The Only Reason to Learn How to Fly
“It happened again,” I told her as I exhale the cigarette.
“What?”
“I took the train once to get here and fell in love twice.”
“Not this again,” she responded with the face of someone who wants to put out her brightly lit cigarette on my face.
“I just can’t help it.”
She said nothing.
“It’s way easier, you know? Seeing someone from afar, putting your fantasies about how he or she lives, ignoring the fact that what you see is not how they really are … It’s way easier.”
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You know you need something real, I mean, this would be a stupid suggestion, but you are still using that dating app, right? Try to be more open-minded using it.”
“I agree.”
“Good.”
“I agree that it was a stupid suggestion.”
She looks pissed. I can’t blame her, for it is not the first time we talked about this. In fact, this topic always came out at least once in every three months.
“You need to stop overthinking, go out, and do not put any expectation.”
“You know I can’t do that; I’ve tried! I got excited easily with any possibilities…”
“And how did it serves you so far?”
Now, I’m the one who said nothing.
“I’m afraid,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of what will come later. I’m afraid that even if I find the right one, the people around me won’t accept them … whoever they are.”
“Fuck the people around you.”
“Another stupid suggestion, I could be jailed for that…”
“Okay, what happened recently?”
“Huh?”
“You don’t usually think about it this far, so something just happened, right?”
The truth is, something did happen. Something too silly to even be discussed. But she knew me, she knew about my problems, so I told her.
“I watched a stand-up comedy show…”
“Seriously?”
“It’s true. I watched one of my favorite stand-up comedians. One who recently got married to someone he loves, someone I thought similar to him. All this time, I thought he took the easy way out to deal with the family he was born in and the family he’s about to make.
“But, turned out, his journey was far from easy. There are some hardships I never knew he faced, and when I found out about it, it scares me.”
“Why?”
“The fact that I will have to deal with it someday, the fact that I might have to choose … at least the people I stumbled in the train, the version that existed in my head, won’t give me those problems.”
“They gave you a different kind of problems, though.”
She’s right.
“You know, sometimes I feel like I want to go to the tallest building in the city, and just jump,” I said.
“To die? That’s not a…”
“To fly, you fool.
“Because if that really happens, all the things that are scaring me won’t matter. I can fly, who the hell would care about mundane stuff we talked about just now.”
“Ain’t that the dream, weirdo,” she said as she lit another cigarette, leaving the discussion unresolved until it resurfaces again in three months.
