What am I supposed to tell you to start her story?
That she first saw me on that sunny April morning while waiting in long lines of students not so eager to wait for their turns to enter the University Student Center and get a hold of their class receipts to be able to go home early. That in that exact moment she was transported to a narrow side street of the fashionable neighborhood of Harajuku with Murakami and his ‘On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl On A Beautiful April Morning”. It’s just that I had something in my hands, not nothing but a fat bank check for my tuition fee and she had a wad of cash instead a white crisp envelope with no stamp. And that it was year 2010 and not 1981. And that we were barely twenty and not thirty something year old male and female species who believe that if we were really meant for each other, one way or another, we will find each other amidst winters and influenza. I can bet my new Mazda sports car on that. The thought of it made her giggle inside. The idea of changing the title to 100% Perfect Boy made her laugh. She vowed not to tell anyone about it. I doubted.
A few seconds later, she heard my voice and that it sent shivers down her spine. She looked at me and in that instance she realized it was like in a Jerry Maguire movie and she was now Dorothy Boyd. ‘You had me at hello’. Of course she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything to me at all. I just had her for something else.
I turned my back on her and decided to go on with my life for that entire summer of 2010. Studying my notes on business and law. Preppy duties. Call of student nature.
I may have noticed her on those long summer classes. Maybe pass along her the hallway. Seen her go inside my study hall to campaign for Dick Gordon with all those political paraphernalia of hers. Talked to that Korean looking guy on the front row. Sit on the wooden bench outside the department head office pretending not to care about the rest of the world during lunch time. At the Photocopying Center of the building with two of her closest friends, shaking her head as if to say her disapproval, notes on hand, eyes looking straight back at me with those bright red frames of her eyeglasses. She might like the color red, I guess. And yes, on that particular two-hour long afternoon managerial lecture class where she seated on the front row and I happened to be sitting on the back part of the hall beside someone else, talking. And if she looked behind her before every person on that class came, she might see me and that someone else. And if only she cared to gaze around the room instead of arguing with a classmate of hers named Ron about some price and quantity variances tutorial session before the professor entered and before I left the room to attend my class and said goodbye to that someone, she might noticed that I am someone else’s someone else and that she may not have to endure a year and a half shitload of college ‘love’ longing. And so that she didn’t end up becoming more miserable than Michael Cera’s best friend on ‘Youth In Revolt’ that is more miserable than Michael Cera’s character Nick Twisp who happened to create a French alter ego named Francois to get the girl of his dreams named Sheeni who studied at a French boarding school and who was dating that French speaking jockhole Trent. Anyway, what can I do? Reality often times don’t get along with what logic tends to decide what is logical to do or even expected to happen. That’s life; it has been very helpful on picking on her and on giving her a journey of female troubles.
So she decided to get along with what life had for her and hopped on her own journey. Jumping on her hypothetical magical flying Cadillac Eldorado, you know like the one in ‘My One And Only’, wearing her 1950’s midnight blue flowered dress and her silver kitten heeled shoes, three brown luggage in the trunk and asked her self, “Where to this time? What’s next? Pittsburg? Dallas?” Unfortunately for her, she didn’t know how to drive and even if she knew how to, the car just run out of gas. So she didn’t have a choice. She spent the rest of her college years stuck with me and that guy named Alfredo and the building with white walls and two unfortunate looking courtyards she loved calling The Asylum and her school uniform she partnered with a soft orange sweater every time she feels cold and her black suede school shoes and her golden zebra print satchel looking bag. And of course, how can I forget the bright red eyeglasses of hers. I wonder if she ever took them off.
Then the rainy season came. It might have been better for the story if I have written, ‘Then Fall came’, but please do accept my sincere apology folks, there’s no such thing as fall in this country. Only falling leaves of quality of justice and insincere political quest for authenticity. One great misfortune of national ideology as she always said. I wonder what other ideas were inside that head. That head that was covered with dark red colored apple styled hair.
But I wasn’t able to learn any of her ideas, that she agreed to disagree with Tolstoy when he wrote that the fear of dying without ever having known love was greater than fear of death itself, because for her the only thing greater than the fear of death is the fear of dying without ever knowing the logical point of one’s very own existence and that for her, love doesn’t have a point to exist for it has been and always will be outside the realm of logic, or discover that she had a love-hate relationship with an old writer Neil Gaiman since she was in high school or her on and off affair with Joseph Gordon-Levitt that stemmed when she watched him in ’10 Things I Hate About You’, or even know that Creedence Clearwater Revival will automatically played inside her head every time she saw me walking down the hallway, though she always pretended not to see me and that she sang along silently with John Fogerty. “When it’s over so they say, it’ll bring a sunny day. I know, shining down like water. I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain. I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain. Coming down on a sunny day.”
And Mr. Fogerty was right. The sun somehow managed to come after a few month stretch of cold wet weather and a semester full of writing and complex analysis of advanced business subjects that most of the time took the students to the edge of their breaking and boiling points. I managed them pretty well and I bet she did too. She had that odd way of dealing with academic things as if she was created uniquely to deal with them easily, effortless, like a high powered top of the line robot or a heartless marionette, devoid of emotion.
And speaking of her emotions, if you were going to ask me where her emotions went to, I honestly don’t know. To an incinerator? To a cliff? To the bottom of the Pacific Ocean? The valley of death? Perhaps. Maybe. What I only know is that they were well kept, but not very much hidden. Emotion was something she cannot hide from me. She was the Spok in this story. The Clark Kent of Lois and Clark. The Sebastian of Annette.
Then you were going to ask me again, how am I supposed to know that? I can pretty much answer that in a swift second or two. I am a two faced mischief maker, I just know. I just know when she felt that sudden thud in her heart, the awakening of that tiny fist of myogenic muscular organ and the sound of the butterflies’ wings inside her stomach. I can feel the coldness of her hands, the warmth of her face that turned red for the entire moment of my existence in front of her. Simple things that amused me greatly. How can someone so soulless like her acted as such? I don’t have any idea and I don’t have the plan of having one.
But the idea was just plain and simple. She was just simply bitten by the most unlikely sensation…love.
And she was right. Love doesn’t a have a point to exist. That was why she didn’t know what it was when they came face to face, it was pointless. It was outside her province of rational reasoning. And that made Leo Tolstoy a lot more correct than her all along. He feared that she might not know love and she goes on living without knowing it.
So she bore the pain of the disease caused by the single bite of the two faced mischief maker- she didn’t know love. She tried to tolerate the chest pains, the cold hands, the unusual morning or even evening sickness and also the butterflies as well as the frequent dizziness, rare hallucinations and turbulent emotions.
She didn’t do fair well in this game. No amount of antibiotics could fight her ailment. So for the rest of the second semester of the last academic year of her life, she was succumbing to her illness.
I’ve seen her suffer all those times. When she found out that I am someone else’s someone else, when she saw me with that someone else on the waiting shed, talking closely, close enough for me to kiss that someone else, and along the hallway as I and that someone else went home and that I was smiling then and that she knew that I seldom smile. I made her suffer a lot more when she heard that I was no longer that someone else’s someone else but I already found someone else to replaced that someone else’s place and that it wasn’t her. And that at the end of the story she will find out that the replacement rejected me to be her someone else and that I’m not supposed to write this now but I did. Because even if I delayed this part, it was already too late.
She decided to let go of her reality. Her intolerance for being alone got a hold of her. And well, she started to see things deeply and extremely. Her vital signs were becoming unstable, her heart, kidneys and liver were not functioning well, and there were frequent chaotic activities inside her brain. So people decided to always put her to sleep and decided not to wake her up any time soon.
And as she dosed off, she let two interrogative statements hung in her mind and those two statements originally came from the mouth of Scott Pilgrim’s bitter ex-girlfriend Kim. Were you purely happy? Or were you just purely evil?
Of course, I wasn’t able to answer them even if I assumed those two interrogative statements are meant for me. People in deep slumber didn’t open their eyes, what more their mouths? So I decided to open mine; to tell her story while she sleeps. I am now contemplating on what to say to end her tale.
What am I supposed to tell you to end her story?
That while she was deeply sleeping one night, in that slumber of hers, she dreamt. She dreamed of walking towards me. She wore a midnight blue 1980’s mod dress like the one Blair Waldorf wore. She had a midnight blue kitten heeled shoes, a long pearl necklace, and a blue sapphire ring like the one Prince William gave Katherine Middleton on their engagement. She was walking straight at me, not noticing the chaos of unfamiliar happy students roaming crazily around her with cameras in hands and the lines of auditorium chairs in that convention center. She knew I was at the end of those lines of chairs. She knew even without her red eyeglasses and even if she cannot see clearly, I was there. She decided it was time for her to hold my hands, never let them go and let me answer her two hanging questions. 2 meters…1 meter…5 more steps. Stopped.
She decided it was her time to turn her back on me. She murmured that she will go on with her life for the rest of her living days. Slowly, she regained consciousness. And yes, she woke up from that dreamy slumber of hers while telling herself that dreams are now her reality.
Her doctors said they cannot do anything about the severity of her situation right now. Talk therapy might help and medications may control her mood swings and crises of self induced injuries. But I know better, the only thing that can bring her back to sanity was if only she finished taking those five more steps and held my hands and asked me those questions but she didn’t make an effort of doing such for she knew that she was already at the border of dreaming and reality and touching me will only make that border moved a few yards back.
To say, she doesn’t have the intention of getting better before another Mr. Fogerty rainy season comes. She decided to dream, eyes wide open, staring blankly. Nobody knows when she will finish those five tiny steps and even in the deepest and darkest thoughts of hers, she doesn’t know when either.
But as for now, as she looks back at me behind those one way mirrors, I said this to her. Dream of another dream and hugged yourself in that dream.
She pressed a finger on her lips. Hush. I already did. I always know that you are not going to.
