Wanderlustress: "Doubt is a pain...

...too lonely to know that faith is his brother" -- Kahlil Gibran

My final divorce papers are in Spanish. Tony handed them to me at the Dome Cafe on Tanjong Pagar Road. Despite the searing tropical heat in Singapore, we sat outside where there was more space, and we were surrounded by palm trees and exotic potted plants. The tall standing fans blew a feverish bath of warm air around us, no relief to the thick, humid hothouse of life on the equator. And with concrete and marble office towers looming over us, I could barely stand the weight.

Still, it was amicable and easy. It always had been.

His trip to the Dominican Republic was brief, business-like, despite the reputable beaches and renowned SCUBA diving. It was the only country we could find that would grant two globe-trotting citizens of the world their divorce without a residency requirement. Well, a one day requirement = arrival + departure. Tony probably didn’t even take swimming trunks, just my Power of Attorney entrusting anyone of official rank to execute the transaction on my behalf. I wasn’t about to go half way around the world just to sign some papers because I wasn’t the one who wanted to marry the daughter of a Korean-American Baptist preacher, who happens to look just like me.

What an attitude. When I was the one who left him.

Under the cozy pine-green comforter in our shoebox one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of NYC, we had decided:

T: “Dee, you should tell them the pay package doesn’t even matter. They don’t even need to pay you.”
D: “Yeah, I just want to go to Singapore, even to work for free!”
T: “What a great experience it will be. I’ll join you when I graduate from business school.”
D: “And we can plan our honeymoon together after you arrive.”

We planned everything together. We had been the best of friends for seven years.

We were introduced to each other one week before graduating from college, by mutual friends who knew that we both had found jobs in NYC. We never saw each other again after that first introduction, but after two miserable months alone in my tiny rented room in Lower East Harlem, barely eking out a salary in the not-for-profit-but-intellectually-rich world, I received a postcard from Tony who was on his summer holiday in Asia:

“Hi Dee,
I’ve been in Hong Kong for a few days now but I really haven’t gotten around to much yet. All I have been doing is hanging out with my dad and playing golf…

…I hope your job is going well and everything is ok in NYC. I’ll call you when I get back.”