He stepped in the Mexican deli to buy a pack of cigarette. On his way home, a glimpse of a woman's face flip-flashed by.
That was her! But that's not possible; last time he heard of her, she mailed from a foreign country...
They merely went out once, but she made an impact on him already. In the following consecutive weekdays, he called her in the dorm, but she was never there; and the weekends, it was the same. He was not patient enough to wait up for her return call or mail, so he went to her hoping he's got the fluke to catch her.
He saw her motorscooter standing right there in the yard and he figured she might be in. From ten to three in the afternoon, he called and waited in the front entrance of the dorm, with a whole grocery bag of fresh fruit hanging danglingly in his arms.
"I am not the kind of girls who love surprises," he recalled what she told him, but it was a bit late now that he has waited up for her to show up.
When he could not wait any longer, he made his last attempt calling upstairs for her. This time, her roommate came down and told him that she would not return for the day. Edgy and a bit aggrieved he was, little by little he got the grasp of her hiding from him and avoiding his mails and calls.
Once back to his dorm, he wrote her a letter out of resentment at her indifference and evasion. Feeling baffled and aggravated by her ice treatment, he sent her the letter in which he taunted her vision and ambition of achieving her goals as a learned person, and solumnly bid her farewell. He was too offended by her rejection on him to wear a smirk with the thought of his witty words may cause some sort of damage to her and harm her who was sensitive enough to comprehend the bitterness and sarcasm he deliberately wanted to dismay her.
So their story ended. And a decade has gone.
Nonetheless, why did he still think of her?
The perception of her rebuffed him for his banality made him bear a grudge about her. I would have been great with her; she would have made my life successful, back in school years or now if only it worked out for them; if only she were his wife. He loathed the idea of being mediocre, but he could not change the fact that he was actually nobody.
He spat on the curb and recollected the fact that she's married and living elsewhere with someone merrily, he knew that, for he came across her in the shopping mall, looking great and even taller than he remembered her. She stood there whispering to the ear of her husband, (boyfriend back then,) wearing a bright and radiant smile on her. He believed that he would even hear her giggle even though she was about ten yards away.
And then, his remorse for writing her the mail checking out on her was a mistake, because he started out wishing to learn that she was not at all happy with the ennui life and the prosaic guy she's with, perhaps constraining in a going-nowhere deadend job, but what he's got was that she's still a fox and apprantly better-off than he was.
This old love of his has then turned his life and his twisted obsession of comparison into a pathetic quagmire, with cycling self-indignation recognizing his incompetence.