It is not so much as love at the first sight (or, these days—at the first swipe). It is more like the other day when I was at the grocery store, pushing the small shopping cart through the narrow alleys (fruits & vegetables, meat & dairy, snacks, chocolate & candies, hair & body, pet) before the shelves burst out into fireworks of memories.

There, exploding into a million little pieces of moments-once-shared: our usual granola, our favorite soy milk, our regular pasta, our instant spices for rendang and nasi goreng, our huge bottle of Pocari. Parading warmth despite the cold air blowing from the meat & dairy freezing units.

It’s beautiful to know that we’ve left traces of ourselves in one another. That despite the distance, the world is now full of them, full of you, full of us, wherever we look. It gives meanings to the most random sightings of daily whatnots.

It makes me feel as if you’re near. And, I guess, in one and other way, you are.

We share the world holding hands—or some other times, holding our mobile phones. Smiles and kisses are popping up from the palm-sized screen; words and voices are flying freely across continents: those days when I look out and see the sunshine, while raindrops fall over the sunroof above your kitchen (that I adore).

Together, we’re off on impulsive adventures: me on the back of the motorcycle, and you at the front with the GPS on. Cooking pasta and fried rice, pig them out directly from the pan. Swearing at each other at the squash court. Sitting next to each other somewhere, not talking, working on our passion projects.

Tens of thousands of feet above the ground, more than a year ago, you wrote me a letter.

You said you’re flying above Gwadar, speculating that it might be located somewhere in Iran. Later on, I found out that it was an area near Pakistan’s Balochistan. An area I once mentioned in my short story that was published years ago, Humsafar.

Isn’t it funny how life keeps on throwing signs your way, teasing you in a humorous way, knowing that you’d never get it until one day you really get it?

If life were a spider web, our stories have been entangled in a heap for many years, many millennia, many centuries… connecting us with millions of lives today, as well as millions of lives before us and beyond us. We might have a long history that we have yet to discover, billions of dots waiting to be connected.

Time, slowly, will spill the secrets of the random things, decisions, and connections that lead us to one another.

But until then, I just want to thank you:
simply, for taking a chance.