sonder
(n.) the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

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It is raining a little and somber a lot.

The thousands droplets dotting the wall-sized window making the colorful lights from the gigantic ads outside distorted to an abstract mosaic shining on the cafe.

It’s a little over midnight but the street is still busy, mostly with people hurrying home to make the most of tomorrow’s Golden Week.

The cafe is quieter than usual because of that. The inhabitants are the ones who probably doesn’t have any plans for holiday. Or maybe doesn’t have anyone to come home to.

Maybe.

Well, I am the latter type, nevertheless.

I sigh in surrender.

Wondering what would I do if I have plans for the short holiday.

Will I travel or stay?

Will I be happy or hectic? Or both.

Or none at all.

Well, this right now is none at all.

I look at the balding man in his 40s sipping at his hot coffee, probably black with no sugar, leaning on the table reading his crumpled newspaper.

Doesn’t he have a family to enjoy the night with? Rather than reading a newspaper who obviously he bought in the morning but didn’t have time to read it until well past midnight.

But then I look at his bag and see a big envelope with familiar symbol peeking out.

Hospital symbol.

Is it his or his loved ones? Is it the pain or the melancholy of waiting that put wrinkles in his eye bags?

That woman who is frowning since she came. She bought 3 portions of cake and one big milkshake. All untouched.

Is she waiting for someone or is she buying it out of spite?

I sees her phone vibrating from now and then but she hasn’t pick it up. Instead she decidedly looking away through the window.

I cannot see if she is crying or smiling in smug pride.

The baristas, nonetheless, is the easiest to deduce. Her tidy ponytail and crisp uniform matches her sure gaze.

In the slow hours like this, she has finished one big book and now is in her second.

Architecture studies must be hard.

I wonder if she plans to study at her place all holiday or making a short trip to a place where the buildings are the sight.

I look back at the window and see, still, people walking to and fro hurriedly so the drizzle wouldn’t prey on their clothes more than it already is.

Will they wash their clothes immediately or hanging it overnight to see if they need to put it in special laundry in the morning?

I set my eyes down to my vacant table save for a big cup of hot chocolate and my phone.

My gaze has been falling onto the latter now and then.

“Hello, I miss you.”

With the feeling of a big world laid upon my somber soul and sharp loneliness bordering the vulnerable center, I end up muttering those words when the other side pick up the call.

The silent that follow is filled with the sound of the droplets hitting the window. An intervening melody.

I wonder if it is raining in Seoul too. I wonder if she, if ever, feels the harsh truth delivered by that tiny drops of water rushing to earth in thousands too.

“Do you miss me or do you miss my presence accompanying you only when you’re lonely?” she asks as an answer.

And I cannot pick the right words to response. Probably because of the rain. Yes, it must be because of the rains, and this city, and this country.

“There’s a difference, Brian.” She tells me before the call is over. Like the passing wind in the humid summer.

With every lives I see passing my eyes through the window now.

I wonder if any of them want to trade place with me.