T

For a while, I was seeing this woman. For a while, she was so close, but ultimately so different. How did we cross paths? Well we just did, like how strangers brush shoulders on the busy streets of Shanghai, New York, Berlin, Florence, or, anywhere maybe except on the moon. Maybe on the moon too. We met in strange ways at strange times in strange places. All the strangeness made us—well, at least me—feel close. It’s all relative, you see. People naturally hold on to what they find familiar and certain, and in those strange contexts, that was just her for me. Once we walked to what seemed like the edge of the city. You know in some kind of games you get to explore the map freely and suddenly you find yourself facing a insurmountable wall, a forever stretching body of water, a defense system that forces you back to within the limit of normalcy. But for once we tickled with that edge, like how we tickled with each other’s normalcy. Lights flickering like an electric music dance floor, except that there’s just rain, mud, abandoned constructions, and us. We talk, we hold hands, we kiss, we talk again. It felt like we were the only ones left here. I don’t know whether it was because we survived the world or got abandoned by it, but that didn’t matter. I got her, a human being with a warm body and many quirky thoughts, on a chill summer night.

Things got better but also worse for us, just like all things would, right? I enjoyed the randomness, the spontaneity, and the sudden bursts of passion, from me. Thoughts and ideas and feelings happening naturally and flowing freely as they should. But, boy oh boy, one just can’t help being greedy and squeezing those things. Tried making plans, got shot down, and made other plans and got no’ed. You see, planning was futile when that relationship of ours—so to speak—was so volatile. We had to return to normalcy, pitifully, for there was no global plague that just the two of us survived from or a species-level effort to colonizing Mars that we were kicked out of. And just like that, naturally we returned to our normalcy, separately, because we didn’t have the same normalcy. I don’t believe in astrology or enneagrams or tarot cards. They just say things vaguely in a random direction and let people mentally complete the rest. Also because I didn’t want them to be true because they all said how different in nature we are. Vaguely true. Fine, very true. So different that we spent hours talking about our difference, differences, including our last meeting in which those were the only topic.

I don’t think I can reasonably live in her normalcy, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of not doing that. I kept imagining a fictitious middle ground. Maybe one that is just like the edge of the city where we both seemed content. At least that was how I felt back then. It was so large of a gap to bridge, will have taken years and tears like for the viaduct to rise from the abandoned construction site. Before the impossible could happen, it was no surprise that we both returned to our own normalcy now, as one of us decided.

I became so upset. I was asking myself, again and again, but why, why couldn’t you be happy, why couldn’t you continue to be happy, with the normal ones, your normal ones?

—

这次不是random word generator也不是刚写出的东西了

but just for consistency and posterity 还是放在这里

the whole thing inspired by S 谢谢她

也谢谢你 T