Love comes after all

Prequel to TIME TO SAY LOVE & collaboration with WAITING FOR THE RETURN

He knew he had lost her when he held her hands and she looked at the sea. He knew when he first met her, she was waiting for someone who might never come back. Heck, nobody even knew if the man she was waiting for was still alive or not. But most believed he was not. After he swam into the sea in attempt to rescue a drowning tourist, he was never seen raised to the surface again. Together with the tourist, too.

He understood that all the love, attention and care he poured onto her won’t even change her mind for she was really in love with the man. And all he could do now was to let go of her cold, thin hands. She never looked back when she walked away. As if her love for the missing man was frozen. And so was her time. To say he was fine with it was nothing near the truth. In fact, he hoped that when she left, she’d say something. But she didn’t. He was so devastated after months of loving her, he received nothing in return. He didn’t expect to, didn’t need to but he felt neglected and abandoned.

It might sound pathetic but he cried every night silently in his house accompanied with only a yellow fluorescent light. And sometimes rain came along. He didn’t know why he was crying so much but he felt better. But no matter how better it felt after he cried, he’d cry again the following night. It never occurred to him that he was having a heart break. And it was breaking his mind too. When it rained at night, he’d come out from his library and stood in the rain. As his tears and rain mixed together, he’d sit down and lay on the wet grass, suffocating himself when the rain hit his face. Even the novels he wrote were so heartbreaking that it made everyone cried just reading the first chapters. All the paintings he painted became melancholic and more blue than usual.

He did this for almost a year. Then, on a cool night he went outside again expecting it to rain but what he found was more surprising. There was a black kitten playing outside his yard. It was jumping around catching frogs. When the kitten tried to jump onto a frog, the frog jumped and landed on its face. The kitten fell backwards and squealed. He couldn’t stand any longer and laughed. The kitten stopped and looked at him. Then it hit him.

Since the day he and the woman parted, he never laughed. He watched the kitten strolling around him as if checking whether he was harmful or not. He smiled and squatted down. He reached out his hand and found the kitten to be licking his fingers. It meowed softly, as if it was trying to tell him something. “Hey there,” he said and quickly grabbed the kitten before it ran away. He checked the rear and found it to be a female. “I need a girl in my life right now,” he added and patted the brave kitten. It meowed again.

It didn’t rain that night. The man then made the black tubby kitten his pet and she was all he needed for more than a decade. After all, he was a writer and seldom went out and met people. In fact, he was ready to live alone all his life until the kitten came. And she was all the company he needed for the rest of his life.