In Bernard Chauly’s 2012 rom-com Istanbul Aku Datang!, there’s a three-minute scene of Harris (Beto Kusyairy) washing melting ice cream out of Dian’s (Lisa Surihani) hair. Moments earlier, Dian — who had travelled to Istanbul to be closer to her long-term boyfriend, Azad — discovered he has a new girlfriend. Devastated, she gets into a catfight with the girlfriend that ends with two cones of ice cream in her hair, and stumbles back to the house she happens to share with Harris, up until then a stranger turned frenemy. The scene just shifts the film’s tone into something gentler, becoming a benchmark for young hopeless romantics everywhere — not the idea that your one true love might just be your accidental housemate, but that their first act of love toward you is care.

That scene is what comes to mind when I listen to the slow-burning chorus of Megat Fazly’s “Sementara Kau Ada,” from his debut album Terma dan Syarat. It’s the longest track on the record, running nearly six minutes, but the length is earned through patience. The song, like the rest of the album, isn’t worlds away from his work with his brothers in Mafidz — the folk-pop savant that only gets more exciting with time — but “Sementara Kau Ada” carries small, deliberate details that give his solo work its own identity: a more personal narration, Aizad Khan’s bass and Zaiff Sharqil’s violin working as core characters rather than mere accompaniment, and the stamped, repetitive choruses that recur across most of the album. That repetition could easily grow tiresome, but within the context of this song — and pop music generally — it always earns its keep.

“Sementara Kau Ada” brushes off the idea that early love has to be grand. The narrator offers his partner emotional security, but instead of ostentatious promises, he speaks it through mundane, everyday acts of service — a quiet vow to wash her hair, to massage her feet after a long day, sung over gentle, ASMR-like sounds of running water, with the lilting violin and warm bass lulling underneath. I can’t remember the last time a Malay pop song dared to be interesting enough to profess love through such humdrum gestures and still made it feel large enough to stretch across the universe. It’s less about the narrator’s own feelings than about what he can offer — a rebuttal to the notion that love has to be reciprocal, when so much of it is given without anyone keeping score. Who’s counting?

There’s a reason why that scene from Istanbul Aku Datang! still sticks with audiences over a decade later, leaving the generation who grew up on Dian and Harris’s story nostalgic for a time when rom-coms let true love unfold in such small, gentle strokes. Shot in close-up, the scene follows Harris’s hands as they wash the ice cream from Dian’s hair, her eyes teary and confused, his fingers moving slowly as the water runs between them. Bernard Chauly’s composition of selfless love — offered even when forever is yet to be guaranteed — is enough to tug at the heart. Megat Fazly expands that same feeling into this song, and does it effortlessly.