What Should I Do If You Are Real?

Five in the morning, with Red Hot Chili Peppers blasting away in my headset while I start typing my fingers away here. I had finish two movies today and a documentary about Dogtown. With a fresh cup of milo and the wee morning breeze, I'm good to roll out another two three hundred words.

I like it this way.

The part about me just sitting there all day long writing, staring at the screen, staring for an answer.

That's all I do when I was sixteen. Movies after one another. Fingertips raining on the keyboard until they gone all yellow and craggy.

Oh no, I didn't blog back then in 1999.

I think I used to have a diary then. But then it was full of sexual innuendos and whiny horseshit.

I'm sixteen, fresh baked from O' levels, waiting for results, and no doubt waiting to lose my virginity.

I had shitload of free time on my hands. I worked in a packaging factory, I hang out in malls. My hair was bad, my scoliosis have gotten worse, I was that dork with the bigass glasses and that shit-eating grin on my face.

I was so in love in Jodie Foster ever since watching 'Nell'. I hunted down all her movies, read all her interviews, bought her biographies and joined her online fan club.

Bloody geek.

And that's where I got to know Amber Lynn March.

She was from Florida, sun setting beach with surfer waves crashing to the shores. Amber liked Jodie Foster equally and we knew each other through Yahoo fan club.

It was after a month of intense corresponding, we decided to have a relationship. Yeah, an online romance.

No shit.

Stupid but amazing.

Everyday we corresponded rabidly through Emails. She was heavily into marine biology, mingled all day long with orcas, dolphins and turtles. She liked ballads and emotionally invested in romantic comedies. She would laughed and cried along.

Most of the time we updated each other about our day and fantasized about meeting one another eventually. We planned the time-line, the flight plans, the budget, the accommodation and our reaction on that fateful day.

We even wrote each other short stories of the fantasized scenarios on the day when we will finally meet. I would start one, then she would complete the other part and we went on, as if we were very certain we would eventually meet.

Sometimes, we wrote about her coming over to Singapore, probably touring. Other times, I would finally save enough to fly over, our teary emotions at the airport and our candle lighted cuddle in her dormitory, safe in her arms.

(I will always pause and lost in that thought whenever I took a jolt down that memory lane.)

She would scanned her palm and attached to her mail, quoting something from Disney's Tarzan:

'Remember how I said I would hold your hand? Well, whenever you want to feel me close to you, you can place your hands on mine. Tarzan and Jane did that when they fell in love, and it signified a unity between them. If I could scan in my whole self, I would! :)'

Then we gotten serious and started launching our affection off ground. We started sending postage mails from one land to another.

She would send a huge stacked of her pictures, sea animal dolls, stuff she collected (beautiful pebbles and awfully bright stickers) and many many letters written by hand.

On one card she had pasted a key on it and said,

'The key to my heart, keep it. It's yours.'

Man, that's really sweet.

I would reciprocate with mix tapes of songs, my baby photos and shitload of cards. One for each day I missed her.

Once, she sent over a dog-eared Spiderman collectible comic book published in 1983. The year that I was born.

It ended six months later when she was so upset that her roomie gotten into an accident and I tried to call her. I guess she got freaked out by the reality of such liaison. We stopped contacting since.

I don't blame her, it was doomed to fail from the start.

I guess this is how I could keep pounding on the keyboard and face that computer screen for days, ever so religiously.

Just pouring it out.

Sometimes, in the tinkle hours of the morning dusk. In front of a computer typing away, I would think of Amber Lynn March.

I hope she is doing okay.