Oh my God! You are real! I knew it. You had to be real. You had to be real because I believed in you. I had faith in you. A faith like religious people have in God, a faith like normal people have in reason, and a faith like scientists have in science. And now, when I see you in front of my eyes, it looks nothing less than a miracle. Do you know the difference between miracle and magic? As BB says, magic happens by deception, but a miracle occurs by faith.
You! You are a work of art. You are an absolute degree of perfection. You are the character of divine intervention. You are a model of how I want characters to be. You are the aspirations of all my heroes in all of my stories.
What should I tell you? Why did I like you in the first place? Your eyes, along with your never-smiling-always-serious face, had always intrigued me. You had always kept me in an incomprehensible curiosity. Your eyes seemed to hold a story, a tale as epic as any Greek has ever written. I wanted to read that story. I wanted to write that story.
Your observant mind and your attractive, passive face had always pushed me to think about what might have been going on in your thoughts.
The way you observed things around you silently, keenly, and patiently, always inspired me to wonder if you were casting characters out of them. How you listened to birds and stared at cats made me wonder if you were listening to their conversations.
Your slow and only-to-yourself walk often got me thinking about what stories might have been going through your mind, what events might have unfolded out of order, and what dialogue was going on back and forth, what drama, what tragedy, what comedy. I always wanted to read your mind.
You were the female version of the dream version of myself. You were an inspiration to look after. You were a work of art for admiration. You were all what I always wanted to be and could have been. You were a reflection of my inner self. Not only mentally but also physically. You were just me but different, like a long-lost portrait.
I always wanted to talk to you, and I always wanted to listen to you. I wanted to hear your stories. The stories going on in your head and the stories you have been through, I wanted to listen to it all. I always wanted to know what hides behind such an attractive passive face.
I wanted to know what made you lose your smile. What molded you into your current broken and beautiful self? Why were you always alone?
But before I could even phrase the questions in my head, you disappeared. You vanished from reality like you never existed. You vanished into the infinity of thoughts. You vanished into the crowd, never to be seen again. You disappeared as the step function: suddenly into nothingness.
I searched for you. I searched for you from mess to hostel, thoughts to roads, cafe to classes, grounds to gates, and roads to railways. I searched for you in both space and time coordinates throughout the spacetime. I stayed outside the mess gate the whole day closely watching every person, hoping that your face would appear from somewhere, but it didn’t, and time went on and on.
And then, I waited.
As time passed, I started to forget the features of your face. It became harder for me to remember your outline, but the faint hope remained in my heart. Sometimes, I found myself staring at the faces of strangers and analyzing their chances of being you. Sometimes, I got excited that I had found you in the crowd and then found the difference that you wore rimmed glasses. Another time, I noticed that your height was less than the girl I was staring at.
It was then I started to ask my friends about you. I asked them, “Have you seen that girl who looks like me, is short and thin like me?” They all denied it and started to laugh at me. They said that I imagined myself as a girl and falling in love with myself. Can you believe that! They said that I was imagining things.
As time passed, I saw more and more of my friends turning into couples and grew increasingly anxious. They tried to set me up in a way. They were pointing at girls and passing comments on me. But I denied them all. I was not interested in any other girl. They took it wrong and made the matter horrible by saying that the way I ignore girls, I may be homosexual, or worse, asexual. When I tried to make them understand that I was already in love, they accused me of imagining things. They said you don’t exist; you are just a figment of my imagination.
It was so heartbreaking for me. But no one agreed with my tears; they asked me for evidence. They asked me about your name, your department, and your class. But I didn’t know anything because I had never talked to you. I never had the courage to speak to you. Plus, I didn’t know that you would vanish suddenly and totally.
It was painfully hard for me at that time. I was getting pushed from both sides. On one side, my friends were forcing me to talk to girls and their strong accusation of you being fictional. And on the other hand, my own memories were betraying me; your facial features fading away with each passing day. And in between was trapped my little heart, clutching my love for you and scared of breaking out. I really wished that I were a painter. I could have painted you to give you a permanent shape, the way I give a permanent shape to my feelings through words.
This went on indefinitely. It was like walking on a giant glacier or a giant dark room with no sense of direction or time. I never knew how much space or time to walk until I hit a wall. There was no end in sight. There was nothing I could do about it except for waiting. It was all indefinite suffering.
I was suffering alone in loneliness, accused of falling in love with a fictional character. No one saw my misery; no one listened to me. But you could not have been fictional. You had to be real. It was true that I had my doubts about you being fictional. But I always had rationally analyzed it. You could not have been fictional because you were certain. The exact details of your face may have been vague, but your appearance was crystal-clear to me. You could not have been fictional because your appearance was much more detailed in my head than any fictional character I had ever imagined.
I could not forget your figure., a sculpture perfectly sculpted, imitating mine. An always passive, never-smiling face, thick black eyebrows, dark eyes, and thick-rimmed rectangular glasses on those always observing eyes. Straight nose. Hair neatly tied in a ponytail, as I remember. A full-sleeved maroon-coloured T-shirt and loose grey trousers covering ankles. Small red flat earrings in the ears, sometimes empty, sometimes with earphones.
I can always remember the way you used to come to the mess. Slowly, silently ascending the stairs, taking food silently, and sitting in the farthest corner. Slowly eating your food, sometimes thinking, sometimes looking at your phone. Sometimes, a girl would eat with you, but mostly, you were alone. And then retreating back, slowly and silently taking your cycle and going away. I could not have imagined all of this; I could not have created all of this scenario in my head. This was not just a one-day thing; this was the result of the constant observation of many days.
I remember meeting on the road one day in the back of the Himalayas mess. You were on your cycles, and you had your headphones on. Our eyes met for a second, and I smiled. And I think you smiled too. That was the first time I had seen you smiling, and I danced my way to the hostel, playing the song Udaariyan in my head.
You had to be real because you didn’t come as a stand-alone in my head. You came with an environment. You brought all the world’s chaos with you, the noise of students in the Himalayas mess, the obstacles on the road. All those things come to my mind when I think about you. I could not have invented all of this in my head. This can not be the product of just imagination. It had to be real.
But my atheist, skeptical, and existentialist brain had its doubts. It had been about a year since I last saw you. I didn’t even come across your face, not even by the slightest of coincidences. I didn’t even see you, Saarang, where everyone was bound to be.
But I didn’t give up! I knew I would meet you someday because I had faith in you. And look where reality has brought us in front of each other.
Now, there are only two possibilities: either you are real, or all of this is fake. It may be possible that I am dreaming or I am living in simulation. But I don’t care. I want to live in this world, whatever it is. I want to live in a world where you are right before my eyes.
It all makes sense now. Like the final piece of jigsaw puzzle finally being put into place, like the house of Lagos finally coming to shape. It didn’t make sense to start with, but it all makes sense now.
Before this dream fades away, and I wake up, and before you vanish again. I want to take the opportunity and ask you your name first and then:
“Will you be my valentine, Sunshine?”
I know it sounds weird. You think I am asking you out the first time we speak. But this is not the first time I have spoken with you. I have had thousands of conversations with you in my head. I have shared every moment of my happiness and sorrow with you. I have addressed all the letters in my diary to your name.
Even this conversation that we are having right now. I have done this conversation a thousand times in my head. I have rehearsed everything I will say to you when we finally meet. I have practiced this hundreds of times. I have gone through the exact word-to-word of the meeting many times.
I know it would be hard for you to believe me. But it’s a good thing that I am a writer, and I have written this monologue. So I have brought the proof, and you can match every word I have said. You can read the post from the top to read the proof.