Vanessa had managed to track down one of the other German exchange students who came to their school together with Daniel fifteen years ago on Linkedin. His name was Arnold, a modernized spelling of Arnholdt which was more common in Germany, Vanessa found out online.
The thirty-something-year-old still had a boyish face, although with glasses and wearing a suit on his Linkedin profile picture, he looked every bit like the manager of a large German chemical company that he was.
He assumed that she was looking for a job. That was what people whom you have not met for a very long time assume usually, and they were mostly correct. Vanessa had received a fair share of these out-of-the-blue Linkedin messages from people from the past she barely remembered. He was on the verge of sending her a message that would politely dismiss her, for she had a terrible jumbo of job histories on Linkedin, for someone who graduated in the same engineering program but didn't work a single day as an engineer. She knew Arnold would look down on her, so she sprung the question early.
"Are you still married?"
That sounded wrong. That was not even what Vanessa contacted him for.
Arnold took his time to type, possibly surprised by the sudden departure from the usual corporate banter to something so personal. Vanessa could imagine Arnold's cheeks blushed, and he was not even the man she wanted to make feeling this way.
"Patel and I are happily married. We now live together in Boston." The reply was followed by a smiley.
That was a to-the-point answer that was supposed to cut off any undesirable feelings on her part, in case Vanessa was about to confess some very deeply hidden love for him.
"I am so envious of you two," she typed, letting her true feelings show. Arnold and Patel met in the same university. Patel was two years older than Arnold, already a graduate student then, while Arnold was just doing his undergraduate. He stayed at the same university in the States and did not go back to Germany, and they got married. That was the fairytale that did not happen to Vanessa and Daniel.
She felt like the chambers of her heart crunched up. Only Daniel could make her feel hurt like this, ever, in her life.
"It's not easy," Arnold sent next, and added a winking smiley. "Visit us sometime. We should talk about the old times."
Vanessa let his invitation hang while Arnold's online status was still green, waiting for a polite reply. Instead, after more than a minute, Vanessa typed.
"Do you know what happened to the others? Like Marcel and Ingrid?"
"Ingrid married a Dutch guy. I don't think you've ever met him," he said.
That jilted her memory. Vanessa did meet this guy. They had sushi together when Vanessa visited Daniel. She, Daniel, Ingrid, and her sweet boyfriend, they had sushi together. The food was awful, but they were still students and they did not know better. The only memory of their conversation that night was about the Dutch word 'lief', which Ingrid, smiling and happy, told us she did not understand when she first heard her Dutch boyfriend say it. 'Ik vindt je lief', or I found you 'lief', lovely, had meant 'I like you', in Dutch, Vanessa had learned that night. Apparently, it was very strange to a German speaker. Vanessa did not know why. Perhaps it was because of the fact that the boyfriend had appeared to be giving her compliments, while he actually meant to confess his love. Vanessa found it amusing that he must have had to say it many times before Ingrid realized what was going on.
Vanessa realized she had never found out what Germans would say if they wanted to say 'I like you' to another person. 'I love you' was easy. 'Ich liebe Dich', a one-to-one translation. But 'I like you'? A phrase that you could only ever say to someone if you truly like them, unlike 'I love you' which could also be told to someone you hate, like your obnoxious little brother. 'I like you' is a phrase reserved for the special people in your life.
