Pen Pal

Pen pals. Yup, I know nowadays people use email, facsimile and they even use their cell phones as their life partner for communicating. Not only short messages, but also love letters. Recently, I haven’t been doing any post mail activities except for work related, but I was a teenager on early nineties, so this post mail activities were part of my world back then. A big part. It was an on and off hobbies. Sometimes I have 10 pen pals at the same times, sometimes it was one or two pen pals that actively sending mails back and forth.

One of the most memorable one was Wawan. He was a guy from East Nusa Tenggara who did fencing, he was an athlete and worship rock music at the same time. That was our something in common. The music part, of course, back then I even could not run properly. We shared stories about music a whole lot. He liked Dream Theatre, while I craved for Bon Jovi. We both liked Nirvana. And we both hated Tommy J Pisa. And the list went countless.
It was really exciting, the way we shared stories. I didn’t have many male pen pals, and girls rarely understood Yngwie Malmsteen. So, I always waited for a letter from him. I waited for our next discussion about the happening rock band, as well as his juicy love stories. He had a girlfriend who lived in Jakarta, while I was hopelessly in love with my junior high school crush.

I remember, I always had this fantasy about visiting his town, meet him eye to eye and then we would go on and on talking about music industry or the next rock gigs we were craving to mosh in. Probably he would tell me that he had broken up with his girlfriend and I would still be that naïve girl who was too much in love with her classmate. Probably we could have been skipped the love department and back to our main passion: music.
It was the hellluva fourteen years a go. And today, I am standing in the land of his town which he always wrote stylishly as Qoe-Punk. I strolled along a street and looked at a name written on the sign: W.J. Lalamentik, then I remember this as a street I used to write on the front of the envelopes addressed to him. I try to track down on how I imagined the city would be. Was it the picture of dusty and grayish scenery? Or was it the beautiful shoreline and greenish lontar trees? Too bad, this probably written in bad sector memories. But the experienced I had today answered a little bit of my curiosity.

Of course it was too hard to track him back, even in his hometown. He might get married already, have three children and live outside of this town. But certainly I bear him in mind, physically from the picture he sent me. More ever, the content has been existing in my mind; the stories we shared and the dreams we had. I remember a girl who always wrote eagerly explained everything from her point of view. I memorize who I once was, and gratefully smiled to be the girl I am now.