Did you ever wonder what reality truly is? I mean when do we decide that something is real? When we can touch it? But what if we can’t – what if it is something that can’t be touched? Like feelings – you cannot touch a feeling, can’t taste it, can’t smell it – but that will never stop you from feeling.
Cathy met someone, well kind of. She didn’t actually meet him in person. She met him as a voice on the phone and later as words written on a screen, a picture on a social network. She saw him smile on a computer screen and heard his laugh through the phone. She told him stuff about herself she usually doesn’t because it gets a lot easier if it’s just a voice or letters on your phone.
It was fun at first, a little strange maybe but just some fantasy – something to enjoy but without any boundaries. Except that changed and rather quickly and now Cathy doesn’t really know what to do. That someone she met lives several countries away and to think of anything beyond fun seems pretty pointless. Cathy keeps telling herself that this is just fun, just a fantasy…but it stopped feeling this way. It feels like something more than she is – and won’t ever be – ready to admit.
Cathy is one of those people who don’t have a relationship. She hates the word “single” because she thinks it’s somehow degrading – like you’re only whole if you are one half of a couple. But Cathy is fine with being alone, not because she doesn’t believe in love – she does – but because she has never met someone to fall in love with. Truly fall in love, truly feel something that went beyond the kind of relationship were you screw your brains out until it gets boring and you realize that there never was more behind that attraction.
A lot of her friends (and some of her family) keep telling her she should “stop being so childish” and “grow up”. That “relationships are hard work and not a fairy tale”. Cathy knows that – even acknowledges it – but she just never met someone where it felt worth trying. Maybe that makes her selfish, but she decided that she can live with that. She has great friends, a mostly great family and though she sometimes wishes that there was someone waiting, she is fine with being alone. Until Frederik.
Frederik works for the same company as Cathy but in a different country. When they had an international project, Frederik and Cathy were meant to coordinate the various stages together. So they had a lot of calls and Cathy really started liking his voice. Then his humour and was a bit sad when the project ended – until he started writing her via Skype and the whole thing went to from work to personal. Now it stopped being work related at all. They write almost every day. They talk. They laugh. And Cathy actually started to feel something she can’t name. Is even afraid to do.
Somehow this whole “meeting” Frederik became more and then more still. Until it grew into something Cathy isn’t sure she can handle. There are so many miles separating them and even if there weren’t – what if it doesn’t work in the “real life”. In reality? Which is the real question: What is reality really? Do you need to touch it or is it enough to feel?
Cathy doesn’t know but she also feels a little less alone since it started. That’s all she is ready to admit, but only to herself.