Singapore is 17 hours ahead of Seattle. When I landed at Changi on a flight that somehow managed to be both long and surprisingly manageable, it was the next morning local time. And my first impression of the place was light. The specific quality of light in Southeast Asia that isn't like Pacific Northwest light at all. Warmer and more direct, like the sun had made a decision.
The Meridian Singapore office was in Marina Bay, that gleaming, concentrated cluster of towers that was doing its level best to be one of the most impressive financial districts on Earth. My contact there was a woman named Suki Tan, a Singaporean analyst who'd been with the Asia-Pacific operation for four years and knew how things worked. "You need 48 hours to adjust to the time zone," she told me matter-of-factly when we met. "Do not try to fight it. Eat, sleep when you can, get some sun during daylight hours. By day three, you'll feel human."
She was right. By day three, I felt something closer to human. By the end of the first week, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. I was completely present in the room I was in without the background hum of a marriage that was slowly coming apart, filling the back of my mind. The work was demanding in the way demanding work could be a relief.
New markets, new patterns, new problems to solve.
I had a small apartment in Tanjong Pagar, a neighborhood south of the city center that had the specific energy of a place reinventing itself. Old shophouses alongside new glass towers, hawker centers below apartment buildings, the whole compressed layering of a city that had decided to be ambitious about everything. I walked a lot, figured out the MRT system, found a coffee place near the office run by a guy named Henry who made the kind of espresso that made you understand coffee differently. I was building something new. It was small at first, the size of a hotel room, the size of a commute, the size of learning which MRT line went where. But it was mine in a way that nothing had felt mine in a while.
Carol Ashworth handled the divorce proceedings from Seattle. Petra cooperated. She was, as I'd always known her to be, when she wasn't on the defensive, fundamentally a decent person. We divided what needed to be divided. The townhouse sold in three weeks at a price that was good for both of us.
Seattle real estate moves fast when the house is right. She sent me one email, formal and short, in the middle of the process. It said, "I understand now what I did and didn't do. I'm sorry. I hope Singapore is everything you needed it to be."
I read it a few times, then I wrote back. "Take care of yourself, Petra. I hope things go well for you." And I meant it. That's the part people sometimes don't believe, that you can genuinely hope things go well for someone who hurt you when you're far enough removed from the hurt to see the whole picture clearly.
She wasn't a villain. She was a person who got something wrong and couldn't see it from inside it. That's a human failure, not a monstrous one.
Damon Reyes, for what it's worth, was apparently not the great friend she'd sacrificed her marriage for. Todd told me through the grapevine that connects all cities that Damon had started dating someone new within weeks of Petra ending things. Whether that means anything or nothing, I don't know. It's not information I need.
I've been in Singapore 14 months now. The Asia-Pacific team has grown. We have seven analysts under my direction and we're managing a portfolio that would have seemed abstract to me when I was sitting in the Meridian Seattle office turning this job down. I know the neighborhoods of this city the way I know Seattle. Not perfectly, but personally.
I know where to eat on a Tuesday night and where to run on a Saturday morning and which hawker stalls are worth the line. I've made friends. Suki, who turned out to be one of the sharpest people I've ever worked alongside, a British expat named Gareth, who works in shipping and has opinions about everything. A few other relocated professionals who understood the specific experience of building a life somewhere unfamiliar on purpose.
Todd came to visit in month four. We spent a weekend eating our way through the hawker centers and arguing about whether Singapore was a city state that had figured something out or an authoritarian experiment that happened to have great infrastructure. Both things are probably true. My father called every week for the first few months, worried in the way fathers worry about decisions they don't fully understand. By month five, he'd stopped worrying and started asking questions about the work, which was how I knew he'd accepted it.
Theo visited in month 8. He stood in my apartment in Tanjong Pagar looking out the window at the skyline and said, "You seem like yourself." "What did I seem like before?" I asked. I didn't have a response to that.
He was right.
There's a version of this story where I'm the hero and Petra is the villain. That version would be simpler and more satisfying. But that's not what this story is. The truth is closer to this. I stayed quiet too long about things that mattered.
I turned down Singapore the first time because I thought self-sacrifice was the same as love, and it isn't. It's a debt that breeds resentment. I waited for Petra to see what I needed instead of being direct about the fact that I needed it. And when she didn't see it, I interpreted her inability to see it as rejection rather than as the failure of communication that it actually was. By the time she handed me the ultimatum, we'd both been failing each other in different ways for a year.
The difference was that her failure was more visible because it had a person's name and an address in Fremont.
What I learned, what cost me a marriage and a townhouse with a view of Lake Union to learn is that the most important thing you can do for the people you love is be honest about what you need before you run out of need. The resignation that settled into my marriage didn't arrive all at once. It came in the hundred small moments when I said, "It's fine." instead of, "It's not fine, and here's what I need." By the time she said, "Maybe we're not right for each other," she was right. Not because of Damon exactly, but because of everything the Damon situation had revealed about the way we did and didn't communicate.
The selfie from Changi Airport was petty. I know that it was the only petty thing I let myself do in the whole sequence of events, and I'm not going to apologize for it because I think I earned one petty moment. She texted asking about my weekend. I sent her an honest answer. That's the last text we exchanged.
I still run along the Marina Bay waterfront on Saturday mornings. The light comes up over the Strait of Johor and hits the Supertrees and Gardens by the Bay. And for a few minutes, everything in Singapore looks like something someone dreamed up and then decided to build. Anyway, I think about Seattle sometimes, the way the rain sounds different there. Softer, more constant.
The way the Pike Place Market smells on a Saturday morning when the fish guys are calling out to each other across the stalls. The mountain view from a bedroom window I don't sleep in anymore. I don't miss my marriage. That surprises me sometimes, but it's true. I miss what I thought my marriage was going to be.
There's a difference between those two things that takes a while to understand.
What I don't miss at all is explaining why my feelings were worth addressing. Performing ease in situations that weren't easy. Being told that the reasonable thing was the unreasonable thing. I'm 38 years old and I run a team in one of the most dynamic financial markets in the world and I sleep through the night. Some sacrifices cost you something.
Some sacrifices give you back yourself. I turned down Singapore once for a woman who was spending our weekends with her ex-husband. When she told me that was non-negotiable, I believed her. And then I called Singapore back. Best decision I ever made.