Her name is Jade. She’s turning
22 in a month.
Jade lives in a cramped studio
apartment on the fifth floor, with a large window that’s practically useless.
The only view she gets is the back of a giant billboard overlooking a steep,
one-way street. It sucks, yeah, but she doesn’t have a choice. Scoring a rental
that cheap in the middle of the capital is already a stroke of luck.
Her phone chimed, snapping her
out of the three-hour tunnel vision she’d been trapped in, staring at her
monitor. She reached for it and saw her usual late-night prayer reminder. Jade
rose from her hydraulic swivel chair, its wheels gliding softly across the cold
ceramic floor with a quiet scrape.
Five minutes later, she returned
to her desk feeling refreshed and a little relieved—two things she always felt
after speaking to God. She gently picked up a can of drink beside the monitor,
careful not to let the tiny droplets of condensation drip onto her keyboard.
It was 1:09 in the morning. But
this city never really sleeps. The lights of passing cars flickered through her
window in ghostly glimmers, casting soft flashes across her ceiling.
Then, her phone buzzed again—this
time, an incoming call from her boyfriend, Sean, who lived on the other side of
the world. Their schedules ran opposite like day and night. But since Jade
worked for a company based in Sean’s country, his lunch break means her “lunch”
break too.
“Good morning, babe,” came her
favorite deep voice through the speaker. Technically it was morning,
albeit pre-dawn, but no matter what time they called, “good morning” was always
their first thing they say.
After barely five minutes of
catching up, the call ended. Sean went back to his lunch, and silence once
again filled Jade’s room, except for the soft hum of the mini fridge fan beside
her desk. If her mood were charted on a line graph, you’d see the curve spike
straight out of the page every time she talked to the man she loved.
Tears began to pool in her eyes
as she stared at the lock screen photo of his gorgeous face. God, how she loved
that man. But the distance and the differences often left her aching. The
problem wasn’t just hobbies or time zones. It was the direction of their lives.
Where Jade believed life was, at its core, a matter of waiting for prayer time,
Sean didn’t believe in God at all.
Someone once said, “Dating
someone of a different religion is like watching a soccer match for the second
time. You already know how it ends, but you keep watching anyway.”
And that’s just religion, let
alone dating someone with an entirely different belief system. Jade felt like
she was in a ticking time bomb of a relationship, knowing one day she’d be
forced to choose: stay and silence her own heart as deeply as she could, or let
go and be left with a hollowness that would crush her.
The question was, if she
stayed—if she chose to love through the differences—could she live peacefully,
without the constant ache eating away at her joy? And if she eventually walked
away, could she bear losing the most precious part of her life? Losing a part
of herself?
Those questions were far too
heavy for her to answer now. So once again, Jade wiped her tears and told
herself, “Let’s stress about this later.” Fully aware of the pain she’d
eventually have to face for postponing a decision this big. But still, she just
wanted to give something that felt this precious a chance.
Jade wanted to be sure that what
she felt wasn’t an illusion. She wanted to bring reality into a love that had
so far only lived through screens, voices, and imagination. And when the time
finally came—when they finally met—whatever she felt then, whether it confirmed
or ended everything, she knew at least one thing: she had fought for her love
sincerely.
Whether she’d ever find someone
better than Sean was a question for another time. Deep down, though, Jade knew
the chances were slim that she’d find someone even equal to him.
She couldn’t even bear to imagine
starting all over again—rebuilding an appealing profile on a dating app,
spending hours swiping through endless faces with her thumb. Exhausting. And
expensive. Not to mention answering dull, repetitive questions from men who
often made her want to fling her phone across the room. Then came the
explanations all over again—what she liked, what she didn’t, her favorite
foods, the movie that made her cry, or why she loved the smell of tobacco from
a rolled cigarette but couldn’t stand guys who smoked.
She didn’t want to reopen old
wounds she’d wrapped up so tightly just for the sake of being understood by
someone new who might not even stick around.
Jade didn’t want anyone else. If
Sean wasn’t meant for her, then maybe no one was. She would become a night
butterfly, fluttering from one man to another. Not because she didn’t know
right from wrong, but because she was simply exhausted. Better to go numb and
break completely than to keep hoping and fall apart bit by bit.
Jade would still pray and ask for forgiveness. Whether God would forgive her or not, she’d stress about it later.
—
