Shotgun Wedding by venitha

We are in grave danger, I both fear and hope, of calling it quits on Singapore. We each regularly have days we're fully ready to give up, and if we ever align in this desperate desire, I honestly think that'll be it. A similar cosmic coincidence is the reason we own a condo in Winter Park. We can spend years trading the roles of Rational and Emotional, but one day we wake up both cast as Emotional, et voilà! We now own the vacation home of our dreams. Or, as the case may be shortly, we now have plane tickets back to our life in a place where we can actually vacation at said vacation home.

In the grand tradition of not going to bed angry, Sunday night before lights out we lay in bed gazing at the city skyline and thinking hard to come up with lists of things that we like, or at least don't hate, about Singapore, which on bad days we're coming to view as the loathsome bride forced on us in a shotgun wedding. I'm not sure how to take the fact that at the end of a bleak and particularly shitty day, the first, and for a long time the only, item on my list, a list of positives, mind you, is the weather, which in actuality I only like in a relative sense: it isn't as miserable as it was this past summer.

Jim, ever the optimist, the jerk, comes up with his list quite quickly, though he opts for the obvious, putting far less tortured and sullen thought into it than I do. His list:

• the view: the amazing skyline we are looking bitterly at
  
• our bed: the fabulous Tempurpedic mattress that we bought after I broke my knee and the painful threat of bedsores found its way through the narcotic haze
  
• me in the bed: Hey now! We haven't made up yet! True, we're mad at Singapore and not each other, but still!

One thing to be very thankful for here is the maturity of our relationship, as clearly evidenced by Jim's comment when he read my last paragraph: "That's jerkwad, thank you very much." I'm also quite thankful for Jim's sense of humor, of course. But I digress. In spite of how it ultimately worked out, Colorado was not my first choice for a destination when Jim and I left college and Wisconsin, and the resulting bitterness and resentment took me years to overcome.

Here in Singapore, however, even though we regularly hate each other and ourselves, we never blame each other for this situation, and this is evidence of some serious strides we have made in the last 15 years. If Singapore is the bride, then HP is the white trash hick holding the shotgun at the wedding. We each, both independently and together, made the decision to come here. If it was a mistake, it was one we made together, and we can undo it together, too.

venitha