On August 22nd 2006, at about 11:30 P.M, I met an extraordinary girl whose memory is forever sanctified within my mind.
Looking back, I can scarcely believe all that occurred that sultry night – thus I have decided to put it all down in writing, and so preserve it all for my own solace.
I'd been living in the city for four and a half months and was just getting used to it. I moved there for university and shared an apartment with two other young men – Koreans – whose speech I could barely understand.
Though they sometimes cooked for me, for which I was grateful, they were lazy, bad-mannered and obtrusive characters. I don't remember them even once washing the dishes or doing the laundry.
As I did not exactly like being in their company, I somehow got in the habit of taking late night walks.
I worked part time four days a week at a lousy retail store, where the manager hated me and my co-workers detested me like the devil.
I don't think I am really a hateable person, but all my life I have been isolated and misunderstood. I had never had any interest in people, mainly because they never ceased to offend or disgust me.
I had never been in love and I did not believe it existed. There were bestial passions, surely, but Love, as it is idealised in novels and movies, I just could not believe in.
Naturally, I had never known a girl. As a child, a girl had poked her tongue at me when I offered her some of a cheese sandwich I was eating, and I wanted nothing to do with them since.
I am a sensitive soul. An intellectual. But I could not ignore the fiery urgings that would arrest me at times. Hazy, feathery sensual urgings that possessed me to the point that I was tormented.
A mere glance from an attractive female threw me into raptures of erotic anguish. I denied it constantly to myself and my acquaintances, but I could not ignore the surging desires that wrestled with my reason and attention.
Once, when I was at a cafe, I kept thinking of beautiful women and wondering what it would be like to penetrate one in the brutal manner I used to imagine. Was it really so good? This pathetic world is renowned for overrating things, perhaps it was no different in this case.
Still, that sacred part of me, wherein the desires congregated, like starved, migrating birds, began to throb and expand. I put my coffee down on the stained wooden table and rushed to the men's room.
Bursting into one of the stalls, I withdrew my prick, frigged it for five furious minutes and discharged all over the wall.
Exiting the stall, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a flushed, dishevelled, insolent reflection staring back.
These bouts of madness took hold of me more often as the weeks flew by, and I cursed by lack of self-esteem, my shyness, and my adamant cynicism in general.
Then that night came. I shall never forget it.
I had been on an exceptionally long stroll at night and sat down on a bench near a convenience store.
I saw a girl – perhaps a year or two my senior – standing by a stop sign. I looked at her nonchalantly for a second, met her gaze, and quickly looked somewhere else.
I pretended to be searching in my pocket for something, and then, taking out my phone, made as if I were reading a text.
I heard footsteps on the grimy pavement and before I knew what happened, the girl had sat next to me.
It wasn't at a comfortable distance, like when you're at a train station and someone takes the furthest seat from you: she sat so close we touched.
I didn't know what to do, I distinctly recall being very insulted by her audacity, but this only lasted till she spoke:
"Hey, I'm Rachel."
Instantly I loved her. Her voice was high, but not sickeningly so. I raised my eyes and beheld her face.
She was not beautiful. Her nose was too thick, her eyes too bleary, her lips not shapely enough, her hair too frazzled. But her face beamed with something that towered over abstract notions of beauty. I don't know what it was.
"What're ya doing?" she asked, genuinely interested.
Her question startled me, for I did not know myself what I was doing.
"Um, just reading a te – um, a message," I replied, trying to gather my senses.
"Do you wanna know something?" she asked.
"What?"
"I'm gonna die."
"What?" I was alarmed.
"Doctor said I'm gonna die soon. Maybe tomorrow, or I dunno, soon. Something like that, he said."
I wasn't stupid. No one does such things. I didn't believe her.
"You're not going to die," I said, "why are you here? Why did you sit next to me?"
"I AM gonna die, it's a sickness, you know? Like cancer. What the fuck, man! I'm not fuckin' lying! I'm not fuckin' lying, man!"
Each time she swore she struck my thigh with her little clenched fist. I thought she was drunk, or high, but she looked clean enough – though my disgust for her had begun to mount. She was too unrefined for my taste, though some inflexible part of me kept me glued to the seat.
"Whatever. What do you want?" I said, coolly.
"I don't know. I'm cold," she said, sniffing, "I don't wanna die."
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Want me to take you to a hospital or something?"
"No!" she cried, militantly.
"Well, what then?"
