It was a random night and I was on a date for the first time in a long long time. The date asked what I looked for in a partner. Normally, my default answer for “what I look for in a relationship” would be someone to do nothing at all, together. But the hidden answer is that I also look for someone to talk about things so grand but also so pointless it might as well be a talk about nothing.
Basically, someone to wait for Godot with. And for me, it’s you.
No, I didn’t think about you that way, and I don’t think I would ever think about you as romantic partners. But these days, I was looking for a partner who would also be a friend. And when I thought of friends, I only had four names in mind. That moment it was you. Because, what I had with you was what I missed the most in the past few years.
I can’t recall how we first met. Back then, you were a freshman at NUS. So most likely it was during one of the activities of the freshmen orientation program.
The night we got to know each other though, I would never forget. It was at Changi Beach Park and we were with many other NUS seniors and freshmen. As the night went late, there were no more planned activities. People wandered around, some were sleeping. Smaller groups of people were chit chatting here and there.
I was walking alone by the beach, tip-toeing to get as close to the water as possible without actually getting into the water. You were walking alone. At some points, we were walking side by side.
I talked about the pointlessness of mind-mappings to me since my mind was already fully visual. I preferred bullet-points and checklists. They were clear, transparent, and straightforward, and my head made all the connections and dependencies for me. I shared that I could not remember people’s faces since my mind saved them as shapes, auras, and gradients of colors I could recognize but could not make full sense of.
You told me you just saw colors. Every single person in your life was a distinctive color in your mind. And that you yourself had a color.
It dawned on me at that moment that I never saw myself in my mind. But it wasn’t that I was a selfless person. It was because my ego had been fully distilled. I could not see me because everything was me. It was in the veins of Vino’s statement in Baccano! that, “The world ends with me.”
The world I could perceive was just me.
I was not sure if anything I said that night made particularly good impressions on you. I did know you didn’t make friends easily. And we kept in touch after that night. In a sense, I felt special. I was happy.
We met once in a while and always at the Business Canteen. There was that time when we talked about Latin (the language). And that time we discussed Albert Camus. Or when we discussed deaths.
I never read as much philosophy as I was during that period. I worked hard to match you intellectually so our discussions could go deeper without me missing crucial knowledge. Did you work as hard as me to improve your abilities to draw analogies from real life examples like I could? Did you ever work on preparing for our meetings at all?
Time passed. Life drifted and people got further away from each other.. We chatted a few times every year. It was always about the meaninglessness of life. You wished for a busy birthday so you could forget it was a birthday. I hid away on my birthday to avoid the dreaded wishes from people. You hated this world. I could not be bothered with it outside of some very specific chunks overlapping with my current interests. You wanted to die. I couldn’t find reasons to keep on living.
And one day, you were no longer there.
You never told me my color and I would resent you forever for that. You kept on telling me it would be a topic for another time. And now there was never going to be another time.
In a twist of fate, I could no longer remember your face. These days, the same way a leaf falls in a forest without anyone knowing, one without traces on the Internet might seem like they did not exist. Had it not been for another common friend, you might as well be an imaginary friend.
Somehow, it was a funny thought that you would be my imaginary friend. Not because I could not remember your face. Not because outside of a random common friend, I could not find another person in my network who remembered you. Not because our chats had disappeared.
You are like an imaginary friend because what I had with you was part of my definition of a friend. In a sense, that was the part of you that shaped me. I could still feel and see your auras in my mind. Sometimes I tried too much to get to know people who had the teeny tiny bit of aura that resembles you.
In a sense, I was a bad friend. I didn’t miss you. I missed our conversations. I missed having someone like you in my life. I missed the utility of having your as a friend. I missed feeling special that in a world you hated, I was one person you didn’t.