The past month was fun.
My holiday was great. The highlights were spending time with my Ma, spending time in the woods near our home, lifted with my head in the clouds and lastly a great road trip to Washington D.C. It was a very quick trip and I found myself on the plane back to Korea almost in the blink of an eye. And that is where my story begins…
All my life, I have been a mess when it comes to romance. Two left feet. Foot in mouth. All thumbs. Call it what you want but I have managed to bungle my chances on many occasions. This never worried me because I never tried too hard and I could always find the humor in it. Until recently.
Through my teen years, it was probably my ego that did me in. When I was a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that I was one of the coolest people not just in my school and town, but in the history of mankind. I’M NOT JOKING. Yes, I actually did believe that and I still think I was quite cool back then. I may not have had the panache of a Pierce Brosnan or the athletic ability of a Maradona but I did have qualities that in my mind made me quite a catch.
This Boy thinks he is Special
Thinking about it now, I have no idea what these qualities were. Through my adolescence, once in a blue moon (Actually much rarer than a blue moon, more like a square moon), a girl would send me signals or give me a little sign (as Peter Andre would say) and I never responded in kind. Ever. I just didn’t. This was the most alien thing my friends could imagine. Most teenage boys look forward to these situations but I found it bothersome. I always held out. If anything I was very picky and honest. I could never settle on a girl I wasn’t into. That’s not the case with most teenagers who are just horny as hell. And so, in my pickiness, in my honesty, I wound up spurning the few girls who had the misfortune of falling for me, leaving them scratching their heads. One girl said to me after I informed her I wasn’t interested in her romantically “Hey, I don’t like you like that much, OKAY? I just thought ‘ This guy’s not that bad-looking, he’s sort of funny. Why not ?’” I worried she would spend the rest of her years pining for me but my fears subsided when I saw her with her new boyfriend two weeks later. With standards like hers, I imagine it’s not that difficult to find that ’special’ someone. She wasn’t looking for one in a million, more like one in a trio.
So, I was never able to settle. That was the first problem. The second and bigger problem was the girls I fell for were never able to settle on me. Now, due to my delusions of grandeur, I could never comprehend this. I wondered what I was doing wrong, what I wasn’t doing right. In the parlance of our times, every girl I fell for was ‘out of my league’. Jules Winfield would probably say they were not only not in my league but not even in the same sport. Popular consensus in town was that I was absolutely insane and a straitjacket would suit me quite nicely.
Reviewing the situation, I reached my mid to late teens, not being in relationships and being quite happy about it. However, by the time I reached my twenties, it became commonplace for me to be blase about everything, especially girls. Any fire in me had long been extinguished. I really could not care less. On the Haley’s Comet-like rare occasion when girls flirted with me at bars, I remained stone-faced. They may as well have been speaking Latin because I didn’t understand them and I didn’t want to. People began to suspect I was absolutely mental and they may have been right.
Still, I felt I was only being selective. I had been down the path of falling for a girl only for her to fall for some ‘better looking’ guy who I would always feel couldn’t hold a candle to me. I would often compare myself to these girls’ significant others and reassure myself that I was cooler. I would tell myself “Man, are you joking me ? Of course you are cooler than him. So what if he dances like a Michael Jackson back up dancer while you have been leaning on that wall for what seems like three days? So what if he has a a snazzy car and the body of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger? Dude, you are at least 2 inches taller than that clown and you don’t need to worry about parking and oil changes. God, he probably doesn’t even know which German city the Beatles moved to before they made it big. Buffoon. LOSER. “ I had an answer for everything and life was good…but as I have said before, everything changes…
Around eight years ago, I visited Spain and stayed with my friend Domingo and his younger brother Jordi. Domingo was one of the most carefree people I have ever met and he had a way with people and girls especially. He was so charming that I don’t think anyone would ever call him a womanizer (although he was a womanizer). Living with him was an absolute joy because he was so much fun and there was never a shortage of people to meet or things to do. However, after a day or 2, it dawned on me that Jordi never came out with us. Oh, and Jordi never even speaks to us. Oh, and Jordi never smiles. Domingo, what the hell is wrong with Jordi? I asked ‘Mingo and he said that Jordi had been like that for a few months. I suspected that he had a disease of some sort because he always looked exhausted. He would just sit at the dining table, drinking his coffee and staring into space. It was so sad to see him like that, during one of the happiest times of my life. It turned out that Jordi didn’t have a disease. His girlfriend and him had split up. I just could not believe this was the only reason he had been miserable for so long. Domingo couldn’t either. There was being sad and then there was mourning like Jordi was. That night, neither of us could understand the extent of Jordi’s pain.
In retrospect, I know where Jordi was coming from. He wasn’t afraid to go all in. Jordi swung for the fences. With a girl, there is always a chance you can strike out but God knows it’s better to strike out swinging. That was the mistake I had made in my younger days. I was never passionate enough. I usually struck out looking, the dreaded reverse K on the box score. I just stood there and watched my chances go by with my bat tucked away behind my head…
My personality just isn’t one of passion and fire. I’m not Al Pacino. In temperment, I’m probably more like a St Bernard. I come across like I don’t care even when I do. It was fine when I was younger because usually I didn’t care. But now, I usually do. Yet my face betrays my convictions. More than anyone I know, I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am sincere to a fault. If I care about something, I am all in. If I don’t care, I say so at the outset and this can make it seem as if I’m being flippant or glib. I’m not, I’m just being transparent, I’m just being ME.
And so it was I found myself on Korean Air flight 086 from New York to Seoul three days ago. It’s a fourteen hour direct flight. I had hurt my foot a few days earlier and requested a better seat but they didn’t have one. My stewerdess (I think stewerdess sounds much better than flight attendant) came up to me and asked if I was alright. I told her it hurt a lot and I had to put my foot in the aisle because I was too tall to put in under the seat in front of me. As a result, I spent four out of the first seven hours standing in the back of the plane. All I did was talk to my stewerdess. I was lucky because the only two Korean expressions I know were the first 2 things I said to her. I started with a polite and flawless ’Mul Jesoyo’ ( Can I have water?) and followed with my trademark ‘Kamsamneeda’ (Thank you.) She was duly impressed. She was a gorgeous Korean girl from Daegu (who now lived in Seoul)and we talked about travel, favorite places, food, Korea. I stood in the back and whenever she had a free minute, she would join me. She didn’t have to but we really hit it off and she would tell me to wait for her.
Soon after, I decided I had to ask her for her number, I had to hang out with this girl. Rather than wait till the end of the flight, I decided to ask her the next time I saw her. And I did.
She smiled, clapped her hands together and said ‘Sorry!”. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was in a long distance relationship with a man in D.C and he didn’t like her talking to guys. I respected that and said I only wanted to be friends because I thought it would be cool to go to Seoul with a nice Korean girl who knows English. She said she could not do it cos of her man. I loved the fact she was so loyal and as I tried to think of some way to convince her, she turned the tables on me. She asked me “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” The way she said it, it felt like a punch in the nose/ knee to the stomach combo. I said “Huh?” to which she laughed and said “Huh?? HAHA WHY DON’T YOU HAVE A GIRLFRIEND? I HAVE HAD MY BOYFRIEND FOR TEN YEARS. He is just like you. He has a cute smile. Curly hair. Stomach. Cute like you. ” At this point, I felt like a boxer getting pepperred, like De la Hoya must have felt when Manny Pacquiao cornered him and ate his lunch for him. Was she saying that I was so cool that I should logically have a girl? Was she saying that her boyfriend was a mess but even he has a girl? We stood in the back of the plane in silence while she looked me in the eye with her big perfect smile and waited for an answer. She really wanted to know. Here I was at her mercy. Buckle up in case of turbulence, indeed. Summoning up all my wisdom, I said “I don’t know.” She replied that I had to know. I told her that recently I have tried hard but it didn’t work. Again, she asked me why. I told her that for a long time I didn’t want a girlfriend. I told her that now I do. I told her I have tried but it didn’t work and it took a lot out of me. I told her that when you go all in and you lose, you don’t analyze things, you just feel empty, like Jordi did. ( *It turned out that she was Jordi’s ex girlfriend…okay that would just be insane. Jokes!) My temperature was rising under these hot interrogation lights and I was wishing I had waited till the end of the flight to ask her out. I only had oh…7 hours left of this…
I went and sat down. I told her I was tired. I was.
The next time she walked the aisle, I avoided eye contact for the first time all flight long. I pretended that I was completely transfixed by the Skymap illustrating the path of our aeroplane. After another ten minutes of trying to look busy, she walked right up to me and handed me a card. I thought it would be a menu or a customs form but it was a postcard with a Korean Air plane on it. I turned it over and she had written:
Dear Sid
Thank you for talking to me.
Sorry about what I say.
Sorry about my English T.T
Your heart is so big.
Nice to meet you ^^
M.J Kim
Obviously, now I wanted to talk to her more than ever.
So I made my triumphant return to the back of the plane… I proudly walked across the four rows behind my seat and she greeted me with a big smile and a high five.
We talked about relationships and we asked each other questions and she said to me that I should just talk to all Korean girls like I talked to her. I told her that she was different from most. Eventually, the conversation turned back to other things and it was just as well. Soon, it would be time to begin our descent towards Seoul/Incheon. I pulled out a piece of paper with my number on it and gave it to her. She smiled and put it in her pocket. I asked if she would call me or text me just to keep in touch and she just smiled and didn’t answer. Her honesty made me like her even more. We exchanged some pleasantries and I told her how great a job she did and all that. The last thing she did was, she pulled me in close, looked me dead in the eyes and said ”Sid, soon you will have a girlfriend much better than me, much more beautiful than me.”
I didn’t know what to say so I just said “Kamsamneeda” and went back to my seat.
