Maps || l.h. au

03 // March 21, 2014

   It’s been more than a week when Leah has first sent a note back to Luke, one that he had replied to and somehow, had become a string of interrelated written conversations on random pieces of paper or pages of notebooks. Leah felt as though she’s known Luke for years already, despite the fact that it has only been eight days.

   She had learned that Luke was particularly smart in the fields of Biology and Physical Science.

   He had gotten his lip pierced back in New York (“Really?” she had written to him, completely surprised. She never got the feeling that Luke was that . . . punk. “Did it hurt?” she had added a moment later. “At first, and then you get used to the stinging feel,” he replied back to her), wanting to keep a piece of memory with him.

   He is bad at figuring out movies and which actor played whom.

   He had a wide and deep love for music, something Leah understood a whole lot, and she had made him promise her that he’d sing for her when they meet (even if he has protested in caps lock for so many times).

   He was kind and patient, a little random at times, and something in the words he writes makes Leah think that he’s just a lovely person over all.

   There was the talk of meeting personally and it was their topic most of the time when one topic just seemed to be uninteresting or they have both died out of thoughts to write about it (the uninteresting topic, not the “what-if-we-meet” thing). Leah felt a little sceptical about it over the course of days but Luke never has seemed to have given up on the possibility—and it was a wild one.

“Would we even really meet?” she wrote.

“If someone above would make it as that, possibly. Why? Don’t you want us to meet?” he wrote back to her and she could practically feel the nerves through his writing.

“I do. It’s just that—don’t you think that there’d be a million things that could go wrong if we met? Like, what if we weren’t really supposed to meet but just enough to meet each other through writing with a map underneath the paper? What if we were the boundaries to the past and the present and having us meet would have collision with each other?”

 

   It took him a while to answer, but when he did, it was deep. And long.

“There is no boundary in between the past and the present. They always touch each other, like when you’re riding the bus home and it’s full and you just seem to keep on brushing the arm of that person you’ve considered to be quite attractive ever since you’ve set eyes on him—or her, for me—when you got in the bus. Plus, the present always collides with the past. Haven’t you gotten those moments of déjà vu where everything seemed to have happened before but you just can’t put your finger on when it was? Life is a constant cycle of time, and even if that cycle is short, it’s enough for us to discover that things just seem to get repeated but seem different because they’ve been tarnished with something else.”

 

“But if you met me then, at your timeline then, I wouldn’t know you at all.”

 

“It’s OK. I don’t even know how you look. But I’ll be guessing.”