2013 in Review

On my side of the story, 2013 was a roller coaster ride. I had fun just as much as I shed my tears. It began with a splendid story; there were people who stayed and people who insisted on living under my radar. And then some of them go, some of them (the most precious ones) decided to stay, and some others were, well... I'm not sure. Of course, it's always easy to write about ourselves being the centre of the universe, being the victim of the situation. But the truth is, I am not afraid to say that I, too, have been written off from someone else's story and that's not entirely their fault.

But this year, I learned a lot about love. About fear. About my relationship with other people. It's true what they say, you can only help someone who wants to be helped. You have to love yourself. Don't spend your time helping people who don't wanna be helped. And don't just sit there wishing people would save you, because you are not the helpless citizen of Gotham City and people are not Batman.

Today might be a little early to start a review. But I will soon be flying west and this might be the last time in 2013 that I will be able to write here, so I'm going to give it a go. This journey might be a very necessary one, because by the time I got back, it would've been 2014. I hope the good things await you, and the bad things you will leave behind. I can only promise you one thing: this journey is going to make me come back as a different person. A better one, I hope, but if I don't, please always refer me back to this post where I promise you that. Please remind me that change could mean for the better, not just for worse. I would love to hear that from you.

So, without further ado, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone.

your editor-in-chief

Inspired by True Stories

Someone asked me very recently about my writing. They asked about the muse behind some posts I've written before, and whether there's only one muse behind all of the sad love posts or if some were about someone and some were about others.

I have to say that I've been inconsistent about who my muse was. It's not always about me; plenty of times it's someone else's story. They're definitely the people I know or met somewhere, they're real; but my brain is so fond of constantly making scripts that never happened in real life so I decided to write some of them here. But I do have one muse who was always behind my most favourite posts, and I called him by the name mathlete. 

I Will Wait

...might be the three most agonizing words known to human.

Because, who knows? Those who said it could really wait and cause themselves a lot of pain for the rewards they're after. Or, it could kill those who hear it because despite what they heard, when they open their door, or heart, or whatever it is, no one would be there. 

Detached

Apparently, that's the wrong response.

If I could see your face once more

Something strange happened today, and I thought you were behind all of it, which is, of course, very stupid. It's too unlikely. It couldn't be you, could it? Even after all these years, you still have that power over me. That power to make me think that the whole universe is in a long-term conspiracy to bring you back to me someday. Everyone says that I deserve my own fairy tale; but I deserve the truth too, and this is me facing it. Holding on to it. Because someday I will have no memory of it; of you. Someday, you, who was once a reality, will become an idea. A perfect (though romanticised) idea, that the world was once a good place to live in. And then it stroke me: you'll never be able to keep in touch with me again. I've lost that email; lost that one, single, unforgettable email you sent me some time after that. You couldn't ever find a way to talk to me again even if you want to someday; even if the lightning struck you and you lost your consciousness and woke up with some completely bizarre idea to call me. You can't. And I can't. So it's time to let it all go. 

Come Back and Haunt Me

Things to be excited about in December:

• New Year's Eve
• Christmas Day (and Eve, for that matter)
• The Christmas song they play everywhere. Some are religious, some are just plain fun.
• The movies they play around Christmas
• The almost constant rainy days (because they remind me so much of London)
• The snow (only if you live the in the Northern Hemisphere)
• Summer holiday! (granted, only for the Southern Hemisphere)
• Deadlines. So many to catch, so many excitement awaits when you prevail!
• End of the year sale.
• Prolonged family exposure (actually, it depends on the way you view your family)
• Even less family exposure (if you work in accounting and other fields that require to work extra at year end)
• Starbucks's famous red cups 
• Cheesy holiday movies (Cheers for 10YearsActually!)
• It always seems to be the perfect weather to listen to Coldplay. Because they're the perfect music to just feel naturally happy and sad at the same time. Or maybe that's just me, but they are.

The Subconscious' Work of Art

That's what subconscious minds do, you know?

They screw you, fuck with your mind, and there's not much that you can do about it. 

Sure, you can fight it. You can choose to fight it, making it your personal battle to win. But even if you came out the victor; even if you managed to go past what it made you think, you're never going to stop having that battle. 

You're still going to get bad dreams; nightmares that don't make sense to you because you think your life is good and anything better than this would be just overwhelming. You're still going to wake up one day, or at least just struck by an epiphany that maybe, what you are, is that you are scared. You have been, and you didn't even know that. 

I miss you the most at 2am.

It is not until you got to stay up at 3am all by yourself that you realise how much of your world was fucked up. That you end up regretting 80% of the things your say or do during the day, and that all your sadness, your despair and your desperation, though overwhelming, is never truly unprecedented. Someone somewhere has been there in your position. Someone somewhere has grown out of it, and so you would (and should) too. It was not until the clock reaches 4am that you realise that solitude is a luxury; you don't get much of that these days, when in fact it is only in those few solitary moments should you be thinking about yourself and not much else. It is only then, when you allow yourself to think of even the things you wouldn't let yourself think during the day: that you don't wanna be here. you wanna be somewhere else. you wish you were with someone else. you wish your choices had been different. you wanna be outside of it all. you think everyone is liar. you think your life is lousy. you think your happiness is simply a byproduct of your manufactured mind. you wish your life was different. you wish it's something you can be proud of. you wish you can look around and point to someone whose life you'd wanna have.

But all of that are the things your mind made up when you were in solitude. They don't last. When the sun rises, you are you again. The precedented you. The you, that may not be the honestly you, but are you nonetheless.

Footnotes for my daughter

Since you've been gone

It would be a lie to say that your leaving wasn't that much of a big deal for my life.

In fact, it changed so much, if not everything. Since there's no more you, there's no more annoyances that got me insane. No more reminder for me to keep being considerate about the things I say or do. Since there's no more you, I am more me. But I can't claim it my life anymore. Because my life wasn't supposed to be like this. My life was supposed to include you. You are supposed to be here. 

But you bailed. I'm not sure if it was your right to do so, or if it was merely based on your best of intentions. All I know is that you left, and maybe you're sorry that you do it, or maybe you're not. Sometimes I don't know what to call you. A piece of my past? My life? Or something that just went missing? For the record, missing things tend to be found somehow. But you probably don't even want to be found.

I can tell that you have absolutely no idea how much your action affect people around you, which coincidentally, includes the people around me. You don't know how much it hurt them, do you? You don't. You're lying if you said otherwise. You don't know how much their hurt means to me, okay? And you probably don't even care, because you're so busy with your own universe now. I get that. But has it ever crossed your mind before, that you are the only one actually suffering from your own action? And that me, and several other people in this world that you willingly left for your new one, are actually the ones who get the most benefits? 

I'd say benefits because now I get to learn a lesson or two. 

I learn that you are a human person; you have your own wants, needs, and your own idea of what life's supposed to be. There shouldn't be a norm to tell you how to live your life, because, why should there even be a norm at all? Norm is a man-made cause, God didn't create it, so He probably didn't even intend for the world to have any norms at all. So why even bother punishing people for their deviation from the norm? Huh?

I learn that I'm such a powerless human being after all. It's not just me, actually. It pains me to say this, but it's pretty much everyone. People often don't realise that they don't have the power to control the things they want to control. They rarely realise that they weren't exactly in charge of the important things in life. People are people; we're selfish, we think the world owe us something, we always think we deserve more, and worse, we think the world revolves around us when it really doesn't. And we should stop doing that because we're going to block the sun if we do. I guess what I'm saying is... I couldn't make you stay. I couldn't stop things from happening. Heck, I couldn't make things happen sometimes. But that's okay. Because I believe in The Higher Power, and it's a lot stronger than me. I can't make you stay, because if you want to leave, you should be allowed to. It's your life, not mine; no matter how much it affects me. Sometimes when life (and karma) is doing its job, you just gotta sit back and be on the ride, no matter how unenjoyable that would be. And that's exactly what I learned from you. I can try all I want; but I'm not you and you're not me. 

It would be a lie to say that I don't miss you. I do. Pretty much of my life was built around you, so it's hard to believe that I have to erase you from this time on. It would be like my past was a string of episodes where we still got one of the major stars in it, and somehow we stopped hiring and move on with the next episodes without the complete cast. It might look like I do it effortlessly; but that's me. I do things without even knowing. Remember when, back in high school, I went through hard days without ever feeling tired until one day I got knocked down by typhus? That's how I roll: I don't stumble. I simply just fall. 

I still believe you'll be back some day. It's out of my or anyone's ability to tell when or how, but I believe you will. I'm not going ahead of time, but I know you will. They believe it, with all their might; so I do too. I just hope that when the time has come, it won't be too late... for anyone. That all of these broken pieces are not beyond repair. And that you, and I, will say sorry. Because we've both made mistakes. And it is only by forgiving each other will we be freed from the misery. So that in the future, we can live with ourselves, despite all the good and bad, and the better and the worse.

And until that time, I wish you well. Simply because you deserve a happiness, too.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

It's been a very long time since the last I root for a literary character. Granted, I've been impressed with at least one character from every books I've read, but the last time that I rooted for one is with Leopold Gursky in The History of Love. Very recently, I root for Cassidy Thorpe from the young adult fiction The Beginning of Everything. 

Note: This is not a book review. You can see for it somewhere. I love the book, but this time I won't be talking about the book. I'm talking about a person. Who practically doesn't exist, but amazing nonetheless.

Cassidy Thorpe is not the first-person narrator of the story, but she's definitely the star. The reason why is simple. She's really bright; when I say bright it means she's both smart and beautiful, and really, really interesting. She is a debate champion who just transferred from a prep school to public school in a small town. Like almost every other girl the young adult novel's boys fall in love with, she's hiding something that makes her thoroughly mysterious and enigmatic at the same time. Anyway, she's also funny and cheerful, and a lot like the infamous Summer Finn from 500 Days of Summer. Her personality is something that leaves people imagining what she's really like. She casually refers things to Shakespeare and recite lines from poems by Mary Oliver that none of her friends ever heard of. She knows words in foreign languages that can describe a moment that English fails to do. Basically, she's your standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

I love her character for all the aforementioned things, but I root for her primarily because of her sense of reality. She refused to be someone's dream girl just because she seems to be one. She wants people to know that she can be superior; but she doesn't become a jerk about it. And most importantly, because she has the ability that is so lacking in people these days: knowing when to stop.

Girl on a Mission

Some of you might realize that I've been reading a lot these days. I've been reading and re-reading so much that sometimes I forgot that I have a life I have to live. I'm not going to claim myself as an advanced reader, because I know I'm not. Maybe someday, but definitely not today. But reading has always been a big part of me that probably isn't never really gone. Growing up, I'm an avid reader of comic books and encyclopedias and some other books that I don't know where to place in my bookshelf. From there, I started to write my own stories and blogs and thus I am what you see today. I guess somewhere along middle school and high school I got caught up with something that I ended up reading less. Of course, during that time, even though I wasn't into books, I was really into magazines that when I traveled, my bags got heavy with the local magazines I bought in each cities I visited. When I started college, my major requires me to do a lot of reading and perhaps nothing else, and reading fiction has been my way of training my brain to get used to reading super thick boring books, and so far, it's been working quiet well! I found this A to Z bookish survey from The Perpetual Page Turner and when I did it, I realize now that I'm so lacking in reading capability that I promise myself I would start reading more in the new year to come. It's kind of a challenge; and we'll see where this challenge might take me. 

Author you’ve read the most books from:

It's a tie between Jonathan Safran Foer and John Green, actually. Oh, and David Levithan. I know, some people think I'm very melancholic based on my reading preferences, but really, they write gold.

Best Sequel Ever:

I don't really read series (I really don't), but I'm gonna have to say... Andrea Hirata's Edensor. It's always the part where it gets so dark that gets them to see the light that had me.

Currently Reading:

Simon Van Booy's The Secret Lives of People in Love and the famous Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.

Drink of Choice While Reading:

Tea in general. Starbucks' green tea latte, to be specific.

E-reader or Physical Book?

I'm actually more into physical books (I know, I'm so old school) But it's hard to find the books I wanna read in print, so I had to deal with e-readers these days. Anyway, e-reader's great for reading after the light's out, so it's quiet convenient.

Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School:

Phineas from John Knowles' A Separate Peace. Or Wes from Sarah Dessen's The Truth About Forever.

Glad You Gave This Book A Chance:

Speechless by Hannah Harrington.

Hidden Gem Book:

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I will forever reminisce this book.

Important Moment in your Reading Life:

Discovering that I love historical fiction. And that I could learn so much from them. I only have realized this after finishing Leila S. Chudori's Pulang and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.

Just Finished:

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Kinds of Books You Won’t Read:

Erotica. I just... don't. If I want to read some sex why not see porn anyway?

Longest Book You’ve Read:

Titik Nol by Agustinus Wibowo (568 p)

I know, this is quiet embarrassing that I never really read a thick book. I promise I'm going to read something more in the future. I promise.

Major book hangover because of:

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. It's so good that I can feel Esther Greenwood in my heart and somehow it gets to the point where it made me think of how depressing this whole life is. It's hard to get over this book, somehow.

Number of Bookcases You Own:

3. Two drawers at home and one in my apartment.

One Book You Have Read Multiple Times:

One Day by David Nicholls. I really like Emma and Dex. I really like the sense of reality the entire story has to offer. It's like reading someone's life forewarned, you know?

Preferred Place To Read:

In bed. And strangely, in a commuting train.

Quote that inspires you/gives you all the feels from a book you’ve read:

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem." from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Reading Regret:

I regret not reading the entire Harry Potter series. And Lord of The Rings. I really do. Now I can't seem to find the time. *sigh.

Series You Started And Need To Finish(all books are out in series):

The Selection series by Kiera Cass. Thankyouverymuch.

Three of your All-Time Favorite Books:

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

Unapologetic Fangirl For:

The famous Ika Natassa novels. They're great, yeah. The only downside is how very typical all the women are, and how they are such a feminist and a non-feminist at the same time (they're such a girl). But the men are... sawoon~

Very Excited For This Release More Than All The Others:

Landline by Rainbow Rowell. See how much I've become so fond of Rowell? 

Worst Bookish Habit:

I bring my paperbacks every where in my bag, and they always end up rumpled, or dirty, or both. Even I hate myself for that.

X Marks The Spot: Start at the top left of your shelf and pick the 27th book:

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

A little story about this book: I really like Rob, for some very vague reasons, actually. So I ended up downloading all the songs mentioned in the book, and I don't like all of them but I enjoyed them.

Your latest book purchase:

Love & Misadventure by Lang Leav. I'm rarely into poetry, but hers is good. Recommended.

ZZZ-snatcher book (last book that kept you up WAY late):

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb.

The book is about living in a country full of terror from God knows who's actually ruling the nation, and I can't help but feeling terrorized that I couldn't go to sleep before finishing the book. It's pretty inspiring though, so there you have it.

The Heroine of the Maladies

Malala Yousafzai is the girl we know as the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2013 who fought for girls' education in her homeland Pakistan, and shot at the head by the Taliban one day after school. Her fearless memoir, I am Malala is a book voiced by a girl who loves her country so much in spite of what it has to offer her. In her tender age, she has chosen her battle: fighting for girls' right to education in her country, after seeing so many illiterate people in Pakistan living in endless misery. She was believed to be teaching westernization in a country so busy trying to fight for Islam, when all they do is straying away from the true teachings of the religion. In a culture so fond of sons, Malala stands taller and does so much more than what the sons of Pakistan can do. She has made some people back at home proud to have a daughter,and later on after the shooting she was referred to as the 'daughter of Pakistan'. She is only 16 when they nominate her to be the youngest ever Nobel laureate, and even though she might be small and young, she soars higher than other people much older than her. She didn't win, but that's alright. She's young, and there's still more battle for her to fight; the battle her idol, Benazir Bhutto, could not win as she was killed in a bombed accident. Reading her memoir broke my heart in ways I did not know possible. She believed in humanity, when people behead and slaughter other people in daylight; she fights for education, in a nation where all they could think about was how to build a good military system, winning over India and never turning into their poor neighbor, Afghanistan. It is such an atrocious world she lives in; but she proves that you don't have to be brutal to survive. As Ban Ki-Moon stated, "By targeting her, extremists showed what they feared most: a girl with a book."

Camaraderie

For all my life,

               I'll wonder why

source

She is loving him still after all this time

The day was early, and the sun was already shining bright. 
We had matching white shirt; I know it meant nothing because so did a hundred other people there. But I was glad we did.
You look different. Bigger. Better. Older.
You grew up. And I believe so did I.
That small electricity under my skin when I saw you; it used to be a lot like love, but I guess it's more of an obsession now.
I don't know what to call you, though. An obsession? A past? A stupid mistake? The one that got away? The untouchable? A hopeless dream? The one I will always have feelings for? What?
I know the small details about you; just the way kids do when they think they have a crush on someone.
I know the struggle you're facing, and in some ways we're very similar that way.
But I don't know you. And you don't know me.
In a way, maybe this is the way I've always wanted us to be. 
Perfect strangers.
Because strangers will never hate each other. Because strangers have the appeal to always be the mystery we want to solve, and you can be that for me. A mystery. A case I will never close. The one thing that will keep me going.
You should stop feeling like you're useless. Because you're not. You've been a big part of my life, and you don't even know it. 
Across a park, a stolen glance.
A lifetime of wondering if I'll ever see you again.

The last two lines were inspired by Iain Thomas's I Wrote This For You blog. 

Shakespeare is a Half-God

I can be very personally involved with some fictional books, and Gayle Forman's Just One Day is one of the most remarkable books I've known. It has so many links to my side of life that I've been sharing in this blog; the one that I don't let out every so often. Most of you must have realized how different the me who's writing the whole posts in the blog and the me in real, everyday life. I can say that this book touches the me whose head is in the clouds and sometimes too far from the ground.

The premise alone was exactly the way I'd imagined true romance should started. It was actually my friend's idea when we had this light conversation of a dream romance (with mine being posted previously here). The idea was to travel somewhere in England and meet a striking stranger who happens to be very nice and spontaneous, so much that he asked the girl to get lost somewhere she's never been to. And while they're there, he'd ask her to get even more lost than they already are. It just adds to my pleasure that the guy in this book, Willem, is a carefree Dutch who act in Shakespearian plays, speaks fluent French, and happens to be a well-traveled person who can talk about love just as deep as he talks about his art. Not to mention how it is set mostly in Paris and Amsterdam; the two places I would like call home someday, because they're just that enchanting. And even better: Stratford-upon-Avon, the place Shakespeare would like to call home; and London. And you know how I feel about that city. 

Apart from that very personal experience, what makes me like this book so much is how I could go from disliking the heroine of the story, Allyson, to admiring her since the last quarter of the book. I can see how she, through what made her seem so lost as a person, could actually find who she is and finally deciding her life. I'm pretty sure each one of us had thought, at least for once, to change our vocations. To take a road that we're so wanting to take but didn't, because it's not considered good by people around us. But sometimes the way to know what we shouldn't do is by doing what we're not supposed to do. It may be easier to be said than done, but that alone is a sign that our heroine in the book is a girl with such determination to finally decide for her own life, and I guess in some ways, that's the kind of person we should look up to. 

Human Life Estimation

The Book Thief is the kind of book that gives you a chance to view life from a perspective that's not human's. I learn as much about mankind as I did from David Levithan's Every Day. It's a very well-written book about a German girl during the Nazi Germany era. There's so many books about the holocaust written from the Jewish perspective, so it's certainly a breathe of fresh air to read from a German family's point of view. A German family that's not blindly crazy about Der Führer, that is. Narrated by Death, it's a story about a series of unfortunate events happening to a little girl during the war. Her foster family was so poor; and she seek happiness through stealing books even though books are not edible. It's not so much about how really devious the Nazis were. It's more about how, even in desperate times like 1942 Germany, human are still capable of kindness and good. How even during the authority's threat, one can still exercise their belief in humanity towards fellow humans. How, despite all the teachings by the powerful, wrongful leader, the book's protagonists can still see the Jews as just human. 

Through Zusak's words, I can almost believe that I was there; that I lived in the '40s, have lived to see the two world wars, and was constantly in danger of being blown off by the Allies' attacks. I learn from Death that... Humans are so many things; and even Death, the one thing humans are always worried about, is constantly fascinated of how humans are virtuous and evil, and at the same time, mostly made of water. 

Myth

I feel like men are more romantic than women.  When we get married we marry one girl. Cause we’re resistent the whole way, until we meet one girl and we think: “I’d be an idiot if I didn’t marry this girl she’s so great.” But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option or something. I know girls that married they’re like: “Oh he’s got a good job.” I mean, they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who’s got a good job and is gonna stick around.

When we were little, we were told all these fairy tales of how a beautiful, kind and pure girl would fall in love with a handsome, rich prince charming who owns a castle and they will live happily ever after in a faraway land. But not only do happily ever afters don't exist, so is the kind of story they keep telling us as bedtime stories.

In real life, there is only very few people would fall in love with someone's voice the way Phillip fell for Aurora. No one is going to have the kind of love at first sight Marius had with Cosette. And there are so many other beautiful ways about falling in love that movies and fairy tales tried to make us believe, but they're ridiculously impractical to the point of them almost being completely impossible.

Very recently, I had an epiphany. Maybe there's no love. Maybe people get married out of the commitment to build a life, a traditions our ancestors did to sustain human life, and that alone is the reason why there's marriage in this world. Maybe people don't fall in love; they fall in logic or whatever it is that drives them toward someone. Some people like money, fancy cars, bright future, career, social status, or someone's lifestyle... And maybe they are the things that make marriages more sustainable. Because only very few people fall in love with the right person. But the definition of right will always change to suit someone's perception of life. So I guess it's something other than love that takes people to get married.

My view in marriage is somewhat very... modern, I suppose? That's what Before Midnight say anyway. I believe that every couples have an expiration, because love does. Only very, very few people found someone that they can fall in love with every day for the rest of their lives. And those who didn't, well... They live out of commitments. Marriage is a vow people say in the name of God and in front of God, and therefore it is a very sacred institution that should never be broken with words such as, "I fall out of love with him."

By that definition, I think that maybe we marry someone who has the same vision with us; the same commitment, i.e. someone whose actions and missions are tolerable and in harmony with ours, and whom we will never run out of patience with. I grew up with the belief that love isn't the holy grail of relationships; it's commitment. Someone said to me a few years ago something the 18-year-old me had never thought of: "Commitment is a very big thing, you know? You graduate school, you take a decent job, you marry someone you like, and that's what you're gonna end up with forever. A job that you must do every day; the same person you're gonna wake up to every morning for the rest of your life; the same house you're gonna go home to every day; children you have to feed and educate and has the needs you have to fulfill... It's a grand job, you know? And you have to do it every single day of your life. You have no other choice. That is a commitment. You think commitment is easy?"

I know, it's such a morose essay and my last post before this one is an optimistic quote to remind us all that sometimes, life does imitate Disney movies. And while it is your life to live it any way you want to, with the kind of buoyancy my last post gave you, or the grimy truth I just told you, I want you to always keep in mind that after all... It's your life. No one has the same story. Just because you have a good life doesn't mean someone else does, and vice versa. So maybe the best that we can do is still to believe that if we are good, we deserve good things too. And if they're not here yet, maybe the package just come in late. 

Optimism Could Work Sometimes

Sometimes you have to look at the facts and experiences, and realize that sometimes, true love is fate, sometimes its completely Disney choreographed, and sometimes it is the result of intense restraint to keep things in a state of bliss because indifference is its killer. 

 source

A Thought List

1. Strangers are weird. Most of the time they teach you without talking, that the society is shit and no one seems to be up to fix it. Sometimes they make the best conversations I could ever remember, even without knowing their names. And sometimes they could do the simple things they thought mean nothing, when in fact it touches the very soul of someone who's never seen it done with such voluntary notions. Some of them have the power to make you think, and the power to remind you that no matter how ugly the real world is, there is still some kindness and some faith worth investing in people. Well, some people, maybe. I'm not saying we're allowed to be naive, no. I'm saying that it's okay to let our guards down sometimes. It's okay to let people talk to you and trust them a little bit; a trust that they won't rob you and left you somewhere in the highway. Because life without trust is so uncomfortable, you know? Life without trust keeps you in constant worry, never-ending restlessness and a mind filled with so many "what if?" "why?" "how?" and other questions you shouldn't punish yourself with. After all, there wouldn't be a Before Sunrise trilogy if Richard Linklater hadn't talked to a mesmerizing stranger on his way to Philadelphia some decades ago. 

2. We need to stop playing God. Seriously. I mean, the only way it's okay for us to play God is by writing fiction; that way we can do whatever we want with it. Literally whatever. Seriously, stop playing God. God doesn't play mortals either. He could if He wanted to, but can you imagine what would happen if He does?

3. I can never be with someone who doesn't like The Beatles. There, I've even settled for like. I refuse to admit that I know someone who doesn't even know who John Lennon is, or what he looked like. 

4. Jodoh has an expiration date. I'm not talking in the context of soul mate, because who even has the right to talk about it, really? Do we have the right to talk about what we will never know until we take our last breath in this world? But I'm talking about the jodoh terminology Indonesian people use to say to people or thing that are "meant to be". I don't know if you'd understand, but they do. You know, how you get to know people, become friends or lovers with them, and so on? It's because you're meant to be. And when things end, it's not because you weren't meant to be; it's merely because you've come to the expiration date that's always there. I don't know if it's because your star crossed with them but then they keep revolving in a different harmony with you, because for me, the simplest explanation would be an expiration date. Heck, even the old couples who've been together for 70 years have it too. It's just different for everybody. When things fail, instead of saying how you're not meant to be, our definition of it should be rendered into, "Ya memang cuma segini aja jodohnya." 

5. Why point #4? Because God never made a mistake. When He sent someone to come into our lives, He'd know what they'd become to us. A blessing, or a lesson. Sometimes a blessing, then a lesson. But thankfully, it's usually the other way around.

6. I've been mentioning God in this post is not because I just recently found God and become religious etc. I don't really have an answer to this, because I was never necessarily religious in any context. I usually claim myself as being spiritual, while at the same time always coming back to the same religion. One thing I know for sure is that it's always nice to have God. Just like trust and faith aforementioned in point #1, knowing that there is God would make life seems to be more comfortable. And easier.

7. Don't wear your heart on your sleeves. I used to encourage some people to do it, and now they do it in the most annoying way possible. What's too much is never good. Even too much love is gonna kill you. Alright, do it. Wear your heart on your sleeves. But always remember to leave something for you. Don't let people know everything. Only very few people really care. Others are just curious. True story.

8. Feminism is an -ism that even most women don't want to believe in. It used to be a heroic movement for women because it's a man's man's world after all. But feminism is now more like a doctrine men made to make fun of the women and make women hate themselves. I'm not a feminist. I believe in a lot of women's rights and women emancipation and blah blah, but women have to admit that they don't always demand gender equality. Because it's always nice to, once in a while, be treated the way women should be treated. Dare any lady say no about this?

9. Not knowing is always a gift. And bravery is always a rewarding act. 

Fantasy Girl

Everyone's got one. It's a tale as old as time, and everyone's got one.

We will always have each other's backs. We will always want to talk to each other after a rough day. We will always want to make each other laugh, and stop each other from weeping. We will always want to fight the bad guys who tend to ruin our days. We will always want to see each other in each of our own big days. We will always love each other. We'll always be in the same team. And when something's going on, we'd like to tell each other about it. We wish we could be there to witness it together. And thought that had we been there at the same time, it could be more awesome. Like nothing's cool without you and me.

Everyone's got that one person. Everyone's got the Robin to their Ted, and a Ted to their Robin. But just like them, it really doesn't mean that we should be together.

We will always have something that brought us together, a force though invisible but still very hard to be ignored. But we were not planted from the same seed. We are not rooted to the same core. We got entangled in so many ways, but when it comes to the basics, we're just never the same person. We will always want different things. Things that are very principal; almost non-negotiable, and if they were, we would be less of the person we'd fallen in love with. What we want is never to share a life together. It's always more about sharing two lives together, and so that means we just shouldn't live in the same life. Because we might be great at crossing paths; but it's just impossible for us to walk on the same path together. We might be great for short-term visions, but our long-terms don't have a future.

So, you're my Ted. The always amorous, sweet, classic melancholic Ted. And, I can always be your Robin; like the bird robin, I will always wanna fly without baggages. Maybe someday I would like to retire flying and just watching the others bird fly from the land, but even when that day comes, I won't be with you. We probably will still talk and say how we miss each other every day. But you and I, were never built to be in the same life together.