Drag me to the past
then ask me about starting and leaving;
you’d see how I wrestled with loss and grief,
how I treaded against negativity.

      In this world where change is 98.7% inevitable, you helplessly surrender to the fact that there will be hundreds of people who will move in and out of your life. Some will come to introduce to you a state of seemingly unending bliss, to take you to the craziest streets in the city, or to make you feel like you just won an academy award. Everything feels like serendipity, eh? There are, however, people who will just pass by but will make you cry and suffer so much you already see yourself as nothing but a wrinkled old prune incapable of entering the never-never land. Yes, even after the ever-after. That’s how serious it is, you see. The uglier truth is that this jadedness right in front of you will just offer one answer to your long list of interrogations: there is a purpose of teaching you a lesson about only-goodness-knows-what, which of course is not apparent (to you or to these people) at first.

     There will really be several of them, and after years of urgent necessity of existence, despite dejection and quite happy chaos, you couldn’t help confessing there’s already one person who once occupied a huge space in your heart. A person who became a special part of you. That one of the ‘hundreds’. That someone you encountered along the way, walked with you, but decided to traverse a land on his own before the nightfall. Someone who left you and yet the thought of him still makes your heart’s fourth chamber throb ten times faster.

      It is undeniable that this person was once your most favourite. He showed you the most precious parts of the earth which sometimes people just neglect or may have not discovered yet. He brought into your consciousness the things you had thought you could not do but you found out you could. He let you realize the beauty and purity of your soul that you and others had not seemed to notice. He taught you lessons which you had kept on refusing to learn because you had felt they weren’t essential—lessons you had not known you were going to use once he’s gone.

      I might be wrong when I said that he once became a part of you because the truth is, he would forever be. There are a lot of reasons why you involuntarily stay this way, and there would always be some people who wouldn’t be able to understand.

You know that because of him:
You loved then hated then loved yourself again,
or you surprisingly felt both at the same time.
You experienced elation and melancholy.
You realized how strong and weak you were.
And because of him, you learned and unlearned to hold on and give up;
you learned and relearned to stop for a while and move on.

      There were stories you wrote with someone which you could no longer add one more chapter after the epilogue. It happened for the purpose of reading and appreciating other books or even creating your new novel. I guess, no matter where this unforgettable story of your life led you, you would still find yourself thanking God that after those times you were together, you did not only learn many things about him—you also learned so much about yourself.