How I Got Here (Malaysia)

Back in 2011, I decided to try out Twitter. I am pretty funny, and accumulated followers quite quickly. People share things from other people on Twitter, which like a grapevine, collects followers for everyone. Through this grapevine I encountered a gal named Kaira Skoota. She frequently shared funny posts, and whether they were authentically her words or not, she sensed the humour in them, which, by definition, is a "sense of humour".

After some time of "favouriting" her posts, I private messaged her to talk. . After talking for a while, I finally said to her, I want to come visit you; where do you live? I assumed that everyone on Twitter was from North America, so I figured that she couldn't be that far away from me. She responded that she lives 10,000 miles from me. I figured that had to be Australia at first. She said, no, not quite. Then I kept guessing places until she finally said that she lives in "Malaysia". I wasn't sure where Malaysia was geographically located, so I grabbed my globe off the top of my fridge. I spun it around to Asia, and started to hunt for it. After locating it, I realized it was farther away from me than Australia, which my people consider the farthest place in the world. On top of that, I realized it was technically the farthest place on this planet from where I was. I was sad to see that, but optimistically, I compared it to the distance of the moon, which was the next closest place to where I was. The moon was way farther away. WAY farther.

Even with my disappointment, I still wanted to talk with her on MSN Messenger, because Skype was too modern for me, and I assumed it was not free. We chatted quite a bit, and I grew to like her more and more. After a while, I decided that it's a small planet, so I'm going to go visit her. I told her this, and she was skeptical that I would actually do that, but seemed excited. I mentioned how I was going to go back to Los Angeles for a bit, and then go to Malaysia from there. This was our discussion content for most of every day that we talked, which was for at least an hour every day. 

I loved talking to her, and it became the highlight of my mornings and nights. Her time was exactly twelve hours ahead of my time, to the minute, so my afternoons were the middle of her nights, and the middle of my nights were her afternoons. I started to realize that I won't enjoy Los Angeles at all if I'm just anticipating my arrival to Malaysia, so eventually I told Kaira Skoota that I am skipping LA and coming straight to Malaysia. I went ahead and bought a one way plane ticket to Malaysia. I was so confident that we were meant to be together, that I didn't even care that it was one way. We'd figure that out.

I told Kaira that I bought the plane ticket, and she was excited, but didn't fully believe me. She asked if I could forward her the ticket so she could see, and I totally understood. It is probably a very common lie from North Americans to Asians. I forwarded her the plane ticket to show her that I was completely serious about this. I liked her enough to go as far as this planet would allow.

The twenty something days crawled by until my flight. The night before it was finally time to depart from Canada, Kaira and I agreed that she would be holding a sign that said Muskoka when I arrived; the town of my family cottage that she and I had discussed. After a sickeningly long stretch of sitting in a chair while flying over the planet's largest ocean, and one five hour stop in Hong Kong, I arrived at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, in Malaysia. I got off of the plane and exited into the airport, where I was immediately lost. After about 30 minutes of waiting for my luggage to appear, I asked a man who looked like he worked there. He told me that I have to take the train to my luggage. This made me uncomfortable. 

I quickly found the only train that ran right through the building, and took my quick ride. It led me to my luggage collection spot, and then I just had to go through immigration. I thought that this could be difficult, but after taking my finger print, with a scanner, not ink, the man told me to enjoy my time in Malaysia, and stamped my passport for three months of stay. 

Now I was in Malaysia, officially. I made my way to arrivals, where there were at least thirty people waiting for the people they were expecting. I did not yet see the Muskoka sign, and kept looking. Then I heard a female voice calling out my name, and when I looked in that direction, Kaira and I finally had our first instance of eye contact with no satellite assistance.