I Met Someone

"I want to take you far from the cynics in this town

And kiss you on the mouth

We'll cut our bodies free from the tethers of this scene

Start a brand new colony"

Brand New Colony (2003) by The Postal Service

I met someone.

I met her for the first time about two months ago in a faraway city. We shared one day and one night together, not knowing that we might have possibly met the rest of our lives. Then, I returned to the half-life I have been half-living, where everything was in a stasis of banality and misery after my previous girlfriend walked out of my life half a year ago with baffling abruptness. I needed someone to pretend to be normal to, and this strange new girl - well, in her own way, she was just as lonely as I was. We talked about nothing and everything, till we have no more secrets except those which we held back; secrets about where we hope we were going. Or falling. There were days we would talk far into the night, spurred by an impulsive reluctance to end whatever it is we were sharing. And one day, I realised that I was happy. It was not the trivial happiness of finding lost keys or receiving gifts. It was a deep happiness. It's like the happiness found in a new book or at the bottom of a mug of hot chocolate as it rains outside in the dark. It is a happiness which exorcised all coldness from my bones, as if there's a blazing sun inside me. It was unexpected and uninvited - like waking up in a lucid dream. And in these dreams, I have always done this one thing: I would leap off a building just to see if I can fly.

I met her for the second time three weeks ago in a different city that belonged to neither of us, for no greater - and no lesser - purpose than to see each other again. It was evening when I walked into her room where she was waiting for me, and even though we did not tell the other how we really felt, we knew the moment we saw each other. We just did. I knew because I could see it in the way she looks at me, in her secret smile, and in the silences pregnant with anticipation. We only left when the night is old, hours too late for our dinner date, and when we returned, we found the night a young maiden again, curious and full of mischief; a little breathless and a little shy. She taught me that I wasn't just half-dead in the past six months, but also in the preceding four years and beyond. In the next morning, she missed her bus back to her old life because we simply couldn't bear to let go, so I took her to another city to start a new one. It was the 7th of July, a meaningless day that found new meaning in the two of us.

The postcard she sent me before our first date.

I met her a third time in the city I live and work in two weeks past when she flew in from Singapore on an impulse and made a present of herself to me on my 26th birthday. I only understood the true extent of her gift to me when both of us found ourselves on our knees at different times, in completely different circumstances, asking for each other's hand in marriage because it felt so right and made too much sense to the both of us. You will not understand the significance of my decision unless you also know that I have never wanted it. I told all my medical school colleagues with unwavering certainty that I intended to leave all my knots untied till the day I die and I said the same thing to my father over lunch before I moved to Kuching. My ex-girlfriend knew this throughout the four years we were together and in a way, we both understood that we were doomed to say goodbye someday. I was a man grown and I had made up my mind.

I now know that it's because I have not met the woman I want to marry until I met her. She told me that she would leave behind everything, her home, her career, and her friends - to start anew - just to be with me. For my 26th birthday, she gave me her heart, and placed her happiness in my hands - not caring if I might break one and dash the other. Knowing just how much she loves me makes me feel far more 幸福 than I ever had because there isn't a word or phrase in the English language that can meaningfully describe the nuances of what I am truly feeling when I'm holding her close to me and feel her breath against my chest; this girl who would so unhesitatingly give me everything. I am so undeserving of her that it scares me. I am afraid that one day, I would cease to be worthy of the sacrifices she is making for me, and I would be left with the ever-fading afterglow of having been in the presence of destiny lost.

What she wrote.

I am a sceptic and an unbeliever. I do not believe in luck, fairy tales or the gods. However, there is one thing I have always believed in since I was a kid growing up on Disney films and my mother's old, forgotten stash of trashy romance novels - and then had those unformed ideals moulded by all the women I have ever dated and the two most important works of contemporary literature on the subject of relationships ever written: South of the Border, West of the Sun by Murakami Haruka and Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. I do and still believe that true love really exists, and it can always survive between two persons who refuse to forget just how much they want the other to be happy. In her, I find a rare lady who is intelligent, funny, liberated, beautiful, well-read, unexpectedly affectionate, tirelessly passionate for the things she cares about, and has a tattoo inscribed on her spine in Tengwar. I find in her a friend, a partner and a kindred spirit who disbelieves in everything unproven but yet, has faith enough in the two of us to take this leap with me. And perhaps fly.

I met someone. Her name is Cheryl, and I am marrying her.


P.S. I like the fact that I am also getting two cats in the bargain. Freebies!



Betrothed,
k0k s3n w4i