can reality be as beautiful as it is in fiction?

I have been wondering about a lot of things.

Since I was a kid, there were many times where I thought I was living in a world that is different from reality. We live on earth, where things happen in accordance to science theories, with gravity, and the sun help us to stay warm, while the stars glimmering in the darkness to help us feel safe during the bleak night time.

But when I was a kid, I had many imaginations.

Once upon a time, I looked up at the sky and saw the beautifully crafted clouds and each color were very vibrant. I thought that someone must have painted all of those gorgeous clouds with canvas. When my teacher and mom taught me about the concept of God or Allah, I thought wow, Allah must be a really talented painter.

Another instance, I once thought that the world I live in right now was inside a dragon’s stomach. We live and eat well because the dragon is flying around, and the skies are just the dragon’s skin.

Growing up, my imaginations and skill of creativity died down.

I no longer can imagine an interesting event to write a story, or to articulate words that will convey exactly what I wanted to say. Maybe as I grow up as an adult, I tend to get exposed to many sufferings, along with class consciousness and women’s systemic oppression, and everything awaken me to think more critically.

But, interestingly, sometimes I love stories in fiction that depicted some events as a way that human is capable of kindness.

What I’m saying is, that I love stories about human who can help each other with genuine purpose, and that we are not a monster. The world now is full of depravity and cruelty, with colonialism, genocide, femicide, and class segregation, et cetera still rampant with no sign of slowing down.

Why do human who was put on earth by God do so many evil things? Sometimes I think that shaitan was right when he said he don’t want to bow to Adam because his offspring will cause havoc on earth.

That’s why in fiction, I love stories about humanism and realism because I believe some human are still capable of having conscience.

For example, one of my favorite movies is from Japan titled 暗いところで待ち合わせ (2006).

It’s a story about a blind woman who recently lost her father, and she lives alone with no one to help her. Without her knowing, there was a strange Chinese-Japanese man who intruded her house, and lives there quietly. He was a lonely man who was subjected to racism in his life because of his origin, and one day he accidentally got accused as a murderer near the house of the blind woman.

Imagine a woman who is alone and blind, suddenly has a presence of a stranger (it’s a male on top of that) in her house; this sounds like something from a horror thriller story. And it is a horror if we applied that to real life situation, because most men are incapable to view women as fellow human being.

However, the reason why I love that horror-like romance movie is because it depicted them as two lonely souls who just unconsciously live together. The male lead never tried anything inappropriate or take advantage of female lead. He’s just there, silently sit and stare at the windows, hoping that one day he’ll see the real culprit who killed his boss so he can clear his name from murder allegation.

The female lead is someone who was afraid of going outside without the help of other people. Even when she uses some tools to help her walk, but the people don’t really care about helping a blind woman. She doesn’t want to become a burden so she’d rather stay inside her house, but this makes her friend frustrated because she gives up on living happily.

Basically, it’s a movie where two people who are not accepted as normal by society help each other in silence. It is a very warm but also there’s this sense of uncomfortableness and discomfort because of the setting of the story.

But that’s basically the premise; that human indeed can help and love each other without ulterior motive. It’s not a hard concept, but somehow in our reality that seems like a utopian and naïve paradise.

Another example, I once wrote a short story about how two strangers fall in love after one night. The female lead got dumped, met a stranger young man, and they eat together while talking about each other’s lives. They bid farewell with him asking for a hug even though they met few hours before, and then they met each other few days after their first encounter.

In reality, this premise sounds like another nightmare, because a woman spending a night with a random stranger man would potentially lead to a femicide case. Or maybe he would be a scammer pretending to be a good person that would take advantage of her later.

But in my story, they are just two lonely people who meet each other because they are trying to survive in a big scary metropolitan area, where lights constantly brightened the areas but people still feel lonely during the night. They have no ulterior motives, just pure kindness that make them fall in love.

Sometimes I feel weird and wondering if I’m allowed to like those naïve stories.

But I realized, that everything is just fiction and there’s nothing wrong with liking a wish-fulfillment stories. Reality is cruel, people are no longer different from demons. Sometimes fiction is more beautiful than the reality we live in, and that’s the saddest thing.

Why are we unable to respect and love as fellow human beings?