The next morning, I try to call his mother. Just to make sure she's met her son.
"Hello?" the pitch is lower than yesterday. I am rest assured she's not looking for him anymore.
"Oh, hi, Aunt. This is Minah calling," I say.
"Oh, yes, Minah. What's up?" she answers like a youth. I rarely spoke to her, so I'm not sure if this is her real character.
"Have you found him?" I ask.
His mother does not take a long time before she says she hasn't found him yet. She doesn't sound worried to me, so I decided to end the call. But before I end it, I tell her that I've been trying to reach him, too, but he is out of reach. An information she must've known without me telling her. She thanks me and hangs on me. I just call her from my front door, so I go back to my room.
I'm watching a Korean drama series recently. I'm also starting to write again, so I turn on my laptop. I'll decide later whether to watch the drama or to write first. I open the folder to my project. There are many unfinished stories there... stories about love, family, failures. I haven't been able to finish any of them since late 2010. Since the last time I published a book. Too satisfied with my accomplishment? Nope. I can say for sure that I have writer's block not because I am too satisfied having published my novel. The first in my life.
I realize I had stopped writing since there's no more stories of him.
* * *
About four years ago, I was in the beginning of my career as a writer. I was in the last year of my junior high school. I loved writing stories, and I loved reading as much. There was a place where we can rent books and comics near my junior high school. The owner of the place held a writing competition where I turned out as one of the winners. I received training until I succeeded in writing a novel. I did not start out from scratch. It was one of the novel whose first chapter I had written two years before.
However, four years ago was when I met Hendra.
As a result, the rest chapters of the novel was inspired by him and our story.
* * *
I wrote about how I loved him. I wrote about the events that occurred between me and him. I wrote about two best friends in love and a stranger in the way. I mixed up the characters. Anything will do as long as the events between me and him were written.
The novel, right after it was published, was given to him. Not to my surprise, he said it was disgusting. He had his own way to talk to me, making me believe that the novel was being complimented. Or maybe I was just fooled by my heart? Yes, I'm sure I was. I scared him, perhaps, writing about him in a devoted way. Coming to my senses, I'm sure as hell to find it creepy if someone is writing about me.
Then the conflicts started to occur.
I stopped writing long stories. I wrote poems instead. I was infatuated by a friend of mine and her beautiful words. She has not published anything, but I swore her poems were one of the most beautiful and explicit poems I have ever read. She wrote poems, usually sad ones, about the boy she loved and about the friends who hurt her. I was instantly inspired. I bought a book for poems. I wrote them also in my laptop. Turned out those were not my first poems. I had written more in my happy times.
I wrote many of them I was able to make a book published on my poems.
But I didn't do so.
I didn't think I was qualified to be a poet.
I sent them to him instead. On his birthday. The last birthday I sent him a gift for.
And there's no more phone calls or messages from him ever since.
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