Love Stories

I have a thing for love stories. Besides chocolate, they're probably my nourishment of choice.

I also have a habit of making up love stories for absolute strangers. For example, there’s a bakery very close to where I live, that I always pass by when I go to the bus stop in the morning. Last semester, whenever I had an early class, I’d convince myself to get up and make it to school on time by promising myself a pain au chocolat from there.

More often than not, this sweet, young lady works the counter. She’s very courteous, always smiling, and very down-to-earth. I once saw her kissing goodbye this young chap (the baker?) who came out of the kitchen. I imagined that that bakery was their baby, that running one together was what they always wanted to do and that they were living out their dream together. Perhaps they grew up together, were best friends all throughout their childhoods and saw each other differently in high school. Or maybe they had to go through a million obstacles to get to be together (feuding families, possibly?) and now they have everything they always dreamed of, and are living a happy life together. Or perhaps they met by chance when one of them was vacationing here in Nice, but the other decided to stay here for love, because being apart was just absolutely unbearable and unacceptable...

Living my own great love story has always been on my To Do List. I got to live a pretty good love story in Amsterdam during my spring break trip last week. It wasn’t in Japan or with a Taiwanese boy like I might have imagined, and even though it was brief, it was also intense and memorable. And I feel really fortunate, because it was with someone who was everything I could ever hope for. Really and truly a wonderful guy who will be a huge gift to an incredibly lucky girl one day. I still think the world of him even though we’re apart, and I wish all the best for him.

The day we said goodbye, I was, naturally, very sad. I saw pure heartbreak whenever I caught sight of my own reflection in windows we passed on our way back to my aunt’s apartment to pack up. So I sent a little prayer up to his God, because he’s Catholic and I don’t have a religion, myself. It went a little something like this:

Dear God,

Please take very good care of him. Please ensure that he gets to enjoy good health, and a long, happy, fulfilling life. Because he really is one of your finest pieces of work to date, and he deserves it all. And please make sure that when he eventually finds someone he decides to love forever, that she is as wonderful as he is, if not more.

But I hope he remembers me fondly for the rest of his life, as I will him.

Amen

I hope He got my message...