Just when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself for being broke and ashamed, and caged up in the limbo of no-progress, an editor from a publishing house contacted me and asked if I was interested in publishing my book.

In return I did an CSI'ish investigative check of her background, mostly along the lines of Is this for real? Could it be a scam? When I found out that her company is a national book publisher headquartered in Beijing and has been in business for over 70 years, I realized a smallish miracle had just descended in my universe. (An occurrence akin to seeing a spaceship carrying handsome aliens like Kim Soo Hyun landing on earth).

I mean you read about pop stars being discovered while they are shopping in the mall, or dancing in a nightclub, and you kind of fantasize about being discovered too, but you don't actually count on that happening. I have heard of far more horror stories of writers banging their heads (and books) against the door of publishing houses and still get rejected. (Just ask JK Rowling or Stephen King.)

But it turns out, this editor, Dandan, stumbled upon my blog while leisurely browsing through other, more famous, contestants on FCWR. She liked what I'd written on my Chinese blog and requested for the full manuscript. What are the chances?!

It appears the show had worked, after all.

Over the next few months, Dandan and I became chummy buddies on IM. We talked about adding photos in, adding stories about what it was like to be on the dating show. We also talked about the book's planned retail prices, royalties, and time of release. She said once it's acquired, they have in-house translators who will translate the book into Chinese. It will likely be released in February of next year. Her boss had approved the deal and they were thinking of titles.

All very amazing stuff.

Going through the book editing and publishing paperwork was a delicious twirl of time. Every form I filled out was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. I would wake up in the morning and click through my photos, looking for the best images to add to the story. The idea that it will be read by people who would find it useful made me laugh in delight. And as the days rolled by, the show well behind us, my relationship with Matt improved.

I walked under the warm September sun holding his hand, and I told him, "The contract they are offering me is pretty standard in the industry. The advance equates to less than a month's salary in consulting. And this book took a whole year to write." Still, I smiled.

Around this time, Matt was going on his second rotation in Brazil. Another two months apart. Shortly before he left, he took me on a day trip to Whistler. The trip wasn't particularly amazing, the beer wasn't that great, but I appreciated the gesture. I liked being with him. Even if it's doing boring things together.

Then one totally random night, Matt said something I wasn't expecting. Completely out of the blue.

He did it when drove me home in his black Honda civic. He parked in front of my house and we were chatting about the day. He said a coworker of his had just married a girl from China. She recently moved to Canada and has been looking for work for a year. The coworker comes home after a long day and sees that dinner hasn't been cooked, laundry isn't done, the house is a mess, while the wife is sitting in front of the TV playing video games.

Hubby asks why she hasn't bothered to at least make dinner.

Wife replies, "Well, if you made more money, we would be eating out all the time."

Then she picks up the phone and orders takeout.

My reaction was something along the lines of a grimace.

"I wouldn't even know what to say to something like that," Matt said in exasperation. Eyes wide, fingers rigidly extended like they are gripping invisible stress balls.

There was a pause.

Then he said, almost in a whisper, "I love you."

"Why are you suddenly saying that?" I asked.

"I just felt it."

This was the first time he'd ever said that to me. In my dream sequence of the various ways he's going to confess, this was the definitely not one of them. Randomly and anticlimactically. I had longed to hear him say this. Tears were involved when I said I loved him months ago and he didn't say it back.

"I'd given up waiting for you to say this," I said, "I guess I already felt loved."

***

In an effort to launch my freelance writing career, I began writing movie reviews, travel articles, short stories, front of book health and fitness tips for magazines, and sending them out for publication. Most of the time after I pressed "Send" they disappear into a black hole and I never hear about them again. I don't even remember how many pitch letters I've sent. Other times, I receive a generic rejection letter and my whole day is ruined.

One day in October, Dandan asked me to translate the first chapter of my book as a sample. I did so very obligingly. Because being bilingual is different from being a translator. I worried that I wouldn't be able to carry forth the humour and nuance I'd painstakingly crafted from English to Chinese. At the back of my mind, I also worried if this is the best way forward. Are they the right people to make it the best book it can be? Do they fully understand all the English? I felt mildly heartbroken that my story won't be read in English, in its original form, that all the work I put into developing the prose won't be seen by Chinese readers, and that my beautiful sentences will be lost in translation. But it's not like I had tons of publishing offers on the table. So I did my best with translating the sample chapter. Every word was chosen with care, and every sentence was written then rewritten many times. I can't remember how many times I'd rewritten the opening. It took me a week of tinkering until at last I was satisfied enough to show it to Dandan. She polished it up with some minor edits and we decided it was a great piece of work.

Then one afternoon only a few weeks later, Dandan messaged me on IM to tell me that the proposal for my book had been "gunned down" or killed (as the term goes in Chinese publishing). She was indignant as she wasn't even present at the meeting.

The next few days were quite hazy. I glided around the house feeling a dull pain in my chest. I surprised myself by how quickly I went from being iffy about the deal to being completely devastated by the loss of the deal.

Meanwhile, Matt had to leave for Brazil again.

I dropped him off at the airport and watched him disappear behind the opaque doors of the security gate. Then I turned around and let out a heavy sigh. I felt tired and empty. It's that emptiness you feel after having been incredibly busy and then that all-important, all-consuming thing that took up your every minute of every day, is suddenly gone. You're left with all this time on your hands and you don't know what to do with yourself. That kind of empty.

My feet took me almost of their own accord to a nearby Starbucks. I ordered a drink, climbed onto a stool, set my stuff down on the chair next to me, and blew on my cup of green tea.

Staring past the Native Indian sculpture in the middle of the airport concourse, I gazed blankly at the blue-green carpet and remembered a question people used to ask me:

"Do you miss consulting?"

A lot of people asked if I miss consulting, the guys I date especially. I suppose nowadays financial stability is not only an attractive trait in men, but in women as well.

To be honest, I do miss it. I miss the money, the travel, the weekends spent at airports and seeing my friends in Toronto or Boston, effectively doubling my friend pool straddling two cities on a weekly basis. I miss the nice hotels and the air miles, the flying, the cabs, the per diems. I wasn't particularly trying to save money but I also didn't have a lot of time to spend money, nearly all my expenses were paid for, so the bank account balance grew of its own accord.

Consulting for me wasn't as extreme as George Clooney's Up in the Air. I didn't travel the country conducting the nasty business of firing people. I didn't live in a sparse apartment nor was I so lonely that I began having affairs with married men. Nope. I had a pretty cushy home to return to with a fully stocked fridge, and supportive parents to see on the weekends. And I racked up air miles like crazy. Not just from the flying but also from the expenses for hotels and the cabs. Anything paid for with AMEX corporate card accumulated points, which converted into air miles, which converted into freedom.

Now I only come to airports to pick up or drop off people. I don't fly anymore.

When Ed broke up with me, and I was heartbroken for the first six months, I really wanted to go back to being the girl I was before we had met. I wanted to erase the memory of us completely. But part of me well knew I could never go back there. That place doesn't exist anymore. And that left me with a sad sense of loss. Similarly, sometimes when I think about my career, I feel a sense of loss also. All the perks and prestige associated with my old job are gone with the wind. I can never go back to that place anymore.

Though I didn't know it at the time, nostalgia can be a dangerous distraction. It appears to be relatively harmless as it provides some level of comfort. But indulging in nostalgia can become "the perilous practice of comparing a current struggle with an edited version of the 'way things used to be,'" wrote Brene Brown in Rising Strong. The key word here is "edited", because memories are often sweetened by the passage of time. In remembering the good, I was forgetting that I had forgotten the bad.

With my book rejected and all my other attempts at publication either also rejected or engulfed by the spacial black hole, my mood was at an all-time low. The remembrance of Martin Luther King's quote only made me more anxious. He said, "If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward." But I wasn't moving forward. Even my three sentence movie reviews weren't getting picked up by newspapers. I wasn't walking, I wasn't even crawling.

Slowly and insistently, thoughts of London began to surface again.

But what about Matt?

I shared my distress with Matt over email, and he offered this crazy solution to my woes, "Maybe you should become a flight attendant. You'll get to travel and write and come back to Vancouver all the time."

Let it be a testimony to how much I love this guy that I gave his offer serious consideration.

Since Matt worked in the aviation industry, his coworkers were ripe with ideas for which airline is best to work for. Emirates was the unanimous winner. I looked up their website and was at once seduced by their uniform with its red hat and white veil. (Which can keep a sultan's consort glamorously outfitted for 1001 nights.) I had never been to the Middle East, which made the idea all the more alluring.

Matt and I decided that we would both apply for Emirates, since it would be good for both of us. He will work in avionics and I will work in cabin crew. We will both be based in Dubai. How marvelous.

I brushed up my resume, and wrote an extremely well thought-out cover letter, a true masterpiece. We then exchanged our applications to help each other edit. It was a lovely time, applying for Emirates together, the two of us striving toward a common goal. I felt simultaneously more deeply connected to Matt and myself. What often happens with relationships is we're afraid to rock the boat, and suppress desires for change for fear of upsetting the other person. I was so glad I opened up with Matt, and that we had come up with a solution together.

But what if I got in and he didn't? He told me he's not experienced enough. It'll be a long shot, but he sent in his resume anyway. What if he got in and I didn't? I decided that wasn't very likely since I'm such a nice person. The employer can see that. Clearly.

As the Emirates in-person recruitment date approached, by a strange stroke of luck, my friend Sarfraz introduced me to a former Emirates flight attendant, Pam.

Pam is a beautiful blonde with gentle green eyes. She worked for Emirates for nine months and hated it. The photos of her in Emirates' uniform were gorgeous though. Her lips were flowering red against a sheer white headscarf, with her cheeks tinted a soft pink. She looked like a glamorous supermodel whose runway lives in the sky. She said the first month with Emirates you have to go to Beauty Class for an entire week, where you'll get schooled on makeup, nails, hair, the precise shade of lipstick to use, and how to wear your hat – exactly two finger-widths above the brow, tilted slightly to the side. She told me she too had a boyfriend before she joined Emirates and thought she could see him all the time. But boy was she wrong. Emirates didn't fly to Vancouver or anywhere near Vancouver, and even if he visited her, Dubai didn't allow unmarried couples sleep in the same room. She said you're always breathing recycled air. It's terrible for your skin. Plus you're always cleaning up after people, dirty dishes, dirty diapers. For some folks it's their first time on an airplane, and sometimes they let themselves go in the aisles before they reach the toilet. So you have to scoop up poop. Sure Emirates puts you up in 5-star hotels, but when you're in a new town you're so tired, you don't even have the energy to leave the room. The hours are weird because of the time difference. She said she was sick twice and never had time to recover before being staffed onto long shifts again. She just kept on getting sick.

I asked if one could read or write when not serving food or drinks during long haul flights. She said no. some airlines allow it, but Emirates doesn't.

I thanked her for her time and came home feeling like I'm not sure if I still wanted the job. It wouldn't leave a lot of time for writing. But Emirates flies to Seattle now, which is only a short drive from Vancouver. My dad, who's the gentlest soul I know, spoke up against the job. He said these are terrible working conditions for the body. Being constantly jetlagged will mess up your internal clock. When you cannot sleep, you cannot perform at your peak. There's not a chance. You will be paying for it with your health.

Still I went ahead with it. I rewrote my resume as per Pam's instructions, downplaying my business experience and highlighting the one time I worked in a restaurant (leaving out the part where I held the coffee thermos upside down in front of an old gentleman and still failed to get the liquid out). I commenced to getting professional help with a photographer who was as artistic as he was non-judgemental – even when I asked him to make me look like Megan Fox. I researched like a librarian. I printed "Top 30 Cabin Crew Interview Questions" and wrote out my answers by hand, then memorized each one.

On the morning of the Emirates group Meet-And-Greet/interview, I rose early and meticulously put on my makeup, making sure not a single hair is out of place.

I tried so hard, and yet...

Still and again, they said no.