Do you still remember!? He looked at her with eyes intoxicated with love, at the dawn just waking up, the grass still dreaming of early morning mist with love and the night breeze. Just fading away.
What do you remember, love? She looked at him with intense eyes, revealing the shattered fragments of emotions. She has long stopped saying "I love you" but only wraps herself up like a kitten rubbing against his heart.
Truthfully, she has loved him for a very long time, from an unclear moment. On some day when the wind brushed through her hair, a former classmate, who used to follow her, confessed with a few words. He just looked and fell silent, but he secretly cherished her in his notebook with poems sent back and forth during the fading class hours. Seeing the dreams sinking into the sea of memory, she laughed. Nowadays, how come there are still such naive people, she wonders.
She left him with poetry to stay in the hometown because life is not just encapsulated in notebooks.
Coming to him—the one who walked with her through student life from a remote province to a university without too much crowding, not in a hurry. Feeling that life unfairly accused those lacking material things, there is only one love from a naive guy. That's enough, and it continues with cultivated emotions, or words sent into the wind of love. She feels a fleeting glimpse of the old self returning, guiding her through the changes. She knows those words don't create money and compensate for the lack of material wealth, but somehow, love stubbornly persists, listening to those poems flying across the university campus. Everything fills up the days of student life.
She lets him and the poetry stay in the university because life needs more than love.
Stepping out of the university with words of love, she almost forgets she once heard that some poet or self-proclaimed businessman sent love words mixed with a bit of money, thinking that makeup would bury the soul. Seeing her heart no longer soft when she feels she has the right to live fully amidst materialism and affection.
She leaves him with promises of a future when experiencing life. But she only sees those promises as the premise for the words said after his life still has many unresolved threads.
Somewhere, a former classmate with the love of the past meets her again after so many years of separation, and there is still no poignant love story. Or maybe it has gone through the hands of many girls, she doesn't know. She looks at this former classmate, surprised by the changes in his perspective on life. No more dreams, no more love words; there's only one thing he said, "I still love you."
Hearing that, she feels he is still as naive as before. Pity. Asking, "Now that you're no longer a boy, do you still love me?" The challenging look challenges him amidst the fading night when he's almost tipsy. In the silence, with voices from the neighboring table still buzzing and a few laughs that seem to lead to nothing, I only hear a few swearing words from the nearby table.
He says that it's no longer important to him. She looks at him and feels that the naive guy is still as foolish as before. She takes his lips, touching lips as dark as a fragrant, moist field that has waited too long to soften her lips, flowing away. She and he make love in the midst of light and happiness just rising.
She will be the happiest girl in the world when she marries him because, for her, where can she find the naive fool waiting for her all these years in this era? Where can she find the heart that used to throb for a word of love? Foolishness, kindness. Where to find such a man in a life lacking those good words to gather later.
She feels pure in a white dress, the veil on her head covering all the stains of the past. Mistakes. Everything will be wiped away by him; thrown away after his hand lifts the veil on the day she looks at him enchanted.
"You're such a fool." With a voice in the thunderstorm, it is said that lightning strikes directly into the heart. She looks at him, silent. She sits down and adjusts her clothes when the sitting child in the corner still doesn't understand what's happening.
"You're a fool." Deaf, right? In the words, there is a choked-up sound falling into the realm of the heart. Frantically, she can't find the foolish guy who once wrote a few hurried love poems. She neatly folds the pile of clothes, some of them still seem wet, a few strands of hair fall when her hand sweeps across, touching her hair, gliding over the skin, leaving a few blushes. The child sitting in a corner begins to cry out loud, as if wanting to join the same tone of his yelling.
The gusts of wind begin to seep in, and a few rays of sunlight begin to appear as the grass begins to sway with the early morning mist, sparkling like a rainbow.
She gives him a silent kiss on the forehead and then steps outside, afraid of waking him up after a wild and exhausting night. From the moment he said he still loves her like before, she knows for sure that she doesn't belong to him, and he doesn't belong to her. She doesn't belong here. That countryside is only a past where every return washes away the painful wounds, and then she continues to return to the noisy urban life, wearing down the soul until the wounds scar over.
She watches him sleep like a child as the door gently closes. The baggage she brings back to the city echoes her question: why wait? The answer is simple: because he needs to see her love life. A sound comes from inside the room, probably he just woke up!
