Can a painful heartbreak grow into something strong and beautiful? Yes, it can, says our columnist, writing about her first love.

At one point, even his dad was trying to matchmake us.

I remember that day as clear as a bell. I was hovering around the dinner table, which was near the father’s working desk underneath the airwell, surrounded by his towering adult siblings.

Then his dad bellowed in what was unmistakably a nudge-wink, “So, when you grow up, do you want to marry my youngest son? “

If there was ever a moment in my life when I turned a hot shade of tomato-red, this must have been it.

I don’t remember answering. I might have mumbled something unintelligible, or just stood frozen to the spot like a popsicle, or simply fled to the living room. I don’t remember. As I experienced the most devastating blow of my young life, I learnt that there was more than a grain of truth in that saying about how the mind mentally blocks out traumatising experiences as a self-defence mechanism.

I was eight years old. He was 10.

Miraculously, we survived this curveball, as did the others that life lobbed the way of our friendship: he introducing me to the abominable “Fatty Bomb Bomb” expression that was the de rigueur insult of the era; me practically shoving him out of the front door and then stewing in my juices as he merrily sat on the swing outside my house and impudently whistled — whistled, the nerve! — to my chagrin.

There were numerous other instances that were exasperating then and now merely amusing on hindsight.

We also had other memories, less grating and far more tender. Sitting in my house, munching peanuts and eyes glued to the television as we watched our very first general election result announcements till 5am in the morning, supervised by my hawk-eyed mother, of course.

Me, leafing through his The Great Artist coffeetable books reverently as he expounded on Van Gogh and Rembrandt (Chun probably introduced me to my very first European names). And me, falling hopelessly in love, in spite of those “Fatty Bomb Bomb” taunts.

At 15, I still remember, I was sitting in my room when he sauntered through the door with his usual cowboy swagger, without knocking, and presented me with a card.

“For your birthday,” he said redundantly.

He had participated in many of my birthdays. From ruining one of the keys of my piano-shaped cake at my seventh birthday party to the 16th birthday party he threw where I caught my first glimpse of his female classmates and thus learnt the meaning of jealousy, we were an inseparable part of each other’s lives.

As my heart thundered like horse’s hooves, I impulsively decided to open the card in the privacy of my room. I devoured every word hungrily, searching the warm and affectionate greetings for a nuance that would give me hope, until I came to the end.

It was signed, “Your brother, Chun.”

I did not come out of my room for a long time. As he engaged in his usual banter with my mum, who, of course, loved him to bits too (who wouldn’t? Such a charmer he was), I cried into my pillow.

Young hearts are strong and resilient. I recovered — in time — but not before one last-ditch effort to win him over. On my 17th birthday, I wrote him a letter and told him I had been in love with him for years.

His reaction was not entirely unexpected. He wrote me a very nice letter saying how he appreciated — and had known of — my “special feelings” for a while now, and that I would always be special to him. I read that letter again and again, teetering between joy and sorrow.

Then he did something completely unexpected.

“Yun, you have a phone call from Ah Chun!” my mother called from the living room a few nights later.

What, all the way from Australia, where he was doing his Pre-U studies?

I dropped everything and raced to the phone. Back in the day, technology was not so advanced, so you could hear the telltale crackle of a trans-oceanic phone call clearly. Crackle or no crackle, I could recognise that faint voice in the background anywhere.

He wanted to check if I was all right and if I got his letter.

It’s been years since that day. We’ve kept in touch through e-mails and letters. The pain of young heartbreak faded away, as it always does. We both entered into relationships with other people. When I visited him in Melbourne, his affectionate words and generous hugs were a comforting balm to me as I attempted to recover from another heartbreak.

While I did not resolve my relationship problems, I came back with a lighter heart, imbued with a new knowledge that was uplifting in an unexpected way. Somehow over the crackling static of a long-distance conversation once upon a time, an unbreakable bond had been forged and endured. A satisfying and far from a poor substitute for romantic love.

I never thought I’d say this. But yes, some things are worth getting your heart broken over.

>Alexandra Wong (bunnysprints.blogspot.com) would like to wish her

readers a belated Happy Valentine’s Day, and thank them for the avalanche of mail in response to Stranger in a Train (Weekender, Jan 29). If they have not received her reply by now, it must have been eaten up by gmail or gone into spam.

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