Actually I'm pretty modern as a person. It's not like I don't understand or that I'm narrow-minded. I have friends who don't really look for love but still date a lot. For them just having a physical relationship is okay, dating on a trial basis is also okay. I also have friends who don't date at all. They're at a place in their life where, for them, either love only belongs to the movies and books, something to fluster them for a few meaningless moments in their life from which they then move on and go back to the reality.
This is where I find myself to be so different from them.
For me love has always been perfect.
A fairytale.
Something pure and destined; something that would make my life complete, something that would make me cry happy tears: something that I had never done before or believed in. Happy tears are actually a myth. Why would you cry when you're happy? You only cry because there was so much sadness prior to that temporary turn of fate. Happiness has always been temporary just like love in this age.
So I told myself that I did not mind the sadness. Just like I did not mind love coming and going, just like I did not mind repetitively losing love and then gaining it.
So all my life, my thoughts about love had been my ideals. My ideals had been my companion and also my enemy. And I had spent the first twenty years of my life only battling myself.
That year had been like any other. If you had to ask me for the thing that I remembered prior to him is probably that that year I had finally gotten myself to let go completely of trying to fit in and conform to norms that exist in society and actually try to be myself.
I had stopped endlessly try to think up new subject matters to talk about with my close friends just because I wanted to keep them as friends. I had also stopped blaming all my problems on my parents and think of them as villains in my mind. I had stopped a lot of things but I can't help but now realize as I think back that I had not actually started anything. I had just relentlessly told myself to stop being the way I was.
My feeling of inferiority has always done nothing but brought pain to myself. Maybe that is why I refused to remember anything properly from my early life. So all in all my life had been a big blur until that one moment when I saw him.
It was around 8pm at night when I was standing outside my college gate. I was pretty relaxed, though it was getting late. My parents had recently stopped caring if I came a bit later as long as I was home before dinner, an action I was greatly satisfied by, though I never actually expressed anything. My relationship with my parents only had things unsaid but that is something that we'll talk about later.
That day I came out of the gate of my college and crossed the road with my friends like usual to buy tea and some cigarettes. I honestly don't remember when I started smoking or why I even did it. I'm really not exaggerating when I tell you that life had always been a vague dream for me. But that night as I inhaled from my cigarette, I looked across the road and I saw him standing. He was standing with one hand in his pocket and one hand had his phone. He was looking down at the brightly lit screen. The white light of the phone lit the features of his face. The road had many cars passing by and the road was ringing with all kinds of sounds of traffic and students standing together, laughing. My friends were all standing around me talking about this and that. But I tuned everything out as he slowly picked up his head and looked at me.
It was for a second only. He didn't stare or smile or even acknowledge me like you would a fellow living person when you look at them. He just honestly looked at me once and something in me changed. I don't know what it was but something was different.
For the first time I wondered what exactly I was doing with my life.