My first day in Berlin, I burst into tears in the middle of the U-Bahn station. Not because anyone bullied me, not because I was lost, but simply because I felt so small. The city was too big, too gray, the voices strange, the faces unfamiliar. I felt like a speck of dust, small and unseen.
In desperation, I opened OVFRIENDS. I wasn’t looking for a date; I was just hoping to find a Vietnamese person to speak a few words in my mother tongue, to ease the feeling of being thrown to the edge of the world.
But the first person I connected with was Johannes, a German guy studying History, whose profile picture was with a Corgi.
We made some trivial small talk. I figured, like most virtual connections, it would fade into oblivion.
But the next evening, at 9 PM sharp, as I was huddled in my attic room, my phone pinged.
“What’s the weather like over there today?”
I was a bit surprised, but I replied: “Cold. And rainy.”
The next night, again at 9 PM: “Is it raining over there?”
The night after that: “Colder than yesterday, huh? Remember to wear a scarf.”
It went on like that, every single day. A small, almost boring question, but as regular as a clock. It made my cold little room feel less empty. It became a ritual. It was my anchor to reality, a sign that, half a world away, someone remembered my existence at exactly 9 PM.
Gradually, from the weather, we moved on to the history of the Berlin Wall, to how I was craving a hot bowl of phở, to how he wanted to visit Ho Chi Minh city.
At the end of the semester, I flew back to Vietnam. As I dragged my suitcase through the airport security gate, the first person I saw was Johannes. He was standing there, looking awkward in the crowd, sweating slightly, holding a brown sugar bubble tea, and smiling broadly.
“Ho Chi Minh city weather is really hot. Welcome home.”
We’ve been together for two years now. And every evening, even if we’re sitting right next to each other, we still ask: “How was your day?”