It's been raining a lot lately and I love it. I hope it doesn't stop. The combination of grey skies, chilly air, and the soft patter of the rain always gives me a strange, comforting sadness I can't quite express.
Like a nostalgia for a memory that hasn't happened yet..
Exactly four years ago today, I posted this, unbeknownst to myself that a year after that, I would meet the man who would shape the memories that have, in the past, strangely given me that very inexpressible nostalgia I spoke of. As if a haunting call from my future self—a longing so strong it cracks the veil of time, from which transcends the blue from the future, or—right now, as we speak, from the present—to the past, leaking and wrapping my old self with it, my old self, though ironically so much younger she was.
The same feeling haunted me at the rise of February this year, the same rainy, lonely day, compelling me to post the same passage on Telegram—an indirect call to him, my yearning hidden in the whisper beneath the words, if only he’d open it and feel the coldness his absence left.. Once in a while, in my endeavour to remind him of my existence, I would drop stories on the app, as we had ceased to talk on Discord, our main medium for communication, altogether. Such a measure was my desperate way of telling him:
"I'm here. Notice me. I look beautiful in this, no?"
"I'm having fun with my friends. My life is good without you."
Except that.. it wasn’t.
No amount of friends, best friends, could make me genuinely have fun and just that alone. In between laughter and smiles, real or artificial, in the good and the bad, of the weather, of my humour, like an intractible force adamant in seeking the crack, bleakness would creep in.. And at the end of the day, I still felt hollow. Incomplete. A hundred friends could never cover with “merriness” the void and pain and silence and longing he left me with.
"Notice me. I don't need you."
Such pathetic measures, in the guise of casual online activity, were always received with “seen.”
Seen.
The poorest scrap of attention one could give. But I was famished. So, though never enough, I devoured it all the same. Though never enough, it was better than none at all. “None” had happened a few times, and it agitated me, annoyed me, that in my madness I’d make public the same pictures or videos again to offer him another chance of seeing them, hiding everyone else in the process to keep them from viewing the same post otra vez.
Seen.
Such was the reduction of our communication. From phone calls that lasted for hours on end, the connection was reduced to a singular click.
Hearts from others, flatteries that didn’t come from the one I wanted…
Does my beauty not charm him any longer?
My insecurity would ask.
Even when Rollo, the man I was crazy about before him—the first man about whom I actually wrote a book—even with his sudden reappearance, his hearts and compliments that in the past would have driven me wild, only stirred me so little. Distracted me so little. The cup was still empty, for despite the scent of his familiar aroma, which so perturbed my expired attachment, in the empty cup he poured only air. Such was the transformation of his substance to me.
So imagine my surprise, dear universe—nay, you need not imagine it, you saw it all. You saw my surprise when, upon posting the passage above on Telegram, alongside a cosy picture taken in my old room during which the same strange nostalgia had enveloped me—an opened book, a cold drink, Patch’s scarf tangled in the sheets, and my small library in the background—you witnessed my surprise upon a notification from the very man whose name was what the words of my post whispered for.
Johannes. Telegram. now
❤️ to your story
My heart jumped.
My fingers, quicker than my sanity, screenshotted it pronto lest he changed his mind and took it back.
After a protracted silence, he had reacted for the first time. Why?
Did he feel it? The blue, the cold, the desolation of my heart?
Did my spectral melancholy, after months and months of ignoring it, make him pull at his thread’s end? The thread I still held dearly and strongly to power the imbalance of its weight. The thinning thread which connected me to him. In thoughts, in spirit, in soul...
The combination of grey skies, chilly air, and the soft patter of the rain always gives me a strange, comforting sadness I can't quite express. Like a nostalgia for a memory that hasn't happened yet.
"You are such a girl."
"I am a girl."
"You are a living meme, do you know that?"
"Nope." Not a living meme, monsieur.
"Like one of those girls that ask their boyfriends if they would still love them if they were a worm."
It was here I felt my defiance harden. "Never would I ever want to ask you that question."
"You did. I remember." He started laughing.
"Only because you provoked me."
"No, no, no, you are like them," he insisted in his usual mulish character.
"For one thing, I hate worms and harbour an extreme disgust for them, so this question could have never even appeared in my mind," I pointed out, to which he protested against. "Secondly," I went on amidst his childishness, "you sent me the goddamn reel. And it seems that these videos amuse you so much you probably want your girlfriend to ask you the same stupid questions."
Smugly his laugh turned. "I am amused because other guys had to go through it."
"And you didn’t with me, so you made me."
"Okay then," he said, his tone challenging, and asked me the other famous stupid question with which girlfriends love to annoy their boyfriends. "Would you still love me if I wasn’t born?"
In a heartbeat, without contemplation, I said, "Yes."
But this, to him, sounded so laughably incredulous, as though I only said yes to deliberately oppose the answer he expected of me to say, to rebel against the norm of usual reactions—that being, the boyfriends looking at their girlfriends in the most unamused fashion because of the utter foolishness of the inquiry.
"Oh, shut up," he laughed, not buying my emphatic yes one bit. But I was far from jesting. I sincerely and seriously meant what I said.
"It's just like this song that I really like," I told him. Then, shedding all of my recalcitrance and rebellion, in a soft voice, I sang the melancholic melody of the song:
"How can you miss someone you've never met? Cos I need you now, but I don't know you yet.."
A moment of silence followed, as though a ghostly breeze passed through the air, dissolving our puerile banter. And instead of another round of his teasing masculine charm, his voice, when he finally broke the spell, held a soft and solemn cadence that warmed my heart so well. "I like that."
"You know the song?"
"No. But I like it."
No. But I like it.
His voice, soft and wistful, still echoes in my head..
Like a nostalgia for a memory that hasn't happened yet.
Four years ago today, unbeknownst to myself, that memory was about to happen.
His warmth, the security and comfort it came with, his playful affection, the vulnerability he used to show.. on a cold and rainy day..
The songs we listened to, the games we played, the entertainment we watched, the pranks and jokes, the books we never wrote, the names of our children, the infinity symbol.. on a cold and rainy day.
"How can you miss someone you've never seen? Oh, tell me, are your eyes brown, blue, or green?"
Cushioned by time, four years ago today, she only now felt a strange and comforting sadness in it. The yearning, the gnawing pain I've been feeling at present, of late.. these sentiments to her back then seemed all second-hand. Borrowed. Muted.
But if I could speak to her and warn her about what was going to unfold, I’d tell her:
Don’t.
A year from then, she would meet a tall, introverted Viking with a British accent, with blue eyes and who loved playing chess. You may speak to him, but don’t. Don’t kiss him. Don’t share the same bed with him.
And do not—for the love of God—do not take for granted the love of your life. Do not give birth to the betrayal that came back to bite you in the arse.
Do not take him for granted.
The love of your life.
The loquacious one.
The one who loved cats.
The one with the green eyes.
"How can you miss someone you've never met? Cos I need you now, but I don't know you yet.."
Like a nostalgia for a memory that hasn't happened yet.. Four years ago today, unbeknownst to myself, that memory was about to happen.
It has happened.