I can't breathe, I'm out of breath. My chest is locked up. My lungs cannot expand. My heart beats fast. It pounds so heavily in my chest that I feel the pain and the weight.

I'm suffocating.

And I don't know why.

I'm losing patience, getting agitated easily. I need an outlet I want to scream I want to fight I want to smash things I want to crush.

Or perhaps I know why.

I need proper conversations, face-to-face talk, daily. I need intellectual meaningful soul-searching conversations. Or maybe just daily chat with mundane happenings. Used to have WL here to talk everyday but she is gone. I'm spending less and less time out of his room. One side effect of being in a relationship is that now you're labeled as someone's property, other conscientious opposite sexes feel the necessary need to keep certain distance, so as to avoid possible misunderstanding.

Now sitting here watching him engrossed with his computer game, I don't know if he will notice anything I'm saying. But the irony is, I can't blame him. I have no right to command him.

People say love automatically brings the joy of another person to a higher priority than ourselves'. Love should be unconditional and unselfish. The joys and pains are shared are no longer a personal property.

However, are we really ready to share the pain together? Does that come down as a responsibility? When one partner starts to think his/her contributions/sacrifices are more than that of the other partner, the relationship is not functioning.

in illness or in poverty, till death do us part?

When his worst fear of ankle sprain was realized, I know he's reminded of her. And with due respect and understanding, I try to ignore his evident depress of evident reasons. But what am I suppose to do? Acting like what she did? Be a carbon copy? Does he expect or does he compare?

I am fully aware of the magic moment she caught his heart and moved him to tears. Will I ever be able to do that?

Why do I have to compare and think in this way? Which he probably does not think like what I fear.

Why do we all inevitably suffer in the after-trauma of an ex relationship? Is it fair to make your partner suffer from your own ex-trauma???

To what extent should we be bothered? Do we prefer not to listen to and know the story of an ex? Or does not teach us something about the person?

If I can choose, I'd rather not to know.

Yes I know he's doing his best to reassure me his fidelity. He knows my insecurity. I hear his promises and I truly want to believe them.

It's weird and unreasonable. And I hate myself being in this craziness. That is why I can't tell him the truth, because it is not justifiable. All my senses are giving him credits. He's almost impeccable, at least at this moment.

It just reflects how immature and insecure I am.

But no matter how much effort he puts in, the past haunts me like a nightmare. Ever since we've been together, I've started to have disturbed nights and unsettling nightmares. In which I was cheated, sold as slave, or imprisoned. In another dream I could recall vividly, I wanted to say to scream at the top of my lungs but I could not get a sound out of my mouth. I struggled desperately but no words can be heard.

Everytime, just when I'm about to forget or able to pretend existence of past, there something pops out and confronts me in my face.

I don't want to live a life where I am constantly haunted by the possibility of infidelity and betrayal. It reminds me the image of Teresa in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In no way Tomas's erotic engagements threatened her position in his heart, yet she was burdened and tortured by the smell of women's groins emanating from his hair. She does not protest, she merely suffers in silence. She jabs her fingers with needles as she watches Tomas and Sabrina having sex on the stage. So painful, so painful.

Women are so good at detecting such traces of evidences.

I long proclaimed that should such cases happen, which I perfectly am aware of its unavoidability, I prefer not to know. Stray for all you want, keep those to yourself and do not ever leak a hint to me. Clean yourself up when you come home. Hide all clues. Not a strand of hair, not a lingering smell of perfume, not a smudged lipstick mark.

But now I'm living in a room where her presence is felt everywhere. No I'm not threatened. I'm sensible enough to understand that. At the beginning I did not even say a word about her letter and her timetable still remaining on his softboard.

To me, she is identifiable. A real person with a face. I'm frightened by numerous faceless unknown women without identities but with a possibility of smell of groins left lingering in his hair.

Insanity. Absurdity. I'm driving myself to hell.

In that sense, I'm like all other women. No one special. I lose my identity.

This again, reminds me of Teresa's dream, where she paraded around a swimming pool with many naked women, all under Tomas's mercy.

Or is it self-interrogation when I'm awake at the dead of night?