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Hey, Kun... don’t be pressured into this, ok? If you don’t want to meet we can cancel... I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable >.<
Don’t worry Johnny, I’m super excited to meet you on the Saturday... I really like you, you know? You’re one of my closest friends :)
Johnny walks close to the big tree, its lowest branches are too high for him to reach but the leaves follow him from up there, a jump distance from his touch. But even if he jumps he’ll never feel them on his hands, they’re not designed to be touched, only to be looked at. Johnny forgets the tree and looks at the hour on his palmtop for the fifth time.
Still a quarter to seven.
The lamp posts are still off despite being way past six p.m., when they normally are turned on. The night creeps in and the street welcomes the influx of people just leaving work and starting the weekend. Few are waiting for the bus home, tiredness written all over their faces and body language; some are power walking from one place to another, well-dressed and bad-mannered, bumping in everyone at sight and laughing loud enough for Johnny to hear from where he is; most of them, though, are waiting for their food to be prepared by the various vendors of the night market, that bring life to the street. Everyone is either happy, impatient or hungry (or a mix of these), much like Johnny is, waiting for his friend, although his impatience and happiness have turned into anxiety thirty minutes ago. He also feels irritated by his hunger and the loudness behind him, but there’s nothing he can do about either of these now so he hides his irritation on a corner of his mind.
It is also from the night market that comes the source of light this evening, allowing Johnny to search for his friend from where he is without the necessity of leaving his position. He looks for a face in the ocean of people but finds no one. It’s difficult to search for someone that he has only seen in a picture, but Johnny tries for some few more minutes then gives up. He looks at the hours again, eighteen forty-nine.
Johnny sits at the park's small wooden bench, the one that leaves the night market lights behind it in favor of facing the peaceful lake. The one specifically chosen by Kun because, in his words, it ‘is easy to locate, near the fucking huge tree.’
This place is usually taken by couples at every moment of the day on the identical park located on the city Johnny lives, and he knows that the moment he walks away from it to turn on the lamp posts and light up the dreadful feeling the unmoving waters of the lake give off, a couple will sprout from the ground and take it from him.
Johnny lets out a sigh and looks at the sky, forgetting the darkness surrounding him for a moment.
It’s a clear night with no clouds at sight, which don’t mean much because the weather is a mess since forever, rain pours whenever it wants to and withers away as quickly as it starts. And of course the zapping of the cars is distracting, but there are few of them and they’re far up above that it won’t be too troublesome. It’s almost seven, so Johnny hopes for no big noisy traffic to cross the night sky the way it always happens on his city. The last thing he wants is to make Kun uncomfortable by his bad hearing and his constant need to move closer. That is, if Kun has a quiet voice, like in Johnny’s mind, but maybe Kun is a loud person.
Again, it’s something difficult to determine when their communication is strictly done through emails. This is one of the favorite topics of his mind, always wondering about every aspect of Kun’s existence. Johnny starts daydreaming the way he’s used to.
How is Kun’s voice, though? Is it loud or quiet? How’s his voice tone? Does it have a cadence to it like the tides of the sea faraway from the city, or is it plain like the waters of the lake in front of him? Is it warm like the breeze of the night air or is it cold like the mix of fear and anxiety that settles on Johnny’s guts as the minutes pass?
Johnny is certain that Kun is an easy-going person based on his tendency for long ‘haha’s and expressive emojis.
Maybe those are part of his speech, part of him. Kun may be a cute guy with easy laughs and warm expressions, Johnny wonders.
When Johnny imagines Kun’s voice inside his head, when he reads his emails or when he dreams about him, his voice is calm and soothing and it unweaves the nodes on Johnny’s head, it brings him peace like few things do.
There are no stars too, Johnny sees, but there are never stars in the sky except for the morning sun and even the great star is barely seen. All of them enshrouded in pollution, either air pollution by the day or light pollution by the night. The moon is a case of its own. The celestial body is on the sky tonight, the lights make it difficult for Johnny to see it clearly, but in most nights it is impossible to find it without the help of a telescope.
Johnny checks his hair on the palmtop's glass body before looking at the hours again, eighteen fifty-three. He thinks of sending Kun an email, but quickly shrugs the idea away. His friend is not even late. Not yet.
This will be the first time they meet and Johnny has his heart on his mouth.
They talk to each other every day for the last seven months when they met at an email-based forum dedicated to a sandbox RPG.
Johnny remembers the stupid argument over the game’s classes and the incompetence of a specific one in reaching the end game. An useless discussion over a game that, if not for that forum, would be lost in time. Kun asked for an one-on-one match to which Johnny promptly agreed but the match never happened. They tried to enter each other’s server for weeks with an unreachable IP message on their screens every try being the only response given by the game.
They never lost contact, the unattainable task was soon forgotten and their emails changed scopes, leaving the old game behind and giving way to frivolities and daily nothings, the foundations of their friendship. But the main reason of today’s meeting is the game and, most of all, the match that never happened.
He won’t runaway tonight, Johnny thinks out loud. He looks at the time again but as soon as his eyes leave the palmtop he forgets. Upon reaching the device to catch the hours again he gets himself searching for an specific picture instead, a picture of the guy he’s waiting for.
Johnny shared the link to a folder full of pictures of him with his robotic owl when Kun asked to see the electronic pet, but he couldn’t access Johnny’s cloud from any of his devices. Johnny first believed it to be untrue, but when Kun shared a link to his own cloud full of pictures of him with his cat, it was also impossible for Johnny to get into it. He couldn’t access it either from his palmtop or home computer.
It was the first time the cloud service failed him, ever. They spent weeks searching for a solution by themselves as the support for both of their cloud services claimed it was working perfectly and accessible by anyone.
Even Taeil didn’t believe it. His friend, a part of the support group of the mail server, couldn’t fathom errors of any kind on any of the moon’s servers.
“Every email account can reach any other email unless in special cases such as in judicial matters,” Taeil explained to him on a hurried lunch break. “The only explanation for his cloud to be unreachable is that he doesn’t exist,” Johnny smiled in disdain at the thought which didn’t go unnoticed by Taeil. “I’m not kidding, dumbass. Listen. Every newborn is given an email address the same day they’re given a name for the past century, when mankind sent every main server into the moon's surface to overcome the overheating problems they were suffering on Earth. Everyone knows, it’s in our History books. ‘The conjunct space extravaganza that brought peace to Earth’ or some stupidity like that. Whatever. What people don’t know, and you don’t know either,” And Taeil started whispering after sending Johnny a deathly glare. “Is that a copy of every newborn’s right eye is made, and not only for biometric purposes. The iris is used as an encryption for every email. When you send a mail, the message is encrypted with both the addressee's and your iris, for security reasons. When the mail reaches its destination, both irises are used again to unpack the message. It’s an ultra secret email protocol that terminated the use of the SMTP protocol, so we don’t have to keep a personal inbox for each person alive, only irises patterns. It’s safer because there’s only two copies of the message and it costs almost nothing because every message ever sent or received is stored in the client side,” Taeil drank his juice and continued sharing top secret information. “The iris encryption protocol is used everywhere because emails are used everywhere. To send mails, of course, but also to transfer money and, oh, right!, share links to exhaustively protected cloud services. So when I say your friend doesn’t exist what I mean is that any link that exists is reachable and made by someone that exists. You see, it’s basic logical conjunction we have here, and the first logical proposition is always true, I know!, so we can only work with the later.”
“You are for real, Johnny, we both are, but I’m not so sure about your internet friend. Maybe he’s a super advanced artificial intelligence trying to rob you of your body,” Johnny was horrified by the though but Taeil merely laughed before taking Johnny’s untouched juice and finishing it in a second. He wrapped up his explanations with some caveats. “And before you ask, if the newborn doesn’t have the right eye we use the left one. If they don’t have any eyes we have Jo, an artificial intelligence that creates an unique pattern to be used as encryption. Why do you think eyes are the only organs not allowed to be donated? It would make things problematic, too problematic... I don’t even want to think about it. Goodbye, John.”
The conversation had little effect on him because Johnny was drowning in other questions unrelated to the one Taeil brought him. Kun was for real, of course. He could merely change the link before mailing it and still make himself unreachable. Maybe Kun didn’t like to talk to him as much as he enjoyed doing.
The solution Kun found weeks after Johnny and Taeil’s conversation erased Johnny’s preoccupations, but also reduced drastically the number of photos shared. It was too much work to share a single picture, Johnny agreed. Kun sent by email the image’s shape and the components for every pixel and Johnny did the same with a photo of himself (and the owl) he liked very much. It took five days for Johnny’s palmtop to run the small script that brought the image back to its original format, mounting the trillions of trillions of pixels into an image. He printed it as soon as it finished and saved a bunch of digital copies after that.
Johnny looks at the picture on his phone. There, a dark brown haired man smiles at him, dimples on his cheeks and a big cat at the reach of his hands.
Johnny has every pixel memorized. He can clearly see the image even with his eyes closed for how many hours he has spent and still spends staring at it.
The first thing, in this case things, to catch Johnny’s attention since the first time are Kun’s eyes. They have different colors, the left one in a dark brown tone and the right one in a honeyed amber-ish color. It was extremely exquisite, making Kun look like someone coming out of a fairy tale, almost unreal. He first believed it to be some sort of digital edition people usually do on photos, but Kun confirmed his heterochromia when Johnny questioned.
A long time was spent looking at the eternally captured eyes in the picture, but there was still so much to see.
The way Kun’s hair looks fluffy reaching his eyebrows. His black shirt emblazoned with the Mona Lisa holding a red Coke bottle design. The beautiful and bright smile on his lips, red from whatever Kun was eating prior to taking the picture (Once, staring at the picture like he usually does when bored, Johnny counted every one of Kun’s teeth. Twenty-five on this picture, a shameful knowledge he’s embarrassed of having). His moles, all of them. Johnny has spent countless hours zooming on each of Kun’s moles, countless and mortifying hours. The one under the brow and the one under the eye, the ones on his neck and the last one, the one he almost missed.
Maybe exchanging pictures had been a mistake because that’s when Johnny started to fall in love with someone he was getting to know. From then on, Johnny started to rethink and rewrite his mails before sending in fear of being too flirtatious, too much, too real.
Kun must be rich to own a real cat, Johnny ponders as he looks at the chest mole, almost hidden by the cat’s gray fur but clearly seen with the help of the zoom feature. He also remembers that, in last night’s emails, Kun mentioned he is ‘dirty blonde’ now. Johnny has tried to envision his friend in blond hair since then but it’s still an idea out of reach for his mind.
I bet you look cute blonde, he wrote in a whim, guess I’ll find out tomorrow ;)
There are so many things Johnny wants to find out about Kun. The list is infinite and new topics are added to it continuously. He wants to know everything; every childish mannerism, every embarrassing story, every life-changing moment, every little aspect of the other’s personality.
Maybe Johnny is too far into his friend for him to not notice once they meet in real life.
There’s a rustle behind him and a breeze that messes his hair but does nothing to the unfazed leaves on the treetops nor to the unchanging waters of the lake. Johnny quickly sways the photo back to its folder. The last thing he needs is Kun to catch him looking at his chest mole. He turns around on his place, waiting to see Kun getting closer or at least recognize his face on the street but there’s no one coming his way and no known faces on the crowd.
Maybe Kun is the type to be late, that never cares for the time, Johnny wonders, or maybe he won’t come at all.
Maybe the messages yesterday night were too much and scared Kun away. Maybe the meeting was too sudden. Maybe Kun was afraid of meeting there, with a stranger on a strange city at night. Maybe Kun never wanted to spend time together. Why else would he pretend not to connect to Johnny’s gaming server every night for almost two months? Why else would he never face-chat or at least call Johnny?
All the uncertainties inside him maximized by the closeness of the meeting make him loose control. His hands tremble a bit and he’s heavy breathing. He tries to count to ten but his mind doesn’t allow him to calm down. Johnny looks at the hours once again, nineteen o’clock. Kun is late from then on.
But Kun was the one that came with a solution to the problem with the pictures, Johnny remembers. He starts the breathing exercise the doctor suggested. Inhale then exhale, slowly. It calms him down a little.
Kun likes to spend time together, Johnny assures himself, he said so that day. We spend days and nights talking to each other. Even if he doesn’t like me the way I do, he is still my friend. He is my friend. He will come.
Suddenly, the palmtop’s screen lights up. An email notification that Johnny quickly opens.
I see you ;)
Johnny looks around, searching for Kun. His hands start shaking again and he can feel his heartbeat on his ears. He gets up and his eyes wander through the crowd, but he doesn’t see the face he longs for. He walks towards the big tree, the only place big enough for someone to hide. A small excited giggle escapes his lips.
A small portion of him wants to give Kun a hug. The rest of him want to spin him in the air and kiss him, so delusional. Johnny laughs.
He circles around the tree's large and tall trunk, when he sees the park's control center alone. He laughs again.
“Stop running away from me, Kun,” Johnny loudly states to his friend.
Johnny places his palmtop on top of the golden surface of the electronic table when he reaches it. Upon being recognized to update the use history of the control center, Johnny is given permission to interact with the park's facilities. He first turns on every lamp post, bringing an end to the darkness and, after that, he turns off the lake when he mistakenly tried to give life to the fireflies on the tree.
He quickly switches the lake back on and kills the tree, unblocking his vision to the bench, and he’s taken by confusion when he sees no one sitting in the empty wooden thing.
He lights the underwater lamps and moves towards the bench. The street is even more crowded than fifteen minutes earlier. Johnny lazily sets his eyes on its way as he sits down. A bunch of blondes but none moves towards him. Johnny suddenly wonders whether Kun is smaller or taller than him, the thought has never crossed his mind.
Where are you, Kun? Come out already :(
He sends the message and goes back to look around. A smile on his face not as big as beforehand waits for Kun to pop up from anywhere. Anxiety and excitement boil inside him and Johnny can’t contain himself on his seat. He gets up and sits on the bench’s back rest, his attention totally focused on the street when his palmtop lights up for another time.
It wasn’t you :( Tell me when you arrive, ok? I’m sitting on the bench by the tree. Thought ‘bout turning the tree off but you might not find me if I do, dumbo hehe Come on already, I want to give you the fattest hug owo
Johnny turns around confused as he looks at the empty bench behind him. He starts writing another mail to Kun but stops himself when a call notification pops up.
Kun is calling him using the email feature. They never used it, even though Johnny tried to come up with reasons to call Kun every other day he never had the courage to press the call button.
“Stop playing games and come out already. I want to see you,” Johnny pleads as soon as he accepts the phone call and his clumsy and shaky hands try very hard to drop the electronic device onto the ground but Johnny only presses it closer to his ear.
He is sure Kun can hear his heartbeat in the other end but he pays it no attention and just waits. Waits to hear at last the voice he for so long dreamed of. All his daydreams replaying inside his mind again and again for eternity. Then Kun speaks and everything stops, and his voice is exactly what he ever imagined and much more.
“Johnny, I—”
Kun’s speech is cut, but Johnny’s attention is elsewhere too. The phone call ends abruptly and Johnny looks up to the skies where an immense brightness lights up everything.
And the moon is so clear in the night sky that Johnny can see the explosion from Tycho to Copernicus vividly.
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