Maybe

We met by chance.

Or rather, we never actually met.

I don't know how tall (or short) you are. I don't know how your voice sounds like. How the curls of your hair sit on your head, or how rough your skin feels due to your hard work. I don't even know how thick your accent is, or the gestures your hands make when you speak, but I suspect you have them.

And also, you don't know me either.

You don't know what I do. You don't know what kind of paradox I am. You don't know how I can go from smiling, feeling genuinely happy one second and then listening to a very sad, melancholic song the next because I intentionally want to cry. How really shrill my voice is, or how I squeeze my hands so often someone might think I'm a puncher. You don't know how good my hair smells, or how I have a thousand different shades of nude lipstick at my disposal every day.

We may talk like we've known each other since childhood. Like I used to come around to your house and run around your backyard while your mother makes cupcakes. Like you used to pull my ponytail at school to make you look like a tough guy, but never missed a chance to pick some wild flowers for me on the way back home. But the truth of the matter is, we know nothing about each other.

We're aliens.

I didn't expect to hear anything from you ever again since the last time we made contact, until you appeared in my inbox once again. You were looking back at the camera, standing on a small bridge, and a charming Italian town behind you. I can clearly see peach-washed houses and bikes and brown-haired people on the background. You were smiling so brightly I didn't remember you to be this cute. The caption reads, Get a house here, maybe?

I smiled. You remember my dreams.

So maybe that's why I never forget you in my dreams.

The Ideal Lover

I probably would've attempted suicide too if I lost someone with whom I can just do this.

I always said that love would be so much easier if I could find someone who's just like me. Someone who listens to same music as I do. Someone who likes to watch reality shows just as much as a serious drama with long pauses and a bunch of award nominations associated with it. It would be a lot easier if it's with someone who likes to read the same stuff I do. It would've been the best thing in the world to be with someone who mirrors you; whom you don't have to try so hard to relate because you can even guess how his mind works and complete his sentences when he's nose deep into something that he's reading.

And then I met you. Like I won the lottery. Seven billion people on the planet, and I found you.

The world wide web is a mysterious place, but I found you. I befriended you anywhere you are on the internet until you recognize me. This is the most ideal way to find a soulmate, I told myself. This is how you could easily find out if someone is compatible with you. You like the same things, talk the same way, and you think the way I do. I'm impressed. I found you.

You.

The taller, darker, skinnier version me. With a dick.

I guess I proved my theory right because it was so easy to love you. It was so easy to imagine how to spend the rest of the time--not just my life--with you. We could always just step into a cafe, murmur the song they played and found out that we've loved that song since high school. We could list down the movies we've watched for the umpteenth time and the movies we couldn't wait to see and most of them matched. We could just sit down on the sofa, reading the books we recommend to each other and loving it--because we love the same things and we never had to guess what the other person is going to like. If you like it, I'll like it. And I didn't even have to lie.

But everyone has issues, and ours is self-loathing. I hate myself every now and then, here and there, that was also mirrored in you. I hate you because you remind me of myself, and I remind you of some parts of yourself you are still not at peace with. We are dealing with the same issues and we don't know how to cure it.

It's too late now to leave. You are stuck with me and I am stuck with you. Seven billion people on the planet, and I have to be stuck with you. 

I still know you well. I know when you will be hungry, when you will need some fresh air and sit on the back porch, reading that lousy Tolstoy book you brought to our first meeting. I know when you will call me and ask if it was time for you to feed the dogs, or trim the bonsai trees, or make an afternoon tea. I still know you very well.

I just didn't know when you start losing me, or I'm losing you, and now it was all just a story of make believe.

Precedents

Hi. Thank you for picking up Shirley and Audrey from their ballet school. I tried to leave my desk just in time, but then that client from Tokyo called and he needs me to save his bourgeois ass. I am so glad your meeting with the Russian gentlemen ended early. It meant a lot to me, and perhaps much more to the girls, because finally their pals get to see the man they're always so proud of. They always had their nanny took them for ice cream straight after ballet, but never did they have their father taking them shopping to get some girly, good luck charm for their recital! Audrey said it made her so happy to see you before dark, before she was tucked in bed, ready for her princess sleep. And Shirley, she thought you looked rather handsome than your usual tired-on-the-weekend self. I know you were excited too; we never deny the fact that these corporate jobs corrupted the time we should've spent with them, but there is nothing we can do as we love these jobs almost as much as we love to see them having the life they deserve. You kept assuring me that they'll be fine. They'll be okay. We're doing the best we can, and it will affect them. They will try to be the best version they can be, too. There are precedents. There may not be a lot, but there are success stories. And I want to believe that. I want so badly to believe that. 

Hemingway said it right

You can have all of your smart books that talks about the history, or war, or some great minds from the past that you admire since grade 10, and I will happily read a magazine or some literary piece you never quiet get. And you will quote Shakespeare, one that you got from the internet because you know they put me to sleep though you can never read it, and I will call you Che or Albert or some other names from the heavy books you keep in your night stand because you want to sound like a hero, even for just a second. 

Love Story

You said you studied environmental engineering in college, but you write as much as Kerouac. Your words springs out of every pages you tore out of everywhere and they sound better than mine. It was a hot summer night at the park, we lied on the wet grass, gazing at the stars. You suck in astronomy, so instead of telling me if it was Orion or Centaur, you made up your own stories of the constellation with superhero names. And that's when you kneeled down and asked me if I wouldn't mind wearing a man on my finger for the rest of my life. Why couldn't you just say Harry Winston? My tears were flowing and I feel like such an idiot. You wipe out the tears off my cheek and whispered if I don't say yes, you'd run around this garden in your birthday suit. How terrifying. So I said yes. You smiled wider than the last time I saw Julia Roberts' genuinely happy photograph. And, my dear, that is how our adventures began. You took me to watch Russian ballet in Moscow and depart on a 7 days Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok. We took pop dance lesson in South Korea and taught ourselves to consume the disgusting Ginseng. We blacked out after blowfish sushi in a fancy Ginza sushi place, And I thought that was it. We die. But when I awake, you were holding my hand, walking the streets of Montmartre half-drunken of too much bubbles. We just saw the Moulin Rouge, you said, and I hated that no one looked like Nicole Kidman there. And then we jumped, to this magnificent place called Broadway. You love Les Mis, but I wanted to see something more cheerful so we see Wicked. I love Fiyero. But I love you more because you actually have some brains inside your head. You said you love Eponine, but you love me more because I don't have to die in your arms during the French revolution. Her fate sucks. The next morning, we were in Rio. All the beautiful beaches and girls who resemble Gisele Bundchen were so overwhelming, it feels more like a honeymoon. And you know what, when I took my sunglasses off, we were under the warm, slightly dim Tuscany sun. The children ran around making a big mess that their nannies had to clean up. And soon, our son flew to London to play football for a major club. And soon, his sister moved out to live with her girls and pursue a career as a writer. And the little one? Oh, I really can't let go of him but he really needs to go: off to the moon, in his astronaut's suit. We grew old together, my dear. We did it. We made it. We have loved and love has made of us. Let's grow even older together. We'll get there. We can do it.

The day I fell in love with your brain

"When I was 4 and ready to read books, I picked up my Dad's collection of Dahl's children stories. Mathilda blew my mind. She was my idea of the girl I'm going to marry: quirky as hell. I keep reading lots and lots of books from his library—his was so full of books it was like the inside of Beast's, you know, of Beauty and The Beast?—until one day I started reading Tolkien. I stopped wanting to read any other fantasy novels since then. I keep reading and reading, fell in love with Hemingway and Vonnegut... and at one point I was very into David Foster Wallace and James Joyce. But up until college starts, I lost track of who's who in literature, it's like New York breeds a new amazing name every week, and then I read Tolstoy. Who's not going to fall in love with War and Peace? It's clearly the most amazing novel I've ever read! Don't get me wrong, I really like Anna Karenina too, who won't? But while everyone thinks she's a miserable married woman, I think she's just naturally a bitch. It's probably just because of my mom being someone else's husband just days after he divorced my dad, but let's not talk about that. Anyway, have you read Dostoyevsky? I first read The Brothers Karamazov when I was in high school, and everyone thought of me as a freak because I finished it in about a week while it took me the whole term to finish The Catcher in The Rye. The thing with Holden for me is simple. I was a teenager, he was a teenager, but only one of us was being a jerk about it, and that's him. And just very recently, I finished Crime and Punishment once again. It's probably my eighth time. Russian novels are brilliant; they give you the kind of narration that's just impossible for people living in the first world like us. They can give you 50 pages description of some girl sleeping, and that's not an exaggeration. Sometimes I wish I were born Russian, blessed with the intelligence to love someone who's going to inspire me to write a novel like Fyodor. Now, I'm calling him by his first name. That's... embarrassing." 

Folk tales sung by the birds

You started it all in Amsterdam. I wish you didn't have to pass me by on your lovely bike, ornamented with carnations on both ends. I wish you didn't have to stop to ask me whether I needed to ask someone for the train to go to Rijk's Museum. I can read maps, you know? Clearly you underestimated me. But I can't believe I gave up to the temptation of stealing someone's bike from one of the corner of the streets, and followed you down there. But oh boy, was the cheap ice cream the only thing I got. Rijk's was closed; you said Van Gogh wasn't ready to see me. I can't believe I laughed. But you deserved it anyway.

I hated Paris. The Eiffel tower is merely a landmark for me; everything is always related to Napoleon, and he was not even a nice guy, why are they so proud of the man who was not genetically French at all? But there, right on the deck of one of those Seine boats, you told me your own version of Notre Dame, and your own version of how Sacre Coeur was built, and the real story about how you broke up with your high school sweetheart in Pont Neuf during the sunset. We agreed that people were wrong about Paris, it's only great for its pretentiousness. But we agreed that people were right about something: Paris does things to people. Things that are so magical, you didn't even know they exist.

"Why are we in Bruges?" I asked.

"So that you remember, fairy tales came from the minds of people who live in the real life. This is the closest that we can be to fairy tales, and I want you to still believe in them. One day, you will be old enough to start reading it again. Yeah, that was C.S. Lewis, though." and you laughed.

I couldn't believe we have the same favorite spot in Lucerne, or Luzern, as the natives call it. I was never fluent in Latin, and you translated the words carved on the monument, the story behind it, and what Mark Twain had to say about the lion. I wish you didn't have to explain them to me. I wish you didn't have to stare at the lion the way I stared at it; at least you could've done it some other time, some place other than next to me. As we walked back to a less sheltered place than the monument, you told me one thing I will always carry in my boots, "Don't confuse love with madness."

I don't know how we decided to go to the Spanish Steps on a Saturday evening. It was full of people; people who awaits for their friends, people who were hipster enough to hang out there, people who's on a Roman Holiday, people who's taking pictures, people who's made good use of their credit cards in Gucci... People. You told me to go buy a Prada handkerchief for my mom. You told me to walk a few meters away and throw some coins into the Trevi Fountain. You told me that all good things, like the Roman Empire, no matter how powerful it was, comes to an end. You told me that if you try to flash back some memories, it's like reading a Russian novel, where every second, every small details, counts. In other words, you told me that we had a great time, so this is good bye.

One Sunday Morning

I look down through my window that particular morning, and this is what I see. I cannot say more than "I love you."