’t help it; I was flattered whenever he tried to impress me.

After Lee dropped me back at the apartment, I surprisingly managed to find and contact another notary public right away, and got everything signed and notarised before he even got home, and I had even walked to this new notary public!

I spent the evening journaling and panicking that our relationship would be done at the end of this trip. I wanted to talk about it with him but I also didn’t want to ruin the limited time we had left, at least not before our plans for my final night in KL. I worried that in enjoying each other in person so much, it was going to be super hard to go back to not seeing each other again and not knowing when we’d be able to. I kept thinking about how much easier it would be for us to make things work if we still lived in the same city, because then we could have more time apart, more often, when we needed it to recharge, but still feel like things were working.

I didn’t see Lee again until he picked me up for dinner the next night. We had tickets to see a friend of ours singing in Chinatown that evening, so that’s where we headed. We wandered around the area for quite a while, looking for a decent place to eat. At one point, it started pouring down with rain, so Lee got his umbrella out and we huddled beneath it as we continued on our journey to find somewhere to eat. He knew I had my own umbrella in my backpack but he didn’t make me take it out; I think he preferred to be able to protect me by holding me close to him. Eventually we stumbled onto the Old China Café, which I thought looked quaint and cute with its wooden saloon doors.

After the weirdness of the previous day, it was nice to have a meal where things felt normal between us again. Maybe I should’ve chalked up the previous day to us having spent too much time together and Lee not having enough time to recharge. After all, the following day, as I was in bed with him and told him, “You know, you didn’t have to spend this much time with me if you needed more time to yourself,” his response was, “Really?” He seemed surprised that I understood he might’ve needed more time to himself. I’m very good at respecting someone’s needs when I know what they are. But maybe Lee was also just trying to give me as much as he felt he could, given the limited time we had together. There might be a lesson here in actually communicating needs and wants better, rather than just assuming.

Anyhow, I told Lee that I’d pay for dinner again, and he made a gesture to suggest he would prevent me from doing so, and my autistic brain took it at face value so I was like, “Are you sure?” and he was like, “No, no,” and agreed that I should pay.

By the time we left the restaurant, it had stopped raining, which made it easier for us to wander out to Jao Tim to see our friend perform.

Before we went into the venue, Lee said that since it was my last night in KL, he could take me to the Petronas Twin Towers afterwards to get some photos, or if there was anywhere else that I wanted to get photos before I left. I told him I’d decide after the show finished since we didn’t know how long it would go until.

I was glad to finally have the opportunity to see Bihzhu sing, as I’d never done so when I lived in KL but I listened to her music online. I was extra glad to go with Lee, because it would be yet another event that someone who knew both of us would see us together at. Not that she’d seen us together anywhere else.

The show finished somewhere around 10:30pm, I think, so I asked Lee to just take me back to Bangsar afterwards. I wanted to just spend the rest of the night alone with him in the apartment, enjoy the last few hours I had left with him.

I had an afternoon flight the next day, so we took things fairly easy the next morning. I packed, we had breakfast at the complex restaurant, and he left me with an experience I can’t forget because it made me want so much more. “How dare you,” I thought, because we were out of time.

I remember Lee inviting me to touch him however I wanted as he drove me to the airport and me just smiling because I enjoyed him asking me for things he likes and being able to oblige. As we drove, I commented on how Lee is the opposite of that saying, “all talk, no action.” I told him, “You’re all action, limited talk.” We discussed how he clearly expresses his love through acts of service. I asked him how he likes to receive love, and he said that was a much harder question to answer because he’s not very good at receiving love. I think he finds it very hard to feel deserving of it.

Once we were almost to KLIA1, it occurred to me that Jetstar – the airline I was flying – was actually a budget airline and might be departing from KLIA2. I looked it up as we drove and sure enough, I was right, so Lee had to change the destination in his map app.

We found parking and made it inside KLIA2 and headed to the check-in counter. When I checked in, I handed over my passport and said, “Just me.” Lee added, “Unfortunately.”

Once I was all checked in, we went to an Old Town White Coffee for my final Malaysian lunch. I insisted on paying for this meal too, and as I got my wallet out, I asked Lee if I could give him my leftover ringgit. He looked at it, all RM17 of it, and said, “No, you keep it for next time you’re back.” He was clearly expecting me to return and hoping to see me again soon.

I wish I could say things continued to be smooth from there, but it was as we ate lunch that things turned to shit.

Where Things Fell Apart: The Assumptions That Anxiety and Depression Caused

There were ways in which Lee was inconsistent with me, which didn’t help my relationship anxiety. I’d tried chalking it up to anxious attachment that I needed to work on, because I didn’t want to come across as needy. As much as I tried to trust his actions toward me indicated how he felt about me, sometimes he’d make a comment here or there that would make me think he just wanted something casual with me, he wasn’t thinking about a future with me. I didn’t want to waste my time waiting around for him to figure out what he wanted when I was already so sure that I wanted a future with him. I mean, the night we hooked back up again, I told him I would marry him if that was the only way we could be together long-term given that we’re citizens of different countries. As I mentioned, that became the basis for a couple of my stand-up jokes because who does that?!

Given my impatience for him to figure things out, I confess that I did go back to KL to see him in January with the express intention of figuring out if he saw a future with me and, if he couldn’t handle a conversation like that, then I was probably going to have to end things. Because no matter how I felt about him, I was scared that it wouldn’t lead to where I wanted it to go and I thought it would be better to end things before I got even more attached than I already was, so I wouldn’t get more hurt later on when he still wouldn’t commit. And, as I’ve established, I really tried to have those conversations with him during the trip. If you skipped over those parts, I’ll reiterate them here. I asked him questions like “What makes it hard for you to commit to a relationship?” and he talked about feeling unworthy of that kind of relationship. I tried to explain that for me, it’s generally been the opposite, that I feel like a man sees me as unworthy when he’s not willing to commit. That impacted me more in the past than it does now, because these days I don’t see my worth as being defined by a man, and I can choose to walk away if a man isn’t capable of giving me that. When we got drinks before seeing a movie, I asked him, “What do you see as the difference between a committed relationship and what we have? What would be different?” and his answer was essentially “Nothing,” which confused the hell out of me because then why not give what we had a label? Why couldn’t we see each other as boyfriend and girlfriend?

My anxiety shot through the roof when we had banana leaf together and he asked me about my dating life, as if I had one, and talked about his lack of one in a way that made me think he wanted to be dating other people too. Even though my answer to him was “I don’t date. I’m not interested in that. If I’m not with you, I’ll probably just go back to being single because I don’t want to date.” I thought I was being clear about what I wanted, and that what I wanted was him.

So, my anxious brain had got it in my head that we wanted different things. With his words, he’d given me the impression he wanted the freedom to date other people even though his actions made me feel like he only had eyes for me. So, by the time I tried to talk to him about wanting exclusivity as we were having lunch at the airport, what came out of my mouth probably sounded more like I was ending things. Here’s an approximation of how that conversation went down:

Me: You know, next time we see each other, I’m probably going to want more.
Lee: What do you mean?
Me: Well, I mean, like… ugh. I went on this birth control for you, I don’t want to have to worry about STDs, I want to know you’re not going to be with anyone else. (I wasn’t even asking for commitment at this point, just exclusivity).
Lee: Are you saying you regret it?
Me: I’m not saying that! I wanted to do that! Not just for you, for me also, but fuck, of course it was for you.
Lee: … (I can tell he’s starting to shut down)
Me: It’s just starting to feel like we want different things.
Lee: What’s wrong with just going with the flow?
Me: I can’t do that. But I do not regret the time I’ve had with you.

His responses confirmed to me that he didn’t want to give me commitment. Especially when he said, “What’s wrong with going with the flow?” And things just spiralled from there. I tried to talk about the sacrifices I’d made, the things I’d done in order to be with him—listen, I was so in love with the guy but also didn’t want to worry about pregnancy (at least, not until we’d had a chance to talk about it to see if we wanted to have a kid together—yes, I would’ve been open to it with him if he’d wanted that because I’d experienced firsthand what he’s like with kids and he’d talked about having his own someday—but we never got to have that conversation) that I went on a hormonal birth control for him, something that I’d refused to do for any other partner I’ve had. Including my ex-husband. But even though we’d previously talked about that and he’d literally thanked me for doing that for him, this time he seemed to be freaking out that I was trying to express what he meant to me. I’ll probably never know what he was actually thinking in those moments, because it turns out that conversation wasn’t even the reason that he wound up ghosting me again like I had assumed. Like, all this time, I’d thought maybe he’d been offended I was coming across like I thought he’d put me at risk of STDs, or that he wanted to sleep around when actually he didn’t. One of the things I wanted to talk to him about (and never had the chance to say) was how I later realised that STD comment came from a place of trauma I’d experienced in my past that I really didn’t want to deal with again rather than anything specifically that I got from him. (But if anyone’s curious, yes I did get myself tested after sleeping with him on both trips since we hadn’t had that conversation and no I don’t plan on having sex without condoms in the future).

When Lee didn’t kiss me goodbye at the airport, it had felt to me like he’d decided things were over between us, not me. I was still standing in front of him, mask off, hoping he would kiss me goodbye, and he didn’t. He just gave me an enormously long hug instead. Then he told me to message him when I got back home. I walked through security and looked for him, thinking he would’ve already left, but did catch his eye and saw him wave at me.

After we parted ways, I made this post on Facebook, along with a photo he took of me at lunch:

I intentionally wrote this post in a way that I didn’t think anyone would think I was talking about Lee. After all, I didn’t tell any of my Malaysian friends, except the friend who’d read my previous blog post and told me about it, that the reason I was coming back was because I was involved with someone there. I still put in some effort to see other friends and posted pictures with them so I wasn’t giving the impression I was there primarily because I was getting laid, because Lee was still uncomfortable with people knowing about us. I mean, just a few days earlier he’d gone silent on me when I told him about a couple of our friends had figured out he was the person I’d written about in my blog! You can’t blame me for staying quiet about us when he was like that, because I for sure as anything wanted to talk non-stop about how much I enjoyed being with him. So, I naturally assumed that anyone reading that Facebook post would think it was about missing being able to spend time with friends in Malaysia because my future was uncertain given circumstances that had arose while I was in Malaysia in January.

Frankly, in my mind, that post was primarily about how pissed off I was that my ex-husband had gotten himself into a situation in Australia that was likely to have a strong impact on what kind of future I could have, with or without Lee in my life, because it seemed likely it would impact child support and whether or not he’d be around to look after our kids so I could continue to travel to Malaysia in order to see Lee. I was upset, because I genuinely wanted a future with him and I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to make that happen anymore. Before my ex-husband had interrupted that trip back, I was sure I’d be able to make things work. In the ten days I’d been back in KL, I’d gotten a taste of the life I wanted with Lee and I wished wholeheartedly that it could continue, but I didn’t know how we could make things work, given the circumstances that had presented themselves, when we didn’t live in the same city and he refused to take me up on my offers to fly him out to the US (and it would’ve been much easier for me to do that than it is for me to fly out there). I desperately wanted to be living in the same city as him, and it seemed most logical to me to bring him out to the US, not just because I have kids and couldn’t so easily relocate, but also because he’s a stand-up comedian in Malaysia and he’s more likely to make something of himself in that career path in the US, especially given that he’s talked about wanting to make it big in the US. Why not take advantage of the fact you have a woman who can help you make that happen? It seemed unlikely that he’d find a local girl who’d so willingly support his career path.

Anyhow, I have since, however, learned that it was this Facebook post that triggered him into ghosting me after I left Malaysia. This post that hadn’t even been on my radar in the realm of possibilities of something that might’ve triggered him that it took me running into him in person and talking to him three times in order for me to get the details out of him so I could try to process and understand what happened. It’s no wonder that I walked on eggshells, worried about accidentally saying something that would bother him and having him disappear on me again. I shouldn’t be that scared that someone I love and am involved with, even if there isn’t explicit commitment yet, is going to disappear like that. But that’s how sensitive I knew he was, and there was a point in my life where I felt like he was worth sticking by him through that for. After all, we’d been able to have vulnerable conversations. It turns out it’s a lot easier for me to have those conversations with him when we’re not sleeping together and I’m not scared I’m going to lose him.

But let’s take a step back before I go into the details as to how I learned what happened. As much as my brain told me to just let go of Lee after the airport and not message him, believing he’d ended things between us, I forced myself to message him when I got home, like he’d asked. He read the message but he didn’t reply. Despite my fear, I made a few attempts to reach out to him and connect in the interim months, whilst trying to avoid being needy, clingy, or blaming him. I tried to show him compassion and let him know how much my time with him had meant to me. Aside from the messages I sent just after I got home, the rest went unread. I reached a point of realising that the only way I’d be able to resolve things and find out what happened was if I could figure out how to go back to Malaysia again and see him face-to-face.

Meanwhile, I was absolutely heartbroken and pretending not to be cut up about it by not sharing anything on Facebook because I didn’t want Lee to know how much I was missing him, if he was still looking at my Facebook. I also didn’t want anyone else to figure out what was going on because I was a) hoping I could fix things and b) trying to avoid hearing “I told you so” from any of my friends who might’ve been concerned about me getting back together with him after he’d already ghosted me once before. I didn’t want them to be right.

Additionally, my Google Home in conjunction with YouTube Music were torturing me by playing songs that made me think it was the universe’s way of telling me how much Lee was missing me, what he was feeling, stuff like that. I got so pissed off from it one weekend that I wound up getting back into performing stand-up comedy after an almost ten-year break (I never performed it again after moving to California) just to get out of the house and away from the music. I literally signed up for an open mic a few hours before it started, even though I hadn’t written any concrete material yet, and wrote, practised, and performed the heck out of that set in about three hours. Lee might’ve influenced me into getting back into performing stand-up comedy twice, in two different ways, but you can’t deny the impact he’s had on my life. A part of me also thought, if we’d be able to reconcile, even if only as friends, and he came out here, then I’d know more about the SF Bay Area comedy scene by then and could help him even more (and I do now, and I could). I wound up doing open mics with almost entirely different sets about once a week for several weeks in a row in the lead up to heading back to Malaysia again.

So now let’s get to my most recent trip back to Malaysia, which I started trying to plan almost as soon as I got home again because, like I said, once Lee went silent on me, I was pretty sure the only way I could either fix things or find clarity for what happened would be to fly back again. Situation with my ex-husband be damned, I loved Lee and I needed better closure than whatever the fuck happened at the airport, even if it meant we were still over. I wasn’t going to let my ex-husband’s situation or Lee’s silence stand in the way of what I had already wanted to do before I was in KL in January, and that was to be able to go back again for a longer period of time while working remotely. Genuinely I had asked my manager if that was something I could do sometime back in November or December, because that’s how serious I was about making things work with Lee. By mid-March I had managed to figure out the best time for me to visit to maximise the amount of time I could stay there for (two weeks and two days, excluding travel time) whilst also finding a couple of people who could look after both of my kids the entire time I was away. A feat I thought would’ve been impossible back in January but I am stubborn and I wasn’t going to wait another nine fucking years to find out what the fuck happened this time. I wasn’t going to just roll over and take his silence and move on so easily like I did ten years ago.

I know most people would handle the situation differently and plenty of people had given me the advice to just take the silence to mean I should move on. But history had taught me before that Lee ghosting me didn’t mean he stopped caring about me, it just meant he was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to handle things, then regretted his behaviour and didn’t know how to make things right because he felt too much shame and guilt for it. There was a distinct possibility the same was true this time, but I wouldn’t know for sure one way or another unless I flew out there and could see in Lee’s face what he was actually dealing with.

By the time I got on the plane, my best-case scenario was hoping to salvage our friendship. I knew I couldn’t rekindle the romance because I knew through his handling of this situation that he was incapable of being what I needed in a relationship. (Although my therapist would tell you, if it didn’t violate patient-therapist confidentiality, that he totally still had a chance with me, had we been able to work through a list I’d made of the things we needed to discuss in order for that to happen). But I still hoped our friendship meant something to him like it did me. After all, that had all I’d been hoping to get when I flew to Malaysia last September, before I had any reason to think he might still be attracted to me.

I was terrified, though. The first chance I could’ve seen him would’ve been a show he produced the Tuesday after I arrived, but as much as a part of me wanted to go, I had already been offered an open mic spot that same night and I for sure as anything had to prioritise my own opportunities. That open mic was likely going to be the only chance I had to perform while I was in town.

I had a few friends come see me perform at the open mic and had tried to get others to join, but two of them ended up at Lee’s show instead, so I’d talked to them about maybe getting together with them at a mamak afterwards instead. I didn’t know if that would mean potentially running into Lee until my open mic finished before Lee’s show, and the friend who drove me agreed to drive us to the other venue so we could check in about after-show activities there. But I was so scared of seeing Lee that I waited in a car while my friends went to see whether or not we’d hang out with some other comedians that night. Eventually I got tired of waiting in the car and got out and was at least able to say hi and chat with comedian friends I didn’t have any concerns about. But the night reached a point where he ended up standing right in front of me and to my surprise, he spoke to me. “Hi Dom, when did you get in?” he asked. “Saturday,” I replied, and at that point froze. It was Tuesday so I had already been there three days. I had thought the fact he spoke to me could be a good sign, but it could’ve just as easily been saving face because he didn’t want mutual friends to see that things were awkward between us after the fact that we had been obviously spending a decent amount of time together in January. It had seemed like he would join us for the mamak afterwards, so I figured I’d leave it there and see what happens at the mamak. He ended up not joining for that, which put me in a more deeply awkward place again, but I already knew I had plans to see him perform at two different shows before I left, so there’d be other opportunities, and probably easier to try and talk to him at the one where no one else there knew who I was.

Three days later, I travelled up to Penang to see him perform. Still terrified, but I wasn’t going to chicken out. I needed to fix the friendship or I needed closure. I didn’t tell anyone who knew him and the situation that I was planning to do this because I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of it. Yes, I knew how ridiculous I was being but ultimately, I had to do this for myself. Regardless of whatever happened, I’d at least get a story out of it that I could use creatively. My history and relationship with Lee have, after all, sparked many creative endeavours in my life and already I was crediting this latest disappearance as the reason I flung myself back into performing stand-up comedy. With no intended disrespect to Lee, a decent amount of my new content was inspired by or directly related to my making a host of ridiculous decisions because of my connection to him.

I at least had decided I was going to use this opportunity to stay in Penang for a couple of days, so regardless of what happened with him, I’d have had a mini-vacation within this trip and do some sightseeing on my own, something I hadn’t really had time for on my previous two trips back to Malaysia. I’d booked a room at the hotel he was performing at because it was decently priced and seemed easier to deal with, and all the while I kept thinking “I’m either a stalker or a movie character, but the only way to know which I am is how he reacts.” Honestly, if he’d just sent me a simple message of “Dominica, leave me alone” I would’ve taken that and moved on. How hard is that to say? Anyway, checking into that hotel scared me because I was worried that I’d run into him before the show and I didn’t want to disturb him beforehand. I know how I get with needing my space before I perform and he’s generally like that too. I went out only to get char kway teow for dinner, then came back to my hotel room to chill out before it seemed late enough to go downstairs for the show.

He saw me immediately and I waved, which he turned away from, and I immediately felt like this had been a bad idea, but I was there now and I’d paid for my ticket so I was going to follow through. I got myself checked in and found somewhere to sit for the show.

After the show, I looked for an opportunity to talk to Lee, but he had been talking to someone else for a long time and I didn’t want to interrupt. So, I wound up meeting the Penang comedians in the show, who asked me how I knew about it and I mentioned that I knew Lee, and talked about how I also did stand-up comedy and used to live in KL. At that point those guys seemed to be cool with me (and I had also been picked out in the audience by one of them during the show, getting roasted for being a white American only to end up getting a round of applause from the audience when I admitted to eating char kway teow for dinner).

Whilst it had been clear that Lee was trying to avoid me, I did eventually find a moment to talk to him. I started casual by bringing up mutual interests, talked about the stand-up comedy I’d been seeing, and mentioned my recent job promotion – I knew that this was not the setting for the conversation I wanted to have. I told him about how terrified I’d been to come up there, but still did it anyway, and he got to the point of saying something along the lines of, “I guess I’ll just tell you what it was that bothered me, it was that heavy Facebook post you made right after you left.” I felt like I was hit with a ton of bricks because, as I described earlier, this Facebook post had not even been in the realm of possibilities to me for something that might’ve been triggering for him. It was going to take me some time to process that. I must’ve asked him some questions about it or commented on me having no idea that would’ve impacted him, because I’d genuinely thought it had more to do with the airport conversation, but I got to the point of recognising it was too much to cover in that moment and said, “This is not the place for us to have this conversation, but I would like to talk about this more before I leave Malaysia, if you’re open to it.” I don’t remember at what point I asked him this, but I did ask him if he could be open to staying friends connected through comedy, and he replied that he could be open to it. I knew it didn’t necessarily mean right there and then, but it gave me hope that we could have what I was looking for.

When the other comedians started talking about heading out for food and drinks after the show, at that point I’d felt like there was a kind of expectation from the Penang comedians that I’d probably be joining, but I respectfully first asked Lee how he felt about me tagging along, and told him I wouldn’t go if he didn’t want me there. He indicated it was okay for me to join. I guess here’s where things may be murky because I’m autistic. Yes, there are some visual cues I can pick up on when things are awkward, but not always and Lee can be very good at masking when he’s uncomfortable, so I took his words at face value and joined. He acted fine throughout the night, we were able to chat like old times, or at least it felt like that for me. We went in the same Grab car to get to the food stalls, and we sat next to each other while we were out. He paid for my drinks, which I thanked him for, and he commented on it being one of his “acts of service.” When it came time to leave, his other friend had said she left her car near the hotel, so we joined her in a Grab to get back there together. Once back at the hotel, he insisted on walking her to her car and I assumed that would be that, I’d go back up to my room on my own, but he indicated for me to join them. So, we walked her to her car and got a little extra time to talk one-on-one.

When we got to the lift, we discovered that not only were we staying in the same hotel, but also the same floor. At that point I commented on how even more risky it was that I could have run into him before the show, and thank goodness that didn’t happen. And this is where things got a bit weird and hard for me to read again. As we stood together on the 18th floor, him ready to go into his room, talking about needing some sleep because he had a long drive back to KL the next day, and I took that at face value too, but there was a pause, a linger, and a part of me wondered if he had wanted to see if I’d offer to hook up again, or if it was something he wanted. I’d thought about asking if he wanted to talk more in one of our rooms, but I knew how dangerous an idea that was because, privately, hormones have the chance of taking over, and I’d already decided I couldn’t sleep with him again unless we were able to resolve a number of issues, which still seemed unlikely, so I wasn’t going to entertain that. As I walked to my room, he called back to me that he’d try to organise getting together to have that conversation I wanted once we were both back in KL. I replied something to the effect of, “I hope I can trust that.”

I stayed in Penang another couple of days for sightseeing, meanwhile getting hit on by someone I met at the show who had no idea about my history with Lee. I outright told him I wasn’t interested in hooking up, I’m at a point in my life where I’m only going to entertain someone who’s also looking for something serious and I can’t really do that with someone who lives in Penang. But I was flattered by his attention so I still spent some time hanging out with him while I stayed there, it was a nice distraction from the heavy crap I was dealing with, with Lee. He joined me to see Furiosa on my last night in Penang and called it a date, but I didn’t see it as one. Whatever, it’s nice to be in a place in my life now where I have people who want to get with me and I’m the one turning them down because it’s not what I want. Strange things happen when you fill yourself with self-confidence because your life has become a moderate success.

When I got back to KL, I sent Lee a WhatsApp message. While I was in Penang, I’d noticed that he had actually opened our WhatsApp conversation after I sent him pictures from the show—the first time he opened our WhatsApp conversation since just after I got home from KL in January. I’d thought, maybe that’s a good sign he’ll actually follow through? But when I didn’t hear back, I just made plans with other people for the next couple of nights before the next show he was doing that I had a ticket for. I wasn’t going to waste my time waiting around for him when I had other people in KL who did want to spend time with me.

Showing up at the next show he was doing, I didn’t talk to him when I arrived. I had other friends who were performing so I said hi and talked to them. Then I sat down and took my seat. It wasn’t until after the show that we talked, and I could be remembering this wrong, but he seemed to speak to me first, which made it easier for me to actually converse with him. When we would go days without communicating, that’s when my anxiety starts to spike, so it’s generally soothing when he then communicates first. I asked about whether or not there’d be a mamak afterwards and he indicated yes, then I asked him if I could get a ride with him, and he agreed to drive me. I have experienced him having clear boundaries and saying no to me when he didn’t want to do something, so I had no reason to think he wouldn’t say no if he really didn’t want to drive me. Of course, at that point that night we hadn’t discussed anything heavy.

As he drove me to the mamak, the conversation flowed and felt natural. He told me things about his family and I asked him questions about things that he’d been doing. Then I drifted back to that Facebook post to pose the question on my mind that had come up once I’d had time to think about and process it. “Can I ask, what was it about that post that bothered you? Because I really have no idea.” That’s when he told me that he interpreted it to mean the “two weeks [it was actually only ten days] we spent together meant nothing to [me].” Hold the fuck up, what? I’d flown halfway around the world to be with him for those days, how could they have meant nothing to me? I was flabbergasted. I had so much I wanted to say but again, I didn’t feel like that was really the right time or place to have that conversation. So I fumbled through some more “I got scared” and “I self-sabotaged” type comments until we arrived at the mamak. Before we left the car, I asked him if he’d also give me a ride back to where I was staying in TTDI, and he said he could as it would be on his way home.

We didn’t sit next to each other at the mamak due to where everyone else was already seated and where there were seats available, but he did try an American chocolate I brought when I was sharing them around, and again paid for my drink before we left. Before he dropped me off at the apartment I was staying in, he agreed to meet me for a late lunch on Friday afternoon, after I finished my half-day Friday workday (I had been working remotely during this trip, after all), and that we would have that conversation. He promised me he would message me to organise the details.

I didn’t reach out to him until Friday rolled around and I hadn’t heard from him. I tried calling him, to no avail. I was so pissed off that he didn’t even have the decency to let me know he was cancelling, because I’d originally planned on going to get a massage that afternoon until he made plans with me that I thought he was going to keep. At that point, in my mind, I was like, “I am so fucking done now. I have one more show I’m going to that he’s in, and at that point I am just going to have to confront him and get the fucking closure I need so I can move on with my life.” That night I’d had plans to catch a movie with a friend who was aware of why I was back in KL and some of what I was dealing with, so when I let him know that I’d been blown off, he offered for us to just get together for dinner and talk the night away instead of seeing the movie, because I clearly needed some comfort and someone to vent to. I revealed a shit ton of information that night that this friend hadn’t been privy to prior to that, most of which was all the positive stuff about why Lee had mattered so much to me and how I didn’t understand what was going on, how he could think that last trip didn’t mean anything to me. This friend didn’t understand either. We could speculate all we wanted, and he came up with another idea I hadn’t thought of before, like, “Had he wanted me to write on Facebook how much that trip meant to me? How could I have known that, when all indication had been that he preferred when I didn’t talk about us?” I avoided sharing any of the photos of just the two of us during that trip on social media so that people wouldn’t speculate. I totally would’ve shared them if I thought he would’ve been okay with it. In the end, my friend helped me by asking how I would handle things when I saw him at the show the following night so I could figure out a plan of attack to get the closure I needed, Lee’s feelings be damned. I asked him to join me for moral support because I really needed it at that point, and he agreed to take me but also play oblivious. No one wanted to get in the middle of things as they played out, and that was my preference anyway. This was on Lee and me to sort out.

By the time the show started on Saturday night, I hadn’t seen Lee show up yet and I was convinced he bailed on the show, that’s how much he was afraid of confrontation from me—after all, this time I had told him in advance that I would be there. It wasn’t until he was announced on stage that I discovered he was actually there. He could’ve bounced after his set, but he stuck around until the end of the night so I did eventually get the opportunity to have that confrontation. It would’ve been easier if I hadn’t had to do it somewhat in front of other people who knew us, but he left me with no other choice. I at least waited until no one was actually talking to him and he was on his own to ask, “So, what happened yesterday?”

“I didn’t want to talk,” he said.

“You couldn’t even tell me you were going to cancel, though? I had other things I could’ve been doing with my time instead of waiting around for you. That’s not fair on me.”

“I didn’t want to talk.”

Too bad. Fuck his feelings. It’s not like he cared about mine. I essentially strongarmed him into staying to talk to me. Could he have walked away? Yeah, probably, but he didn’t, so he must’ve figured I needed to get things off my chest in order to get rid of me for good. I told him that from my perspective, it had felt like he was the one of us who was acting like our time together in January meant nothing. I’m the one who flew all the way there to try and fix things, that’s how much it mattered to me.

But I also said a bunch of things that up until then I had avoided because I was still trying to be a considerate person, but he needed to know that if that conversation didn’t happen, I was going to be processing things via my blog instead, and I didn’t think he’d like how I handled that (we did at least reach a point at the end that, even though I had been able to say most of what I needed to say, I probably still needed to blog about it too, and he understood that about me, which is why he was able to tell me I didn’t need his permission to do what I needed to do and share what I needed to share, including pictures). He asked me if I realised how awful it was for me to try and use that as a threat (I’m paraphrasing, I don’t remember the actual words) and I said yeah, I did, but I’d rather he hate me for something I intentionally chose to do to hurt him rather than something I didn’t mean to do. His only response to that was “Wow.” I acknowledged that he’d never seen that side of me, he’d never seen me when I’m angry. Does some of this paint him in a bad light? Sure, but I think I’m also painting myself in a bad light with how far I went to make this happen. Neither or us are heroes or villains, we’re just two people hurting who haven’t had the best approaches to reach a resolution.

So, what all came up during the conversation? I can’t tell you the order of everything because there was so much to take in that my memories of it are more like flashes than chronological. I told him, “Listen, I’ll leave you alone for good if you just tell me that’s what you want.” He admitted, “You’re right, you don’t deserve this.” I think that’s one of the reasons he stayed. He also told me that was what he wanted.

I had another question about the Facebook post. I really wanted to understand where he was coming from with his interpretation of it. He explained that he had been concerned also about how those friends who knew about us would read the post. I insisted that I thought he was the only person who would’ve interpreted the post the way he did (something I didn’t think to say at the time but is true is that the friend who’d figured out I was with him on the last trip, and one of only two friends who knew of our situation who potentially could’ve interpreted it that way, and who I’d messaged around the same time I made that post something like “I think I accidentally ended things with Lee” sent me pictures of him performing months later, clearly thinking we’d have worked things out by then). He got upset, “Are you saying I’m wrong?” clearly not wanting to believe he was wrong. He added, “This is why I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to hear your excuses, your explanations,” so I gave up trying to talk about the post from my perspective and focused on other stuff. He explained that he had been so deeply cut by that post that he couldn’t see a way back to how things were before that. It was only then that I realised just how much he’d actually felt for me, because he’d never bothered to tell me. At that point, the stuff I had wanted to talk about flew out the window and I reverted back to the lovestruck puppy who thought, if only he knew what I’d actually been trying to say, maybe we could still fix things. I explained that what I’d actually wanted was a committed relationship with him. I explained that that trip had meant the world to me, and he’d genuinely showed me a relationship experience I hadn’t even known I could have or even think to ask for. Even if we had no future, I felt like he needed to know that. I don’t think it helped, but at least I tried.

I told him that these issues are just going to follow us into our future relationships if we don’t deal with them. He seemed to think we’d still be able to find people it’s easier to deal with this stuff with. Maybe, maybe not. Relationships are inherently triggering and you need to be with someone you can trust to help you through those triggers. That was easier for me to do with him when we were able to see each other in person, but a lot harder to do long-distance. You need to be able to have tough conversations with a romantic partner. If he couldn’t handle having them with me—one of the few people he’s been able to get vulnerable with—then what hope does he have in future relationships?

He told me that he’d ultimately reached the conclusion that our communication styles are too different that we just weren’t compatible on that front. We deal with things differently. I need to talk things out, he needs to be private and work through things on his own. That’s a legitimate and fair point and one I can see myself. But holy cow, if he was the kind of person who could’ve talked to one of our mutual friends who knew about us (which, granted, in January was all of 3 because I hadn’t updated anyone else who’d known about us prior to that), I’m sure they would’ve told him he was wrong about that Facebook post and I obviously loved him even if I hadn’t said that to him again yet. I can’t help thinking about how he chose to shut down and break his own fucking heart because he made up a story in his head and that felt more right to him than to just reach out and talk to me to ask for clarification.

There were many times I felt like, damn, maybe we just shouldn’t have slept together again, at least then we could’ve retained the friendship I’d originally wanted back. And I did ask him if he felt like he could stay friends, but he said he could not. He said it was too painful for him to even look at me because it just brings back memories he doesn’t want to think about. My heart breaks at that. He used to look at me like I was the only woman in the world he wanted to be with, and now he can’t even look at me without hurting. I asked him if thought he could change his mind after he’s had time to process tonight. He said he wouldn’t.

I told him I can’t go anywhere in KL now without being reminded of him. Like when I went to KLCC earlier that day, I had the option of eating at the sushi restaurant chain we had gone to together at Sunway Pyramid. I actually almost went, but went to a Thai place next door instead. I didn’t describe all the situations, but it’s true. Having another friend seeing me off at KLIA1 this time, he left me at the same place Lee had back in September, and my mind was flooded with the memory of Lee kissing me goodbye right there, and then sadly looking at me from above as I went down the escalator. There was a show I went to on this trip (that he wasn’t performing at) in Damansara Uptown, and I was dropped off in the area early, and immediately recognised it as an area he had taken me. I wound up walking into the Drop By Vapor store we visited together as a result. The middle show I saw him performing at was right by where we were my last night in KL in January. I was walking down the same roads we were then, remembering when it started raining and he pulled me close under his umbrella. I walked past the restaurant we ate at that night, and took a picture of it for my memory. But I guess, unlike him, I don’t want to forget.

I told him that I’d spent the last few months reading up on things for how to communicate with him better. I wasn’t specific, but I’d read Secure Love by Julie Menanno to better understand how to communicate when attachment styles clash and Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg (while I was on this trip) so I could try and speak in a more understanding and less triggering way. I’d been following Instagram and Threads accounts that help me understand how to better handle difficult situations in relationships, stemming from attachment-styles or otherwise.

I asked him about social media. Told him that by staying connected to me on social media, it seemed like he wasn’t letting go of me. He said no. He said he had let go. That was what I needed to hear in order for me to cut ties with him on social media. Once I got back to the apartment I was staying in that night, I unfriended and unfollowed him everywhere on social media. If he wasn’t going to do it, it had to be up to me. I could have made him unfollow me on the platforms that don’t automatically do mutual unfollowing/unfriending, but I decided to leave that for him to deal with himself if he wanted. So far I’ve only noticed he unfollowed my secret Instagram account, which I’ll be honest, cut me, because that was the one account he had access to that was more intimate. I’ve been back and forth since then, wondering if I made the right call to sever those ties, but this was his decision and I don’t know how to live with the pain. I also archived our WhatsApp conversation at the same time I severed those social media ties; he hadn’t looked at the last few messages I’d sent again. I’ve since clicked on the Archived folder and noticed he had gotten around to opening our conversation again, but I can’t let myself read anything into it. I have to just trust everything he said to me in person, that he was done and he can’t have anything to do with me anymore.

I asked him, “If I come back to Malaysia again, will you want me to avoid any shows that you’re in?” He replied, “No, I’m not like that, I won’t make you do that. I just won’t talk to you if you do.” I’m still processing how I feel about that. Because as much as I enjoy watching him perform, I think it would feel weird for me to go to a show he’s doing, knowing our history, and have him completely avoid me.

I apologised for hurting him and he told me I didn’t need to do that. I was like, “I am though. I may not have intentionally hurt you but I still did it and I’m sorry for that.” I asked him if there was really nothing I could do to make things right, and he said there’s really not.

The last thing I said to him before he said, “Come on, let’s go,” was “I’ll miss you.” He walked me out to our mutual friend who’d driven me there and came with me for moral support. He told our friend to take care of me, and left it at that. We parted ways for good.

To sum up… even as Lee has shared with me how he interpreted that Facebook post to mean that the ten days we spent together meant nothing to me, I struggle to understand why, because to me all the evidence pointed to it and him meaning a great deal to me. Why would I fly halfway around the world for a situationship, just to hook up with one guy who hadn’t even offered me commitment? I could find a situationship in San Francisco if that’s all I really wanted. Heck, I was offered regular casual sex with a former hook up shortly after I got back from KL in January. I turned him down because a) I wasn’t looking for something casual and b) I still had hope I could sort things out with Lee. I didn’t want to jeopardise that just because I was hurting. So, the only explanation I can think of for why Lee interpreted the Facebook post the way he did is because of his struggles with depression, and the capital D Depression lied to him about what he meant to me. He struggled with insecurity and feeling like he wasn’t good enough for me and didn’t feel like he could give me what I needed in the relationship (something he brought up again during this final conversation, which I acknowledged I had noticed, and also knew that it didn’t matter what I said to try to tell him otherwise, I couldn’t help him with that). So, through a depression lens I guess I can see how that post might come across as me saying I didn’t care about him or what we had. I was, after all, intentionally vaguebooky, but that had been primarily because I was under the impression that he still didn’t want me talking about us really at all, and I’d felt like he shut down and was ending things at the airport, even though I’d instigated that conversation.

But this part? “In a different timeline, maybe I could have a life I chose 100%. Leaving Malaysia has always been hard, but never this much. Sometimes we have to just make do with what limited options we have available to us – make the most out of the time we have. I don’t regret anything from my vacation, but that doesn’t mean that getting a taste of another life doesn’t hurt when it’s gone.” This was all about how everything I got from Lee in those ten days were the life I wanted and wished I could have, and it sucked that things outside of my control prevented me from being able to have that life. What sucks even more now is that in the interim four months, I got promoted with a pay raise that would effectively likely ensure that my income would at least stay the same no matter how much child support was reduced, but I can’t have known that was coming at the time.

Looking back on things now though, I acknowledge that it seems he was right about not being able to give me what I needed in the relationship, because what I needed was someone who wouldn’t disappear on me when things got tough, or when he thought something upsetting about me. I needed someone who would come and talk to me to gain clarity in those moments, so we could figure things out together. I needed someone I felt like I could talk about and not have to worry about how he’d react to it, someone I didn’t have to keep private. I deserved that. I wanted him to publicly celebrate being with me, too. Show me off. And I needed someone who was brave enough to tell me how he actually felt about me. And that was too much to ask for from him, given how things turned out. I think at this point, given our history, nothing short of a giant romcom gesture from him and a promise to try harder in these areas would be able to make me feel like we had a shot together again, and I know that’s not going to happen. He’s said he can’t go back. So I have to move on.

It still sucks that our friendship, our relationship, was destroyed over what I feel like was a misunderstanding, but as a good friend said to me, if it wasn’t this, it would’ve been something else later on down the road. If someone is committed to misunderstanding you, and won’t reach out to clarify things, you can’t build a relationship on that. I recognised my anxiety had been making assumptions about what he wanted, and once I realised that, I tried to seek clarity and understanding instead. It’s unfortunate that I was too late by that point, because Lee was already spiralling over thinking our time together meant nothing to me, so he didn’t even want to read any of the messages I sent when I was trying to repair that rift in the most compassionate way possible.

Despite the fact he told me he doesn’t think he’ll change his mind about what he wants with me once he’s had time to process, I don’t really believe that. Once the pain of heartbreak has had more time to heal—I mean, it’s still fresh now, that was only around five months ago—the positive memories will start creeping back in a way that he won’t push away, because he no longer has the pressure of feeling like I want to stay connected. I’ll have walked away for good, because as much as I didn’t want to, that’s where I am now after our final conversation, so I can figure out how I need to heal. I believe this because it’s happened before. When he ghosted me ten years ago, he’d said I betrayed his trust. By the time we reconnected, he no longer felt that way, he’d been able to process and gave me the benefit of the doubt. So I think he’ll reach a point where he’ll realise he fucked up, and he’s never going to find someone else like me. It’s weird to me that even in all the anxiety I have felt from this relationship, and not knowing anything about any of his other previous partners, I am in a place where I feel confident that I’m the best woman he’s ever been able to get with, because I can’t imagine anyone else having as much in common as we have, nor being as patient with him as I have been, nor as supportive of his career choice and having the ability to help him bounce ideas around. The number of times he took breaks from our conversations to make notes about jokes he wanted to work on were numerous, though I have no idea if he’ll ever actually use them. There were a couple I know he tried out back in December, but he told me it wasn’t a great open mic night so he couldn’t tell if the jokes were good or not. I started doing stand-up comedy about 12 years before he did, so I have a longer history of stories from the comedy scene that he’s enjoyed listening to. I’ve taught him so much about life and women, and he was able to open up to me about things he hadn’t shared with anyone else.

When I think about that, it makes sense how deeply cut up he would be to think I thought my time with him didn’t matter. When he told me how deep that ran, I told him I had no idea he felt that strongly for me because I was getting mixed messages from him. Now, though, this level of devastation feels like it could only mean he loved me as much as I loved him, we were just too fucking scared to tell each other, and that’s a tragedy. It’s got to be the worst possible way to find out someone was in love with you. But still suggests that we just weren’t ready for the kind of relationship we both implied we wanted.

It’s too late to repair anything now. I’ve accepted his decision to move on, so I’m going to work on processing this so I can learn from the experience and do better the next time I get involved with someone. He at least was able to help me define what I wanted in a relationship now. After my divorce, I was so set on being sure that I’d prefer being single for the rest of my life. I sure as anything didn’t want to get remarried. Lee reminded me what it’s like to actually be in love again, and I do want that kind of companionship.

It’s just too bad I couldn’t make it work with him. We both sabotaged this connection because of assumptions we let get the better of us. But it takes two people being willing to put in the effort to make things work and, at the end of the day, only I was willing to fight for this connection and gain clarity when we’d had a misunderstanding. I wish he’d felt the same way, and was willing to look past the voice in his head that told him he wasn’t good enough for me. Because I don’t easily let people in that close to me like I did him, and it felt like he couldn’t see that. This wasn’t about him not seeing my worth. At the very least I’d been able to process his latest ghosting as not being about how worthy I am. I knew it was about him and whatever he was dealing with. I knew how amazing he thought I was. And I think knowing what he was losing is one of the reasons he cut himself so deeply when he let himself believe the lies he told himself about how I felt. Why he can’t look at me without remembering those great times together.

In Conclusion

I think there will always be a part of me that loves Lee, but I understand why we didn’t work out. I’m glad I got the closure I needed to be able to move on with my life rather than living in hope that we might one day be together again, like the sliver of hope I’d kept tucked deep down inside me in the nine years we didn’t communicate with each other between 2014 and 2023. Even if I had to chase Lee down and drag it out of him.

That said, right now, I also feel like I’d be open to reconciling the friendship in the future if Lee ever realises he made a mistake too. I’m not going to pursue it, or hope for it, given the circumstances, but he knows how to find me and reach out if he changes his mind. I didn’t block him anywhere, just unfollowed and unfriended. I didn’t delete him from my contacts on WhatsApp, Discord, or my phone. Because I can’t forget the impact he’s had on my life. And I prefer to stay connected to the important men in my life that I’ve slept with, even if we didn’t work out romantically (heck, one of them has been emotionally supporting me a ton as I process all of this stuff).

Lee’s not going to read this blog post. He didn’t even read “Closure Encounter of the Ghosting Kind,” and that post was about 1/5th of the length of this one. So he won’t know that I spent over 9,000 words just writing about how much my ten days with him in January actually meant to me, and that I find it insulting that he could ever think that trip meant nothing to me. When I asked him in January if he found it overwhelming that I’d fly all the way to KL to be with him, he said yes. So, he’d be overwhelmed by this. He also told me that though he understood I could post whatever I wanted to my blog, he didn’t want to know about it, and he didn’t want me to tell him about it. He couldn’t handle how much I cared about him, because he didn’t think he deserved it. Which is why I held back as much as I did and never told him I was still in love with him until I regretted not saying it to him at the airport and tried to WhatsApp it to him, but by then it was too late. I don’t think I’d have written and shared this post if I had any hope of us ever reconciling, even as friends, knowing how he’s likely to feel about me sharing all this information about us. I’d still care about respecting his privacy about this relationship if I thought there was any chance of us getting back together again. He closed that door. This chapter feels closed.

I go back and forth on whether or not I regret sleeping with him again. If I hadn’t, I’m much less likely to have said something to accidentally trigger him, and we could’ve returned to being friends like I had originally wanted. On the other hand, he reminded me what it’s like to feel cared for and special from another person who is wholeheartedly attracted to me (physically and emotionally), and I loved back. Even if I don’t find another partner in the future, I’ll still have that. Ultimately, I’d felt like our relationship had been cut short when I had to move to California, so I was afforded a new opportunity to see how it played out to its natural conclusion. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently if we actually lived in the same city, but there’s no way to know that. It’s also helped me better define what I want in a relationship so I can be clearer with any potential partner in the future, when I’m ready to open myself up to someone new.

We’re all dealing with our own unhealed wounds and personal traumas. I don’t have any ill wishes toward Lee. I hope he’ll one day be able to find what he needs to be more secure in relationships and express himself better, but I probably made the right call to disconnect from him completely on social media because I don’t want to be around to see it. I know I’d be sad it’s not with me.

Friends who wish to say comforting words to me to help me through this—please avoid saying anything like “You dodged a bullet” or the like just because Lee hasn’t had the most mature way of handling things. You don’t know what he’s been through that caused him to be that way, and it’s not helpful to me. As angry as I’ve been that things ended this way, I don’t want to denigrate someone I loved as much as I loved Lee. I still have compassion for him, I’m still going to miss him and having him in my life. No one else gave a shit to hear from me in detail about all the stand-up comedians I was going to see last year. No one else paid as much attention to what was going on in my life. No one else taught me to love myself as much as Lee did, because his attraction toward everything I am was genuine. I wanted to be that person for him too. He just wasn’t ready to accept that.

I’m not just grieving the loss of Lee. I’m also grieving the loss of the future I wanted to have with him. The fairytale Hollywood story I’d built up in my mind. It’s going to take time to work through all of that.

When Lee disappeared on me ten years ago, I let that affect my friendships with all of my Malaysian friends. I distanced myself from everyone there. That’s not going to happen this time. It’ll probably still be a while before I’m able to make it back to Malaysia again, but it’s not going to be another nine years like before. I have friendships there that are now stronger than ever, and Lee can’t take that away from me. Some of those friends have intentions to come out and visit me in California, too.

One final thought/lesson: don’t stick your dick in a writer/stand-up comedian, let them fall in love with you, and then treat them poorly/disrespect them by disappearing on them instead of handling things maturely with a conversation to clarify things if you’re not prepared for them to write about it or channel it creatively. Especially not one who has a memory like I do. I originally wrote about my January trip months ago, but I waited to give Lee a chance to step up and place his ego aside so we could handle things better, in the hope I’d gain better perspective. And whilst I got that perspective, and was able to accept where I’d been wrong about things, the fact he couldn’t admit he might’ve also been wrong about things meant that I still needed to write about my experience in order to let go and move on. Because Lee doesn’t get to decide my narrative. He doesn’t get to decide how I actually felt about the time I spent with him in January. I do. This is my story. And Lee meant the world to me.