How I Met Your Father – Season Finale, Episode 14: The Happy Ending

The kiss had officially declared what we were feeling for each other. And although we were at first unsure of the future, and the next-day felt so hard because we had to say goodbye on Monday, it was a beginning of all things wonderful in our life.

Eddie was the happiest of all when I told him about what happened. He was amazed and slightly bemused because he didn’t believe that two people eventually met and got together for real over internet – I couldn’t be more thankful to him than I already was.

Our story was even published on Yahoo – about true love found on their Meetic.

It all happened so fast…

After that first visit, came more visits, and more trips for me back to Paris. It was a long-distance relationship, and as we celebrated our two months being together, J already asked to come with me to Jakarta, to visit and meet my family. He had already asked me to meet his too, at Christmas.

And on his 22nd birthday in November, that we celebrated together in Bonn at the Tacos, a hip Mexican bar in the Zentrum, he told me he wanted to move to Germany to be near to me.

“You can’t possibly want to leave everything behind in Paris?” I asked, half-hoping that he was serious.

“I do. I really do. I want to start over new with you.”

(We would have the similar conversation twice – once before Germany and once before Indonesia)

“You don’t speak German,” I said. Now that was a real obstacle.

“I’ll learn, I promise.”

He really did. In fact, less than six months after we met, he moved to Germany.

A week after arriving in Germany, we went to Indonesia, the first time ever J had stepped outside Europe – and in a country so far away he never dreamed once before that he would go.

He loved Indonesia the very moment he arrived in this country. I brought him as my Plus One at my cousin’s wedding – I finally somehow managed to do so.

He also fell in love so much with life in Indonesia that, on our way back to Germany, in the airport, he told me we should never leave, that we should just live there. It didn’t happen that year, but the year after, and we have been living and working here since.

It’s love

It’s strange how love could make you do things you never thought you would. Like switching all your life to match your significant one’s life.

J had switched his life, turned it upside down so that he could be with me. Because he loved me. And I loved him so much for that, too (aside his sense of humor, his smile, his small habits and a gazillion more things in his persona). It isn’t easy changing job and country, let alone changing everything in your life altogether at the same time.

J always thought that he’d spend the rest of his life working and living in Paris, marry a girl there and pay mortgages for a flat in the nice Parisian banlieue.

Instead, we took our chance, moved to Germany and then to Indonesia. He married me, someone completely stranger, that just happened to cross his path one fine Sunday, the 1st of August 2004.

We were married 18 months after we met.

I always thought I would not get married until much much later – at 32 maybe? Or even 35. Instead I was married before I was 24.

Of course we had taken a wild, crazy bet by getting married that early and things could have not worked between us. Fortunately after the newlyweds’ dramaful adjustment phase, we just bonded closer and closer.

Today, we have been married for six years, six full years of love, commitment, trust, honesty and faith, but also six full years of understanding, adjusting, adapting, compromises. As we grow older and wiser together, our priorities changed and our goals in life, too.

Louis, you were born seven years after we met, five years after we were married, and you are the most important milestone we have reached together so far.

And I’m looking forward to more, much much more years to come, more milestones. Because the efforts of being married doesn’t stop the day you say “I do” – it is in your everyday, your whole life. It takes so much things to make a marriage work and we are still, always, making everything work.

Now you know, Louis, how I met your father. One day, on your wedding day, I hope we will be there to tell these stories. And one day, you will be able to pass on these wonderful memories to your own children.

This was how I met your father.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 13: Sealed with a Kiss

In the morning after having caught the train back to Bonn, we woke up at 10 AM. At Angie’s apartment – she lent me her room.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” I let myself in the living room where J was sleeping on the sofabed. He smiled and gave me kisses on the cheeks, again, which felt like another electrocution.

I looked at him – stylishly wearing a grey Von Dutch tee with the then-famous Von Dutch logo in green emblazoned on it, and faded blue jeans. He put on a dark green Levi’s sweater and I thought: is this to enhance his green eyes? How did he know I couldn’t resist them?

“I’m hungry,” J said.

“Let’s hit the city,” I was already fully awake at 8 AM and fully dressed, fully prepared.

We caught a bus to the Zentrum. It was sunny at first, we walked hand in hand again, wandering the city. It was a Saturday and not a busy one.

Bonn is a quiet and very friendly city to live in. It only has a Zentrum the size of a Jakartan mall, but every corner was so familiar to me, so homey. I invited J to dig into my daily life living there.

We walked around the Zentrum and J liked it so much even though it was a village when compared to Paris. It was his first time ever in Germany.

Not so far from the Hbf, we found a small toy shop and got in. J bought a velcro animal for his newborn nephew who lived in London (the same nephew, who, at birth, looked like a dead ringer for you, Louis).

I thought it was too sweet and thoughtful of him. I told him that he’d be a good father one day. He just laughed. He said that the day he’d become a dad was too far beyond. (7 years minus 16 days from that day to be exact)

We got into an Italian cafe-resto and shared a pizza and a bottle of red wine together.

We still talked. And talked. I wondered how did we manage to talk so much considering we just met. (Come to think of it, we still do talk so much. About anything and everything. And living back in Jakarta, we talk to each other in French so it’s like belonging to a secret society – the secret society of just us two. We don’t talk in codes when we don’t want anyone else to listen – afterall nobody speaks French here)

When we got back to the apartment I saw that one of Angie’s flatmates decided to stay in and had her friends around. They were a bunch of noisy blond girls – and they were having a dinner party in the living room.

So we stayed in the room instead, lazying around, listening to Hed Kandi’s Black Water Music. J had brought some Hed Kandi CDs from London when he had visited her sister and her newborn son in June.

We still talked. And talked. Effortlessly. There was not any single moment when we lacked of conversation topic. It was like talking to a person you had known your whole life. Whereas I just knew him 3 weeks prior and had just seen him for the past 24 hours.

At 8 PM we were hungry again and went out to the city to the same Italian restaurant we had lunch. And shared another pizza, another bottle of wine. And two margaritas. Peach ones.

We got back to the apartment feeling even giddier with happiness than the morning before. We sensed that something meaningful, something crucial in our life, was about to happen.

At the apartment, the all-blondes dinner party were still ongoing on full-force. So we got back to the room and put the CD back on at the desktop computer. We listened to another round of Hed Kandi, with all the lights turned off so the only lights were coming from the computer screen.

Naturally, as all computers do, the lights dimmed off after ten minutes, and went completely off after half an hour.

And in the dark of the accomplice night, we sealed it with a kiss.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 5: As Heard On Radio

Okay, I was just 21. Just turned over the legal age to drink. And most importantly I was young.

So excuse me if I listened to music like this:

It was my summer anthem of 2004 (the one that is less suicidal actually. I also listened to several bunch of other depressing songs, like Hoobastank’s The Reason, Air’s Cherry Blossom Girl, Rosenstolz’s Liebe ist Alles, The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life).

I listened to that (okay, super cheesy and J later on had me sworn not to listen to such shitty hip hop songs anymore) song all summerlong.

Summer 2004

In 2003, summer was the hottest summer for the last 50 years in Europe, which started at the end of March and ended in early November – and 2004 had spring chased off by summer heat just a wee bit later – in April we were already donning tongs / flip flops and summery outfits, sitting down on the banks of River Rhine, listening to the sounds of water.

Then, the breezes swayed me over to die Insel Sylt – the tiny Sylt Island north of Germany, which lies off the shores between Denmark and Germany in the Nordsee. And to the Islas Baleares in Espana, the sunny Ibiza. But more on that later.

I love summer in Europe. The nights are just getting longer and longer to peak on summer solstice on the 21st of June.

I love the smell of grass in the parks, wet at dawn and slowly getting dry as the sun rises. I love the festivals – outdoor showcases and experiences of music, dancing, laughter, smiles. I love the summer holidays to the islands of Europe, cruising on an open-top speedboat with a glass of chilly drink in my hand. I love sunglasses – we wear them even at night in summer. I love Cologne in all its summer splendor – the splendid basilica towering above the Zentrum with its tribe of white doves flying alongside the roofs up above.

God, I miss Europe. Always. Bonn and Cologne will always be two of my nearest-at-heart homes around the world.

In summer 2004, my cousin sent me an invitation to her wedding back home, which would take place about eight months later in February 2005. She said, “Bring your plus one.”

It was my first wedding invitation after I moved to Europe. It was a white of an aurora borealis-white with frilly green ribbons tied around it. It was pretty. I wondered if I could bring a PLUS ONE to her wedding.

Sunday, 1 August 2004, 3 PM

I still remember that day. It was a Sunday, the 1st of August 2004. I left my window open all day long, the strong, fragrantly sweet smell of violet-colored wisteria was invading my room, sending sentimental emotions to my mind.

I played around with the wedding invitation.

My cousin. Getting married. She was five years older than me. I knew she met her husband while they were children. They had been together forever. On the very first day at kindergarten, her soon-to-be husband saw her and told his sister, “This is the girl I’m going to marry one day.”

How romantic. I wondered if such book-romantic stories only happened to other people. Not to me.

I left my Yahoo! Messenger open and sighed.

And as I was looking on the screen of my desktop computer idly, my mind was there and everywhere, a message popped up: “asheardonradio would like to talk to you”.

And unlike Ted’s children, who are still clueless who their mother is, even until now in the seventh season of How I Met Your Mother, you know, Louis, that asheardonradio on Yahoo! Messenger, is your father. Even though, back then, we had no clue about you. Not yet.