10276 in Two Months: A Novel: an Unlikely Facebook Love

By Giok Ping Ang

They are hundred thousand miles apart, and could not love in flesh, not in part, so they love with their hearts. Everyday they chat on Facebook, and everyday they live, love and die a little. 10276 is the number of love messages they chatted in two months. Mark Fallen is a screenwriter from England, and Lim Shi Yi is a poet and novelist from Singapore who is married with two daughters.

It seems a perfect love made in heaven as they both share the same interests in calligraphy, music, painting, cooking and above all, poetry. She decides to write a script to document their love entitling The Secret Love Of Two Poets and he becomes her script mentor as they spiral deeper into a painful love affair.

Two parallel love stories, both virtual, both intense and life altering yet contrasting in development. She is to find out that it is much easier conjuring physical contacts and rendezvous for her characters in her script than it is for her own love and in the end has to choose between family and success or true love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Oct 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781482898781

Giok Ping Ang

Giok Ping Ang was born in Singapore. She graduated from the University of Oregon and later obtained a diploma in accounting from UCLA. In 2011, her poem “An Invitation” received an honourable mention in the Writer’s Digest seventh annual poetry competition. She enjoys painting and loves photography. This is her first novel.

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Copyright © 2014 by Giok Ping Ang.

ISBN:                  Hardcover             978-1-4828-9830-9

                           Softcover              978-1-4828-9829-3

                          eBook                    978-1-4828-9878-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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He added me. On Facebook. On eleventh October 2010. He was my two-hundred-and-twenty-seventh friend. He asked me if I minded as he noticed I was married. I said no because I liked to meet people and make new friends. He said he was not a writer, not for a while now. I joked and laughed that it was all right as long as he was a reader. His name was Mark Fallen.

He told me he was sad, too sad to feel. His father had just passed on a month ago. I told him I had lost mine thirty years ago, and I had cried for two years and still cried sometimes. The image of my father’s wake, the dark wood coffin, the pungent aroma of incense, and the monotonous and eerie chanting of monks floated across my mind. I told him he must grieve, for it was the first painful step to healing. He said he also lost his marriage and his dog. I felt really sad and was at a loss for words momentarily. I felt like crying and felt sorry for him. It was too much for a man to bear, losing three loved ones at the same time. I took a deep breath to calm down and cracked some jokes to cheer him up. We changed our subject to something lighter, something less morbid. He posted a link to his favourite piano recital, Chopin’s ‘Nocturne’ in C-sharp minor. I suggested to him to switch to listening to Baroque, something not so solemn and depressing. He seemed less affected after an hour’s chat as we bid each other goodbye and thanked me and told me he appreciated my advice. I ended the conversation by posting a link to Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ on our message page, a painting done by me with a poem written on the painting, and wished him happy listening. I felt pleased after we logged out, and although the image of my father’s face and his death continued to loom in my head, I told myself to cheer up, for I had helped a man in mourning that day.

Two days later, he prompted my message again. We continued our conversation, and I wanted to know if he was feeling better. He said he was and had stopped listening to The Nocturnes; he had been listening to Mozart and Baroque instead, and they lifted his mood. I found out that he did calligraphy and was very excited for I loved calligraphy as well and went to his art album to look at his work. Staring at his calligraphy, I recalled my unpleasant experience struggling with lines and lines of cursive writing practice daily in primary school and the dull numbing pain on my palm from the impact of my English teacher’s ruler for untidy writing, but this was no cursive writing practice but calligraphy at its best. His calligraphy was beautiful. It was executed with much control and grace, and although I was not familiar with English calligraphy, I could tell he had mastered the art form. I told him I was really impressed, typing multiple exclamations, and we talked about the secret and art of doing good calligraphy. He said he studied Middle English, a form of English used in calligraphy, and I said I loved old Chinese. He said he was a big Shakespeare fan. I had not studied any Shakespeare, but I had studied Tang Dynasty’s Li Po and Du Fu’s poems and had extensive training in Chinese calligraphy. He Googled it immediately to find out who they were and was intrigued and said he wanted to study them after he got the information. I was very happy for his interest in Chinese poems. We spent the next hour talking about poems and expanded our conversation into painting and discovered we both painted as well. We both loved impressionist paintings. It was Chagall’s dreamy paintings of people and animals suspended in the air and Van Gogh’s wild untamed impasto Sunflowers and magical Starry Night for me, and for him, Degas’s The Blue Dancers. I Googled The Blue Dancers and looked at it in detail, thinking that I would someday write a poem on the delicate and enchanting ballerinas with dreamlike costumes and tantalizing white skin. I told him I would write a poem as soon as we logged out as I felt very inspired looking at the painting. He said it happened to him a lot, the inspired moment after taking in great art. We talked about art and museums for another hour and recounted the great art pieces we saw in our separate museum visits all over the world, my favourite being the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York; his was The Museum Of London. We laughed about how we stood and froze in front of our favourite paintings. I imagined him in front of the Degas and dancing ballet. I chuckled loudly in front of my Macbook Air and felt relieved that he could not see me. Time flew by effortlessly. I was sad to log out when he said his bread was proving, and he had to attend to it. I wondered what kind of bread he was baking. I baked my own bread too and reminded myself to get the recipe from him and hoped it was something I didn’t already have.

He messaged. He was sad again. This time, we chatted for two hours. I had to stop what I was doing, writing my second novel, and felt a little annoyed. He told me his father had endured great pain from liver cancer and suffered and had been ill for a long time. I told him I understood his pain. My father had had liver cancer too. I went to his photos to look at his father’s wreath again. The flowers on the wreath were lovely. The bouquet looked so vibrant, I thought it would pop out of the screen. I tried to make him feel better, talking about the flowers, and did not know if it helped, but I told him I was sure his father was still with him, a notion I hoped for with my own dead father. I had to leave the computer as my daughters were calling out to me to have dinner. I told him that I would continue talking to him later.

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He said hello the same evening and was in a relatively cheerful mood. I was really glad. At least my time off from my writing and my children did not go to waste. We talked about art again. This time, we talked about poems. I told him that poetry was my one true love at the moment, and I could not live without poetry. He promised to send me some poems he wrote. I said I would really like to read them.

I read a poem he wrote when he was nineteen. It was about the meaning of life and the anguish of separation. It was mature, eloquent, and philosophical, too good coming from a nineteen year-old. But I remembered Emily Dickenson and Rimbauld who both wrote all their amazing poems in their teens, as I reread his poem on the screen. I felt extremely envious and a little jealous. Some people were just born so talented, and they were so darn lucky, I thought. In truth, I was really impressed and felt humbled by it. I did not start writing poetry until I was forty. I was new at it, and although I had won a poetry contest, I did not feel I knew enough of the art. I told him I wished to learn from him and thanked him for sharing his poem. He promised to send me more poems and said he also wrote seven scripts; one of them had been held by a renowned producer for a while until the studio could not get the budget approved. Meeting him was too good to be true. I had been planning to write a script after completing my second novel. It would be my first attempt in screenwriting, and I asked him if he would help me with the technicality. He agreed to help immediately.

How blessed could I be, I thought, and was glad I did not cut him off when the chat became too long. Having planned to venture into scriptwriting, I really needed a scriptwriting mentor. The next few days, I spent in the euphoria of the visualization of completing my screenplay and selling it to Hollywood and making a big hit. It felt like I had reached my goal halfway just by meeting someone like him. He was a godsend, and I felt fortunate to be added by him.

He was curious about my novel, and we chatted for an hour about fiction this time. I told him I had finished my first novel based on the Sino Japanese war but was unhappy with it and could not pinpoint what went wrong. He told me to leave it alone for a while, a longer while, maybe six months or more, and said a lot of writers could not finish their first work. They were too emotional about it and wanted it too much to be perfect. He lit up a light bulb for me. It was a completely new piece of information, and I felt ten times better after the chat. The frustration with the first book, the guilt of not finishing something, and the agony of not knowing what to do flew out my window the instant he told me that. I left my computer with a smile and felt ten pounds lighter.

We chatted every day, sometimes once, sometimes twice. Sometimes we missed each other and left messages of hello and have a nice day or posted music links on each other’s wall. It was strange to have caught each other to chat in the first place. We are seven-and-a-half-hours different in time. When I went to bed, he was travelling home from work. When he woke up, my day was three-quarter over, and I would be preparing dinner for my kids. When he settled back home in the outskirts of London, I was groggy with my sleep starter or three glasses of wine or both. Our clocks tic-tocked at different parts of twenty-four hours, and we were sleeping in different beds, eating different foods, our lives completely out of sync. But we managed. We managed to connect. The world is big and small. Seeing a number on the message icon became a daily habit. I expected to see one when I logged on, and I thought he did too. It was like the cup of coffee in the morning. It was like putting toothpaste on my toothbrush. I had to have one, and I had to do it. A day without it rendered me neurotic and restless.

He told me he liked Asians, that they were gentle and pretty. He admired a classical pianist from Korea. I looked at her clips and dissected her oriental features to him and explained why he liked her so much. She had all the stereotypical oriental features. I thought she was not that pretty; her eyes were too small, her jaw was square like a man’s, and her lips were too thick, but I did not tell him. He said he wished I was not married, and I typed laugh out loud twice. I suggested he should come over and look for a girlfriend or a wife. Then I remembered I had a friend who was single and unattached and asked him if he was interested in meeting her. He asked me how old she was, and I told him she was thirty-eight. He said it was perfect. I was curious and asked him for his age and thought my friend might want to know. He wanted to know my age. I thought it was irrelevant and perhaps he was joking. I said I was an old bag and told him not to ask. He said he did not think I was old, and he was not sensitive about women’s age. I refused to let him know my age. He wrote he was forty-two and said he was not afraid to announce his age. I told him I was forty-seven and asked if he was satisfied now that he really knew I was an old bag. He laughed and said I looked young, and I reciprocated the niceness to his looks versus his age. He did look really good on his profile picture, I thought. He had sun-kissed skin and ash-blond hair, his lips tilted into a warm smile, and his eyes twinkled brightly, except there was a mismatched tint of sadness. His profile picture arrested me momentarily as I had not realised how handsome he was. He was keen to meet my friend, so I said I would find out from her first before I gave him any more information about her. We parted happy and hopeful. He thanked me twice.

I saw my friend Sue’s name on his friends list. Ah, they connected. I secretly wished their friendship would work out and grow into a pretty bouquet from a small seed that I planted. For the rest of the day, I felt very happy and peaceful and very pleased with myself for having done something good.

The following day, I logged on. There was no light on the message. My heart sank. The following day and the following day were the same. I kept myself busy, writing my novel, writing my blog. As I became more and more restless, I opened a blank page and tried to write a poem but could not squeeze anything out of my right brain, limp without a trace of inspiration. Staring blankly at the screen for thirty minutes with a title to start, I ended up deleting it. Not being able to write a poem seldom happened. I felt lost and frightened. Maybe I had lost it; my creative juice in poetry had dried up. Oh no, this was not happening. I climbed on a chair and dragged my copies of Li Po, Du Fu, Rumi, and Emily Dickenson down from my teak bookshelf and was nearly killed by the avalanche of the volumes. I laughed inside, thinking that at least I would die in the right way, killed by my favourite poems.

The sky was heavy, and it started to drizzle. My misery of not being able to compose a poem was heightened by the sadness the sky brought. I sat by the window and cried. I could not remember when I had last cried. It was at least a few years ago when my husband and I had lost our business. It had been something worthy of a cry, a good, hard, heartfelt wailing. I remember doing that in the bathroom, many times, many nights. But this morning, this normal day when a light drizzle brought soothing melody to my quiet world, why did I cry? Wiping my face, I asked myself to snap out of it and not to ruin a productive day.

The following day, I was at the grocery store, holding a basket filled with a half-week’s food for my family. My iphone vibrated, and I balanced my basket on a raised leg to read the message. A message was prompted on my Facebook page. It was from him. I tried to read the message, almost dropping the basket. ‘Hello, how have you been, my dear poet friend?’ it beamed as I strained my presbyopic eyes to read. Shuffling through the crowd in the supermarket, I fought for a spot nearest to the cashier. My heart raced as my car sped on the streets, ran a red light, and almost hit a bird in mid-flight. All I could think was, was my Macbook Air charged and where had I placed it that morning.

‘Fine, and how are you?’ I replied. ‘I had been busy at work, I have been very stressed,’ he wrote. ‘How is everything with Sue?’ I typed. He said she was a sweet girl but was not his type. My heart sank and leaped at the sound of it. ‘Oh, why is that so?’ I asked. He said that they had few common interests and ran out of topics to chat about. I comforted him and said he would eventually meet someone with all the right attributes. We chatted about his work stress and my