About Being a Pessimist

9:10am was when he said he would pick me up... 9 at the earliest. So, when at 9:24am, he still had not shown up, I began to get a little upset.

The situation may not have gotten so bad, had I not called his cellphone to get his voicemail. Three times.

Often, he tells me that I am a pessimist. I tell him that I simply like to have no expectations, so that I am never disappointed. However, the truth of the matter is that sometimes I am, undeniably, a pessimist. An irrational one, at that.

There are many things that could happen to a 21 year old boy driving into the city from his little farm town (the drive can take anywhere in between 40 to 120 minutes, depending on traffic) in torrential rains. (Speaking of which, there was flooding. In one park, all cars except for a white GTO were half immersed in water. Highly ammusing for spectators.)

Like in that ad for drunk driving... when that guy goes home and the next day his friends call him, only they get his voicemail and assume that he is in bed... when the reality of the situation is that he is lying dead in his upside-down car which has rolled down the bottom of a hill in some deserted rural area.

At least a quarter of the drive from his place to mine is through farmland. Masses of it. Hills and fields and even some dense bush areas. And not many people. A car could have a severe crash, and nobody would know for hours. Maybe even days. Or weeks.

For a brief moment, I was afraid beyond control. I experienced what it might feel like to have your life disappear. What if the entire day passed, I wondered, and the evening came, and I still hadn't heard from him? What would I do, how would I sleep, how would I wake up... how would I live?

By the time he arrived at 9:37am, I was crying. I cried violently in his arms for another ten minutes after that. Then, there was the acceptance period: he was alive, his phone was in the boot of the car, there was traffic, he had woken up late, and drive through McDonalds breakfast.

We took the day off university, drove down to the batch and spent it making love, sleeping, eating chocolate covered bananas with whipped cream and sprinkles, making more love, more sleeping, and more love.

Later, when it got darker and we woke up to the rain hammering on the roof and the wind trying to pull the little house off the ground and fly it to Kansas, there was a candlelit bath with steam swirling around the dancing flames, and I could have happily spent forever in there (or not... the water would probably have gotten cold and we would have frozen to death), followed by dinner (which was what we could find in the cupboards: a packet of fried onion flavoured noodles and some tuna curry in a can - leaving me only half satisfied), cleaning up and home time.

I slept through most of the ride.

Now, it will be hard to fall asleep knowing that when I wake up, he will not be beside me.

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