I remember when I was much younger, I used to date a guy who relied on me for half of his life. Not because he had no money. For a college student, I thought he was doing pretty well. We were together for three and a half years, and God knows how much I spent on him. I remember paying for our Coldplay concert in Singapore, which I eventually failed to attend. I remember how it felt when I found out he was still planning to go with my friends, using the flights and hotel booked with my money knowing I wasn’t going. Perhaps even today, he still works at a job my parents helped him get. Back then, we called it 'maybe it's his luck,' and never looked back.

Ever since then, I promised myself I would never spend ridiculous amounts of money on someone who couldn't bring himself to spend anything on me. Eventually, I met people who understood that generosity went both ways. We bought each other gifts, paid for trips, and did things simply because we wanted to. We stopped calculating.

I remember dating men who bought me designer bags and booked first-class flights before I had even said I loved them. I still left them, because I couldn't give the things they needed. I couldn't love them. Somewhere along the way, I learned that money couldn't buy affection, but I also learned how beautiful it felt when generosity came naturally. 

Perhaps that was why I thought I had figured it out. I knew I could take care of myself. I knew I didn't need a man to fund my life. I simply wanted to be with someone who understood that taking care of another person could be one of the quiet pleasures of being together.

Then recently, someone came all the way to my country. To meet me, he said.

I know he was never really my type. Perhaps that was what made me curious about him in the first place. He wasn't someone I would ordinarily have imagined myself with, but I thought that maybe, given enough time, I could have learned to like him. Perhaps he could have shown me things I had never thought to look for in another person. Perhaps, somewhere between his stories and my laughter, I could have found a reason to stay. And I think I was willing to try. 

I enjoyed his company. We spent days exploring the island, talking, laughing, and sharing little moments that I genuinely liked. I liked listening to him talk about the things he cared about. I liked having someone around. But somewhere between the conversations and the afternoons, I began to feel that I was trying to make room for a kind of romance he had never quite offered me. I had to ask him to take me on a date. When we finally went to one of my favorite Italian restaurants, he looked at the menu and told me it was too expensive. We eventually ate somewhere else that night.

It wasn't the restaurant. I could afford the meal. I could afford my own flights, and my own life. We had agreed that I would pay for the car rentals and he would cover my meals. Yet, somehow, we ended up splitting everything, even the water I drank.

You're right. I paid for my own water. On a trip with someone who said he’s coming to meet me. Such a small thing, isn't it? Almost embarrassing to admit that something so insignificant could leave such an impression. But it wasn't the price of the bottle. It was the feeling that even the smallest gestures had to be accounted for, that everything between us had to be divided so carefully that I began to wonder what, exactly, we were sharing.

Perhaps this will make me sound materialistic. Perhaps he, or anyone reading this, can call me that, and perhaps, in some ways, I am. I may not be the prettiest woman on earth, but I have always been an all-or-nothing kind of girl. I can be intense at times, I know that. But there is one thing I am fairly confident about, and it is that I know how to give all my love. When I love someone, I will always make sure that our table is never empty.

I don't always want to go to a fancy Italian restaurant to prove to the world that I can afford to sit in one. I work. I make my own money. I know what it takes to build a life in which I can afford the things I want without having to ask anyone for them. And I don't see anything wrong with wanting a man who can provide, either. Not because I am incapable of providing for myself, but because I don't believe that being capable of doing everything alone means I should never want someone to do something for me.

I could afford the meals, the flights, the car, and everything else I agreed to spend money on. That was never the question. But if a man asked me on a trip, if he wanted my company enough to travel all that way to see me, and I still found myself paying for my own bottle of water, I couldn't help wondering what that might look like if we stayed together for years. If we built a life, shared a home, grew older, and somehow never broke up, would I still have to ask for the smallest things? Would everything always have to be divided so carefully, even when we had spent years learning how to share a life?

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous to wonder about a future over a bottle of water. But I have lived long enough to know that the little things don't always remain little. Sometimes, they become habits. Sometimes, the habits become the way two people live together. And sometimes, the things we dismiss at the beginning are the very things we find ourselves living with years later.

I wasn't asking him to give me everything. I was trying to understand what it might feel like to build something with him, and whether I would have to keep explaining why I wanted to feel taken care of, too. I didn't need him to pay for my life. I wanted to feel that someone who had travelled all that way to meet me actually wanted to take me out. I wanted him to choose a place, make a plan, and let me enjoy an evening without having to explain why I wanted one.

I wanted to feel considered.

Perhaps that was what disappointed me most. He wanted the closeness of something romantic, but I couldn't understand why I had to explain the care that would make that closeness feel welcome. And when I finally told him I would rather we remain platonic friends, he said he was sorry he had failed me.

I remember thinking, Why does he want to succeed me, honestly?

I had never asked him to compete with the men who came before him. I didn't need designer bags or expensive dinners. I wasn't asking him to prove that he could afford me. I was trying to find out whether we knew how to care for each other in ways that felt natural, whether there was room for me in his thoughts without having to ask for it.

Perhaps he was trying in the only ways he knew how. Perhaps we simply understood consideration differently. I don't know. But somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling that he wanted to discover me as much as I wanted to discover him. And I wish he had known that I was still learning him. That I hadn't decided who he was to me yet. That there was still room for him to surprise me, to make me laugh, to make me want another afternoon, another conversation, another reason to see him again.

He could have made me like him.

I will remember how passionately he talked about watches, how he taught me that when we look at the stars, we are looking into the past. I will remember his love for owls, the way he taught me to take pictures, and all the little things he told me about himself that I might otherwise have never known. For a little while, I got to see the world through his eyes, and I think there was something beautiful about that.

I could have liked him. That is the part I find difficult to explain. I wasn't mourning a great love, nor was I losing someone I had already decided to spend my life with. I was saying goodbye to a possibility. To someone I was curious about, someone I might have grown fond of, someone who could have become more if only we had met each other a little differently.

And yet, I would be lying if I said I regretted every moment we spent together.

Because sometimes, comfort comes from the pieces of life we took for granted. The hugs we didn't take, the kisses we didn't return, the hands we wished weren't so warm. The names we only called when we were mad, the smiles we forced ourselves to give, the arguments we wished would end with us never having to see each other's faces again.

We don't always recognize comfort when it's standing right in front of us. Sometimes, it looks like a person who talks too much, a hand that stays in yours a little too long, a familiar presence you grow so accustomed to that you forget how different things might feel afterwards.

Sometimes, it looks like the very things we wish we could have a little less of.

Not until a familiar face disappears from view, dressed in a T-shirt of my favorite cartoon, and I find myself sitting somewhere, crying over something I cannot quite explain. Not until I catch myself thinking, I am alone again.

Perhaps it is the silence that comes afterwards. The familiar roads, the ordinary afternoon, the good morning and good night I will no longer receive. Everything remains where I left it, and yet something feels inexplicably different. It is strange how little time it takes to grow accustomed to another person's presence. His footsteps, his laughter, the little habits that once seemed insignificant begin to settle into the background of our days. And before we know it, we have forgotten what it feels like to move through the world entirely on our own.

Then, just like that, we begin to wish we had done things differently.

Hugged a little tighter. Held hands a little longer. Given a prettier smile. Been a little less bothered by the little things, a little more generous with the moments that seemed to promise there would always be another. We wish we had known that ordinary moments could become memories without ever announcing themselves.

Perhaps we can be a little more tender with the ordinary things. Return the kiss. Accept the hug, even when we're in a hurry. Hold someone's hand without immediately thinking about how warm it is. Not because we know these things will disappear, but because they are here.

For sometimes, what we miss isn't anything extraordinary. It is a hand reaching for ours, a voice filling the quiet, someone sitting beside us while nothing in particular happens. The simple comfort of not having to occupy the whole world by ourselves. Still, I wonder what I might have done differently if I had known how the afternoon would end. Perhaps nothing grand. Perhaps only a tighter embrace, a hand held for a moment longer, a smile given without reservation.

But perhaps growing up means learning that missing someone doesn't necessarily mean we made the wrong decision. We can miss his company, regret the moments we mishandled, and wish things had turned out differently without pretending that everything was right for us.

I can wish I had been softer in certain moments. I can wish I had hugged him a little tighter, listened a little longer, or enjoyed the afternoon without thinking about what was missing. But I cannot turn tenderness into an obligation to accept less than what I need.

I can pay for my own water. I can take myself to dinner, and build a life in which I never have to depend on anyone else. But I don't want independence to be the only thing I get to experience with someone. I still want the little kindnesses, the thoughtfulness, the feeling that someone is happy to have me there. I wanted to see what we could become. But perhaps wanting to see isn't enough when only one of us seems willing to look.

So I suppose I will keep the little things. The stars, the owls, the photographs. The stories he told me and the afternoons that were lovely despite everything I couldn't quite ignore. I can be grateful that I met him without pretending that he gave me everything I needed.

Perhaps he was right when he said he had failed me. But I don't think he failed because he couldn't afford a particular dinner or because he didn't know which restaurant to take me to. He failed because I began to feel that I was asking for a place in his thoughts, when I had hoped he might make one for me on his own. I didn't need him to give me the world. I only needed to feel that he wanted to make a little room for me in his.

And perhaps that is why I might think of him the next time I look up at the stars, knowing that the light reaching me has been traveling for years, sometimes centuries, before I ever get to see it. By the time it reaches us, some of those stars may no longer exist as we see them. And still, their light arrives. Still, for a little while, we get to see something beautiful that has travelled so far. Perhaps meeting him was a little like that. Something brief that still left me with things worth remembering.

I think I could have liked him.

But perhaps I needed more than the possibility of liking him. Perhaps I needed him to meet me somewhere along the way, to give me something real to hold on to while I was still deciding whether I wanted to stay. And I wish he had. Not because he owed me a love story, or because I expected him to become someone he wasn't. But because, for a little while, I thought we might have had the beginning of one.

Perhaps that is all we ever really ask of the past: not to change it, but to return, for just a little while, to the moments we didn't know we would miss.

I can miss his company without wanting to return to the things that hurt. I can regret the possibility we lost without regretting the standards I held on to. I can wish things had been different without pretending that wishing alone could have made them so.

He could have been someone I liked.

And I think, in another version of this story, I might have.

But in this one, I will remember the stars, the skies, the owls, the beautiful tangerine sunsets, and the way he taught me to look at the world through a camera.

And perhaps, every now and then,

I will wonder what might have happened if he had thought to get me a bottle of water, too.

October 15, 2026