Have you ever heard of the “zsa zsa zsu”?

It is a term popularized by Bradshaw, if you have seen the series, to define the state of a human’s body when the hormone called norepinephrine is being produced. It basically is the hormone that usually increases the rate of human’s heartbeat, releases glucose, and increases blood pressure when he or she is in love. It is the cause of the “zsa zsa zsu”. In short, the “zsa zsa zsu” is experiencing what I am having now at the moment: mollycoddling some butterflies in my breadbasket. Being closer and closer to you as I roamed to be on a brink of you again.

If you would like to explore it further, scientists have also proven the existence of other hormones causing people falling in love. Dopamine has caused me to be somehow addicted to you, and I am completely sure of such assumption now. As for serotonin and oxytocin… They are waiting to be precipitated in the coming days. You know that sometimes when I am most nervous about something, I ramble so much I don’t know what I am talking about. My flight of ideas. My cold feet. One meter away from you.

If we were in a Hollywood chick flick, we would have been kissing so passionately in front of other people as if the world only belonged to ourselves. You leaned towards me, replicating those butterflies that I need to take care of, sniffing my hair. I instantly wanted to gird your body with my arms, squeezing you as if there was no tomorrow, but… That would be very awkward, would not it? So, I stayed put, instead.

As usual, you did not say anything at all except an offer of help to carry my awfully heavy luggage to the check-in counter. I checked ourselves in, smiling while looking at our passports being reviewed altogether. Is it only the silliness of me; or is it a part of the beauty of being with you again? The little things we have always cherished, and we will get to cherish once again.

There are too many things I would like to talk about with you. I still have no idea on why you are flying to Brazil with me at the moment. I still have no idea what is going to happen between us. Should I ask those questions? Will you leave them unanswered? What are we going to talk about in the next 35 hours of flight to Rio?

And suddenly, I have my hand in yours.
Fingers caressed by yours, fingers lightly kissed.

Are you going to stay around forever?
Will you be gone when these love hormones are worn off?

Are we to have a love anew?
Or are we only continuing the love that has been there all along?

Will you ever leave me again?
Will I ever have to leave you?

F

Everything has been taken care of. Now it’s just me, this smallish but sufficient luggage, and soon, you.

That is, if you are indeed coming here and letting me go with you. There surely are doubts inside, yet my will to see your face once again trumps over reasons. Meetings, documents, bills, taxes — I am basically postponing life for at least a week for no other reason than you.

The flight is imminent. I always think of flying as the transportation method most suited to my personality. Thousands of feet above ground, I am detaching myself from each of every problem and opportunity and anything else I have, and within me I contemplate. Everything else is contained within those small blocks we call cities. In the air, in the floating machine, I am safe from the world contaminated by the restless civilization and all the mundane activities happening in them. Only then I am free to think, as an observer, as someone whose impact on the world is completely removed unless the plane crashed into a ball of fire. Nothing is more important than the sound of your own mind when you are literally flying high in between clouds.

If you were up there with me, my head would be filled with you from the moment we depart from the nowhereville to the moment we arrive in wherever you want us to be.

But now, my feet are still on the airport floor, and you are yet to arrive.

The moments when I broke your hope. When you broke my trust. We have been going through heartwrenching conflicts, yet we always keep the resolve deep within ourselves. The resolve that will be pulled out to the surface once we have all the time in the world to ourselves, and that is when honesty would prevail.

Through acceptance comes transcendence, and though we haven’t met yet to even talk about how our day was, I can feel myself accepting and forgiving the damage you have done. People said that the journey is more essential than the destination, but only this time, I don’t care all the ways we’ve tread to end up here. The fact that we end up here itself matters more than how or why we could. A glimpse of your face would be more than a relief.

What would follow, then? Does it matter? I am always a man of plan, but now I don’t dare to. I would not expect anything from you, any promise of a future together, anything. What I want is to pull the long and complicated thread of me and you and hold it firm in my hand now, in the present. Not tying it to a balloon blown by the wind to the sky of unforeseeable future. I only want to live in the moment. All I need is your simple presence to linger round my moment of expectations — nothing else. You are the cellar door I need. Beautiful, without ever needing any context.

Then, you come.

There, in the distance. Your legs wrapped in khaki pants are walking down the terminal firmly towards me. Your arms swing in a pendulum motion captivating my eyes. Your airy smile upon seeing me.

We are going to have so many stories to write about.

M

I initially thought that of all the things I had to bear with due to her existence in this realm, my “lesson learned” could have been “an eye for an eye”. Instead, she showed me a completely different moral: forgiveness.

These days, I have been already able to recall the moments when I first began to detest her some years ago. It was a sunny Sunday, the kind that would have triggered me to cook his most preferred dishes, and I was smiling the whole sunup. I opted for angel hair with pesto sauce to greet his morning, then drove to his apartment afterwards. What I thought would have been the strangest part of the day was to find his door surprisingly unlocked. Apparently, it was not peculiar at all, compared to seeing a woman whom I sense some familiarity of, snoozing on his sofa, merely mantled with a blanket that he often used to bundle me whenever I got ill. It was unreservedly a nasty thing for me to see. And it changed everything.

A requital nested over my heart and mind for so long it made me decide to pilfer you from her later on. It apparently turned out as a blessing in disguise. I think, I have found a love of my life.

In this day and age, subsequent to all the things that have happened, I have come into my senses that she did not steal him from me. She did not take you away either. If I were left by someone - even two, now - then perhaps I am the one who was too unworthy to be kept. I wanted to keep you. Yet, though she was not even around anymore, I still did not have the capacity to compel you to stay, ascribed to my desire of vengeance. Most of all, I might as well have broken a woman’s life and heart by doing so.

I realized the condition needed to change, so I came up to her apartment in the same sunny Sunday (and yes, her place is still around our very own spot where we first chanced on beneath the raindrops). She was on her own and I earnestly apologized for everything. I had always thought that she should have been the one who would request for my forgiveness. Still and all, I knew that I had to be the person with the bigger heart. She embraced what I said with widely opened hands.

Startlingly, it was such a relief.

Thank you for sending me a signal that I had to make peace with her, and principally, with myself. I am going to see you in the airport. Very soon.

F

In no other places but here, the simplistic yet serene Gokoku shrine of Naha, Okinawa, the last traces of my parents are immortalized. Listed in a small but noticeable monument near the entrance under the maple trees are the names of the plane crash victims twelve years ago, and it has been a long, arduous way in my life since then.

What I could remember from them were not much but mostly memories of them together, smiling knowingly, holding each other’s fingers, preparing lunch for two. Not even once a fight, not even behind me nor in front of me. The two people that are very much in love with each other. Yet, the accident made me lost hope in love. What use would love be if in the end nothing survives the aftermath? Both of them are now forever erased from existence, remembered only in forms of visual recollections that have no intrinsic value but to instill sadness within me.

The crash has made me a nihilist ever since. I am both a being and a nothingness.

Or I was.

Standing in the midsummer sunshine of Naha, I feel a mystical sense of serenity overwhelming my whole mind and body, as if the whole place is telling me that this might just be the most correct place of them to be. Not the best, not the most beautiful. This is not even the best part of Japan. But here, the humble small town of Naha, is where the magic ends and live ever after. Would love needs any kind of perfection? Would they choose to die in a fairyland castle after living happily ever after? Would it make any difference from them being dead in a plane crash?

My phone rings. Not the right time for bad news, but there are no better times either.

In a freak turn of events, almost half of the conference participants are now having a slightly severe case of food poisoning from yakiniku dishes provided at lunch break, that turn out to be contaminated with enterohemorrhagic E. Coli bacteria of the O-111 strain. An exceptionally rare case in Japan, where hygiene is worshiped like the sun god. I let out a huge sigh. Gastric problems have always been my Achilles’ heel ever since I was a kid where I nearly died from a seemingly simple typhoid infection. I didn’t fall ill because I preferred eating okonomiyaki instead, the kind that you always like to cook at my place. I never believed in superstitions, but is it a sign that I have been given the chance to escape my fate, to be with you once again?

The next text was from my landlady. She tells me that you were here with some news around the words that you are going somewhere. Somehow I knew, out of the places you’ve been telling me excitedly, there would be only one place you would kill to have the chance to go to.

Hurriedly, from my friendly Japanese guide whose face somehow reminds me of Takashi Shimura I borrow his cellphone just to text your number. It has been some time since I last heard from you.

A long, intertwining thread of feeling inside me reverberates in my end a frequency that must be reaching out to your end.

In that case, a short statement would suffice to make you understand. If you are the other half of me, you would be hearing the same words that I am thinking now, triggered by a few words I sent digitally hundreds of miles away from your place, yet only a heartbeat away from your infatuating persona:

“Meet me at the airport.”

M

I knew that I had landed safely in my hometown when I saw people in airport busy getting their iPhones out of their pockets and check-in on a social network. According to my constant observation, most of the time, they do so only to get a badge that will label them a ‘jet-setter’, or see a flight symbol next to their check-in statuses.
Many of my friends bought smartphones only to do that. They probably try so hard to leverage their social status by updating statuses on social networks. I rarely comment, but I definitely would as soon as I see them craving for food and not being able to obtain some decent dish as all of their savings had been traded with a smartphone.

This is the city with a bucketload of absurdities, yet I keep going back to the same place, over and over again.

Going home means having my local cellphone number reactivated, which leads to another fact that if you had been looking for me, a text message would come up and I would read it with a smile, no matter how slight it might be. I somehow knew I would wait for it even though it will probably take forever.

The only things I hate about airports are its protocol, security checks, and what’s similar. I ambled slothfully through the immigration and baggage claims, which, as usual, took for aye. I realized that my feet are back on the ground. My soul is back to my hometown. They say its one of the most crowded places in the world, yet most of the time, it’s the city that would always make me feel the loneliest.

Chattering, laughter, chuckles, shouts… We can hear them all over the place. From a man to another. From a man to a woman. And vice versa. The things that make the city seems even more crowded, and triggers my wanderlust to come out as an excuse to leave the city all over again.

This one would be fleet. All I have to do is to pack my amenities and needs, then withdraw myself to be injected to Salvador. A city that’s according to someone who posted on Wikipedia is the “capital of happiness” in Brazil, thanks to its affluent amount of outdoor parties and carnivals. I might hook up with someone new there…

And then, that single thought, reminded me of you again. Packing would be easy. Wrapping up my “unfinished business” with you would not be. Conceivably, enigmatically inside my veins, I do not want anything between us to end. I would rather have you being mad at me until you know when, so I would always have a reason to keep coming back to you.

I miss you.

Still. No text message from you at all.

I am tired of this hide-and-seek game. There are too many things I wonder about. Do you still call out my name when you are asleep - just like the old times? Because I still do and sometimes I don’t want the habit to diminish. Do you miss caressing my feet with yours before we doze off?

I would not give a shit about how you would respond anymore. I long for you and I believe hearing some abridged greetings from you over the phone would be more than enough, let alone being able to have lunch together once again. I want to see you before I leave.

Your cellphone number is inactive, so I decided to land a call to your place. It was a woman who answered the phone. Apparently, it was your landlady, or so it seems.

“Hi. May I speak to…” It was so difficult for me to even articulate your name.

“He just left to Japan yesterday,” She kindly answered. You know what? Even such simple sentence suffocated me. Your landlady do not know when you will be coming back. Hence, neither do I.

F

My journey unravels at a steady pace. A couple days ago I was chattering with new friends at the local Korean restaurant getting used to this town, and now, I am 60,000 feet above the Pacific ocean heading for an environmental conference as a company representative in Okinawa, Japan. My extensive knowledge on environmental waste management brought me here instead of any other people working longer than me in the office. Funny how life leads me here. The very same place where my folks died years ago in a flight accident, and here I am, sealed tight inside an airplane, crossing fingers and trying to calm myself. I have been avoiding flying like a plague even since, but this time I had no other choice.

The passenger next to me is an old man, probably around the age of father had he lived until this day. He was sleeping for the last four hours, but now that he is awake, he talks endlessly with a tone not unlike a summer cicada, steady and repetitive yet interesting enough to keep my ears open. Trips to Japan seems to be more than common for him considering his knowledge of places of interest in Okinawa and his native-like fluency of Japanese. The way he mark his book with a banknote reminded me of you, again. I cannot help but stare at the sea of clouds stretching to the horizon. Have you been taking flights since then? Are you always this lonely in your journeys?

My father, unlike this man, always told me to not look up to everything all the time. To avoid breaking my neck. He told me life is not always a series of accomplishment, that it is important to sit down and catch my breath. Not that it’s hard, though, as I am mostly an underachiever and have nothing to catch up to. But every now and then I met various people that keeps me from just sitting around achieving nothing. You, with your excess of talents, a strong will, and a charm that could stop a tiger. I once again recall why I could achieve what I never think I could. You gave me example that perseverance will bear the tasty fruit of success sooner or later. Regardless of how I feel towards you right now, you have taught me more lessons than the years without parents behind me. I will be eternally grateful for that.

My train of thought stops when the old man mentions how he narrowly avoided death years ago, when he missed his important business flight to Okinawa as he was tending his sick wife. I feel a bit startled when he mentions the date of the flight was the same flight that took my parents away. He should be dead by now, but he isn’t, but his wife passed away instead on that very same day. That day was his biggest lesson in his life. The trip was vital to the future of his company, yet he chose to tend his wife, who suddenly fell ill to food poisoning. Had he not been there for his wife, he would have died together with my parents in the fateful flight, not to mention his wife would be spending her last moments without him by his side. His company fell into pieces soon after, but he regrets nothing.

I sit there listening silently. Fates tangled, fates straightened. Who would’ve thought? The day I wept in sorrow, this man did, too, for having lost a love but not his life. Yet he grasped back at life as someone who stood through the pains and rebuilt what he has lost. His wife lives in his heart, and he keeps being true to her until the very end. I am seeing the face of a true love. A condition I am desperately looking for, with her, with you.

If I were to lose you today, am I ready?

M

“Being left by a guy whom we believe is ‘the one’ often makes us women try to simplify love and think that it would be easy to be in love again.”

The last sentence she whispered prior to the start of my treads towards the check-in counter at Barajas got me hanging by a thread all over again.

My last few hours in Madrid were filled only by my ramblings about how I suddenly felt reluctant of leaving the city. Us women, including me, almost always have a handful of excuses, from saying that I wanted to be with Mom longer, to stating how regretful I have been of not being able to witness a ceremonial bullfight. These verbose lines I asserted only contained a single point: I wanted to hang out with that guy longer.

What my mother said stroked me right at the epicentrum of my soul. It might sounded too strong but it wholly contained a crystal truth within the idea. Falling into love, for me, had never been easy. It follows that, why has it seemed as if I have made this Spanish guy someone special already? Truth to be told, maybe it is just a summer fling. Or, maybe, he could be the substance to conceal your presence out of my sight. The icings on some bitter-taste cake.

As I walked through a barricade of airport controls and security checks, I could not help myself of not being bewildered over the way my mom remarked how I feel. She told me that I had changed so much and that must be due to the help of someone else. Someone influential. Someone remarkable. Someone she insisted to be introduced if we ever reunite again in our hometown anytime soon.

I have changed? How so? There are so many questions in my heart, as usual. I think too much I might as well have missed some of the most enchanting moments in a woman’s life. Such as being foolishly in love.

What is love, exactly? The same question kept making me puzzled, baffled. The thoughts of you swiftly shoved into my recollection, of how we actually had such a beautiful time cheek by jowl some time ago. If only - if only the condition was not embellished with secrets, lies, and my obnoxious intention in the beginning. It should have been easy. Instead, we were told to go under the pressure.

Can something that started as an informal interdiction go on perpetually? Does love need a strong foundation, or is it the foundation we had been looking for?

Maybe you were right. Maybe nothing gold could stay. Notwithstanding, what if we were meant to be diamonds? Crafted under pressure, yet actually to last forever. Unbreakable and shatterproof. Special and eloquent.

We did not meet in Nice. We still did not meet in Madrid. Even without any chance of rendezvous, I up to this time deeply wish for an alluring fortuity amidst me and you.

I do not want it to happen because I knew you were the one. In sooth, I genuinely don’t. I wish to be with you to prove ourselves that we are meant to be with each other, even if it does not go on until the hell freezes over. Even if we were right for each other only for a laconic of time.

It would be a (succinct) divine happiness to the hilt once again.

F

Indeed, there comes the chance to meet that girl again. With the boyfriend.

The wonder couple of the world, I assume, as she clings to his arm without showing any intent of ever letting go for even a few seconds. I thank myself for not trying to spew pick up lines on her days before, since they would be an ideal definition of the word “soulmate”. Something tinges inside me. I never think I would actually witness a chemistry this strong outside a pharmaceutical laboratory. The slight glimpses to each other, the head-on-shoulder gesture, the way they finish each other’s sentences… true romance is not dead, yet. He is the living proof. She is the endangered species. What am I, then? The archaeologist.

The random after hours meet up we had in the bookstore when I was browsing for Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (inspired by her reading On the Road the other day) ends in a pleasant dinner in a Korean restaurant I’ve never set foot in. There are plenty of culinary spots I’ve never been in this town, but this one so far is the tastiest. Perhaps, what I need is just a good company.

We talk and talk, and in addition, I observe. She is a teacher at a private grade school, and he works in an advertisement agency. They have been together since college and plan on marrying in a year. These are the people you know you can quickly fall waist deep into their niche market of interests. Both of them continue to blabber about plentiful things from places of interest to go around the town, ways to remember those multicolored public minibuses to get anywhere, to their favorite monthly play at the local German cultural center. Their eyes spark with genuine, sincere enthusiasm. Something I just realized I have been lacking since ages ago. Even with you, the excitement is perhaps foreshadowed by a smog of guilt and infatuation. In front of this Shakespearean couple, I find myself as nothing but a clone of The Stranger’s Monsieur Meursault.

Scrambling through my mandu ramyeon, our conversation branches into Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of ethics when she doze off on his shoulder. He stops talking and lightly run his fingers through her hair with a smile. “Whatever school of philosophy I tried to shove down her throat will always end up with her sleeping like this,” he says, “but it’s probably the other way round”.

Lecturing his girl with boring stuff just to see her sleep. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

His smile softens, and he asks me politely if I’m going out with anyone, since I told them before in a flash that I have been having bittersweet times with a girl for some time. I say no, not for the time being, not in any time soon. “If you want it, I can get you to know some of her cute friends,” he says, “but from seeing what kind of guy you are, I don’t think it will make any difference. I believe in true love. You will feel the sound of your hearts clicking when you get to know one yourself.”

They were just friends before, but he finally fell in love with her after she went through numerous breakups only to go back to him crying. They clicked so hard their friends could hear it way before they realized their feelings for each other. Now, they spend their days together in bliss

After long moments of silence of me being deep in thought, he finally wakes her up and pays the bill before saying goodbye. “Next time it’s on you”, she says with a cheeky smile while waving goodbye. I smile back, slightly happy knowing I have made new friends, but inside I am left wandering.

The happiness is real. All I have to do is keep my ears open for the heartfelt click.

M

If there was only one thing I could remember about Mom, it would be the beauty of her resilience. She has always told me that us humans have the power to be resilient. That is, according to the built-in dictionary in my laptop: “(of a substance or object) able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed”.

That was exactly what happened to her when my Dad met his end.

Just like me, Mom had always been fed using luxurious silverware—figuratively and literally speaking. My mother was born in an affluent family as the only child. Blessed with a shedload of luck, she then could obtain fine education in one of the most prestigious business schools in the New York. She was the girl every other chick dreamed to be. She was endued with such pretty face, polite attitude, and graceful look. She had everything, including and especially love. 

Mom and Dad got acquainted while they were studying together in the same business school. Mom told me that she instantly knew he would be the one. Of course he would. The rest was history, as her life turned into a fairytale once again.

But you reminded me so, dear, that life is no fantasy; and nothing gold can stay. 

When Dad passed away, she became the stuff that had to bend, stretch, and go through compressions plenty of times. A load of times. Just a few weeks later, she got back on her feet, decided to pursue the dreams Dad was not able to pursue, and carried me on with her. Mom brought things about wholeheartedly for me and for her — to still have a wonderful life even without Dad around. Yet, she succeeded. She made my life a fairytale as well, though it was difficult to have such thing sans Dad.

She now leads one of the biggest banks in the world, has become one of the most respected women in the industry, possesses a quite and idealistic husband by her side, and… me as her only daughter, who’s also been spoonfed with silverware in my whole life, and now is trying to get out of the golden cage by living on my own, living with some lad in a different town, and going to Brazil to pursue my dreams. Is this my moment of resilience now?

It came to me with no surprise that Mom completely understood my decision of leaving the city where she resides well. She proposed a condition though: that I would have to spend a couple of days accompanying her meeting some important people in Madrid back-to-back before I fly home to pack my bags and leave to Brazil.

So here I am, wearing some business suit that Mom bought me (which had been rarely worn ever since), sitting around a long table located in a big office in Cuatro Torres Business Area. Here I am, being more enthusiastic about whether this guy in front of me - who is a perfect resemblance of Jon Kortajarena - would ask me out or not after the meeting. As for Mom, she is debating over some clauses in an agreement with Jon-Kortajarena-look-alike’s boss who is sitting next to him.

He lightly casted a smile whose meaning my mind could not define. Instead, my neck reacted by being suddenly supple. I beamed some more interests and enthusiasm of what would his next action be, and I smiled back. 

F