Start Small
42. The first time you've said that out loud.
The place Kaia picked was two streets off the main road. A cafe under a HDB block, with air conditioning. Six tables, a chalkboard menu, a woman who plated everything herself. Wen had walked past it a dozen times without going in.
“You choose the place with actual effort,” Kaia said, sliding into the seat across from her. She stretched, arms out over her head. Her hair was still slightly damp at the ends. “Slept until three-ish. Showered. This is technically my morning.”
“It’s eight.”
“I know. Doesn’t feel like it.” She picked up the menu without opening it, set it down again. “I’ll have whatever has the most butter in it.”
They ordered. Wen ordered the one with the basil and cheese. Kaia ordered a carbonara with a side of salad.
The bread came first, then water. Wen was quiet.
She reached for a piece of bread. She set it back down. “I’m not sure how to begin. But I want to tell you.”
Kaia waited.
“It happened on a Sunday morning. It was early. I was scrolling on Instagram and I saw a word. On a carousel.” Wen looked at the table. “Greysexual. I stopped on it. I don’t know why that time and not before. I think I’d seen it and kept scrolling. But that morning I stopped.” She picked up her water glass, set it back down without drinking. “I read the book after. The one you recommended.”
“It’s not that I don’t feel anything,” Wen said. “It’s that it’s - rare. And very specific when it does happen.” She looked at the table. “I spent a long time watching people and thinking I was missing a step. Everyone around me felt things constantly. Urgently. And I just… didn’t. Not the way they seemed to. I didn’t know it had a name. I didn’t know other people walked around with it and it wasn’t a problem. It was just what they were.” She looked up. “I wouldn’t have known any of this until I got to know you.”
Kaia didn’t say anything for a second.
“Huh. That’s the first time you’ve said that out loud,” Kaia said.
“Yes.”
“How does it feel.”
“Lighter than I thought it would and heavier than I wanted it to be. Both.”
“That tracks.”
The pasta arrived. Kaia twirled hers, ate two forkfuls before she spoke.
“I’ve dated men and women.” A crooked smile. “You should know that about me, since we’re doing the honest dinner. My last one was with a man. There was a lot of friction. He was sweet at first. He pushed a lot of buttons. How I worked. The friends I had. How I needed to live. He wasn’t a bad person. He just needed me to be someone else.”
“What happened?”
“It took me longer than it should have to see it clearly. That’s usually how it goes. You’re inside the thing, you can’t see the whole of it, you need distance.” She ate another forkful. “I’ve experimented with different relationship structures too. Kink. ENM… Hey, I’m not saying that to shock you. I’m saying I know the landscape from the inside, not from a book someone gave me.”
“Kaia, you gave me the book.”
“I know. I picked it because it was closest to true, not because it would fix anything.” Kaia gave a small shrug. “Books don’t fix anything. They just make the direction you’re already going easier to point at.”
“So what do I do.”
“You ask yourself what you want. What you actually want. Not what our culture says is allowed. The messy kind. Not what your mother can easily tell her friends. And you go from there. That’s what I did. Not as a plan. I am not going to lie to you, it felt brutal. But as a question I kept asking until the answer stopped changing.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s not supposed to be an answer. It’s just my way.” Kaia looked at her. “The last relationship wasn’t just him being wrong for me. I was learning things about what I wanted too, what I needed, what I could actually say out loud, and what I’d been silent about because saying it felt like too much work. I wasn’t just enduring him. I was… really, taking notes.”
They ate for a bit.
“I wrote something,” Wen said. “Published it, actually. Last night.”
“The one from that Tuesday. The night you wrote three lines and crossed out the rest.”
“That one. It turned into an essay. About my parents, mostly, the arithmetic of what it cost them to give me the life they thought I was supposed to want.”
“I read it. Three in the morning, wasn’t it.”
“I didn’t tell you it was up.”
“You didn’t need to. It’s not hard to find someone’s Substack once you know the handle.” She turned her glass. “The twelve dollars. I thought about it the whole shift after.” She took a sip of water.
“What did you think?”
“That it wasn’t a metaphor. It was a real number.” Her shoulders dropped a little. “People will read it and think it’s about meaning, and it is, but you also just did the maths in public. That’s a harder thing to do than the meaning part.”
“I did more maths after,” she said, eventually. “Not my parents’. Mine.”
Kaia waited.
“If I worked differently. Consultancy, eight days a month - that covers it. Floor, buffer, saving. I’ve been doing twenty-two.” She looked at her plate. “I don’t know what I’m moving toward. But I’m thinking about it. The job. Whether I still want to be there.” A pause. “I’m not doing anything tonight. But I know now that I could. That’s different from not knowing.”
“It’s very different.”
“I don’t know what to do with knowing it.”
“You don’t have to make a big move,” Kaia said. “Nobody’s handing you a script. You start small. You find the one true thing you can do this week, and you do that. Then you find the next one.”
“What’s the one thing.”
“I don’t know. You do.” Kaia paused. “But it’s probably smaller than you think it needs to be.”
“Work’s been a lot,” Kaia said, later, after the plates had thinned and the woman at the pass had come by once. “Not the patients. The patients are the good part. The rest of it.”
“The politics.”
“The admin, the metrics, and everyone managing us deciding what the work should look like from a spreadsheet. I don’t have the energy to fight all of it. I want to do the part I love and let the rest happen around me as quietly as possible.” She looked at the table. “It doesn’t come home with me, mostly. But it’s there. Friction in the system, even when I’m not touching the system.”
“Is there anyone at work who, I don’t know, makes it easier?”
Kaia’s mouth crinkled into a near smile. “There’s someone. Met her a few months back, actually. Odd way. She was covering nights on my ward, which nobody in admin does. Geez, it was so obvious. Asked her straight out if HR sent her to spy on me.”
“Did they?”
“She didn’t say no.” Kaia picked up her water, drank, set it down. “I asked her outright and she didn’t lie to me. She said, ‘that’s the most honest thing I’ve said on this ward in three nights.’” A small laugh, more air than sound. “That’s it. That’s the whole reason. She could have said something soft and I’d have let it go and probably never trusted her. She didn’t. She let me sit with what she didn’t deny.”
Wen thought of her own mother, the barley water. “That’s a strange thing to build trust on.”
“It’s the only thing I build trust on.” Kaia rolled her eyes slightly. “She’s been, I don’t know what to call it. Watching out for me. Not in a way that makes me a project. She’s the one who suggested I look at training further. Not the promotion track. Nobody wants me managing rosters. A different lane. Teaching.”
“Teaching what?”
“Birth educator. Working with couples before the crisis point. Not instead of the hospital. Before it.” She paused. “Last week. Mum and dad came in. Mum had felt the baby stop moving. Cord was around the head, thirty-five weeks. They were worried. But they asked - they asked what it meant, what the chances were. So I told them honestly. I cannot know. Most babies come out with the cord around the neck and nothing happens. But there is a slip chance that it does, and then it’s catastrophic.” She turned her fork over, set it down. “You can only say that to someone who has enough space to receive it. Most don’t arrive with that. That’s the thing.”
“You should do it,” Wen said.
“I’m doing it. Slowly.” She ate a forkful. “I tried one course. Did some reading and went for the Zoom calls. Good work. But it felt wrong for me - the context didn’t sit right. I am here in Singapore. And a nurse.” She picked the fork back up. “So I’m writing it down myself. Cases. What I’ve seen. What doesn’t go in the notes. If there’s no course that fits, I guess I’ll build the material.”
“I’m telling you now so it’s real. You’re a witness.”
“I’m honoured.”
“You should be. I don’t make things real out loud very often.”
Wen was quiet for a moment.
“There’s someone,” she said. “Han Qin. Two years. I love him.”
Kaia looked at her for a long time.
“I figured there was someone.” A pause. “You said everything else. Just not him.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“A little.”
Wen put her card down before Kaia could reach for hers. Kaia had sent her half, via PayNow.
Kaia stretched back in her chair, arms out over her head. They looked at each other for a moment.
Outside, Kaia touched her arm once, briefly, before turning toward the MRT.
“Text me,” she said.