“There should be stars for great wars like ours.”
– Sandra Cisneros
It was a perfect, well-calculated life. One that she carefully planned from the moment she entered college and one she stuck with as she drifted in and out of life. Her life was a steady pulse, occasionally rising but nothing that would shake her world out of the well-balanced life she created for herself.
She was getting along just fine despite the fact that sometimes she felt empty because of the routines given to her. She was the perfect child, the perfect employee, and the epitome of the perfect woman. She desperately tried to hide who she was beneath the façade of a good career, a great family life, and an online persona that was unparalleled. In her she craved for deep adventure but she didn’t mind being content in where she was at the moment.
At the very core of who she was, she was content. She sometimes longed to be with someone but it was never an intense longing, it was an afterthought, something she wanted but quickly forgot in the daily bustle of life.
She thought she has loved before but that was until she met him. He was eccentric, with an energy that just won’t quit. With persistence of a child, he crashed into her life with color like she has never known before. She treaded around him with careful calculation. He was nothing like who she expected to be with. Even with her love life she had a checklist that she wanted to stick with. But from the moment he said hi, the checklist was thrown out of the window.
It was his persistence that won her over. She recalled how his entire face would light up when her face came on the screen and she recalled the first time he told her he loved her face to face. They were magical moments she kept in her heart, moments that didn’t matter much the first time they happened but have developed into sweet memories she will cherish forever.
He often told her that he wanted to be a hobo. That his main goal in life was to travel from one place to another on his motorcycle anonymously helping those he came across. He wanted to free. From the moment they met she knew that was what he wanted; she didn’t know the weight that these words would carry later on.
The girl who was always so perfect was suddenly curious: who was this man? And soon, slowly, she let him in. Through hours of conversations, she got to know the wildly energetic man who seemed optimistic about everything.
Slowly, both of their walls came down. And her life that has been on a straight line her entire life was suddenly shattered. Here she was falling in love unconventionally with the most unlikely person. There were many similarities between them but the contrasts were what made them work. Between hours spent together, they have built a world that was excluded from the reality that they were both in. The reality they created was just between him and her, the hobo and the princess. They were happy. They were looking forward to a shared life together. It wasn’t a reality yet but they knew it would happen soon enough.
The princess fell hard. She only once read about unconditional love that didn’t seek to be loved in return. She only once dreamt of experiencing a love that caused her heart to bleed when she wrote about it. Suddenly, she was gifted with that kind of love. Her days were filled with the eccentric hobo whose only wish was to be free.
The love they had for each other were desperate, intense, and irrational. She often ran in fear that he would leave and he did the same thing. There were many factors to consider but not once did she believe that he would lie to her about his circumstances. It was possible but she knew that the love they shared was real and wasn’t a product of her imagination.
The hobo once told her that the love they had would one day cause others to envy them because by looking at them together, others would ask how it was possible to love each other like that.
But the love was too intense and soon they were burning in their own desires. She desperately wanted to be with him, he desperately wanted to find himself. The hobo loved her but he has yet to recover from the storms life has thrown his way.
As he spoke of freedom, the princess knew that the freedom he sought couldn’t be found externally, he needed freedom from the demons that lived inside of him in places so deep her love couldn’t reach it even if she tried.
And as quickly as it began, their love story ended. The hobo, despite loving the princess more than he loved anything in his entire life, needed to go back on his own way. With fear overcoming him, he no longer thought he deserved to be loved. He pushed away the idea of happiness out of the fear that even that would end one day too.
She left her with a heart so shattered that she knew it was irreparable. But despite the chaos he has left, the princess had no regrets. She knew that she would never be the same again and for that she was grateful. Her heart has now been through fires of both love and pain and to enjoy one, she had to deal with the other.
With an aching in heart, the princess fondly recalled memories with the hobo and she calmly whispered a quick prayer to the universe hoping that it would find him as he went on sea.
She wanted to let him know she loved him and maybe if he would have stayed, maybe he would have finally learned to love himself.
