1: Golden Leaves and the Art of Loud Plotting
The problem with autumn in Heidelberg isn’t the biting breeze that makes your ears turn a bright, aggressive shade of pink. It isn’t even the fact that the sun seems to operate on a very strict, union-mandated early curfew, packing up and leaving the sky by four in the afternoon. No, the real problem is that it is too cinematic. It forces you to feel things. It forces a completely regular, chronically online guy like East—who had recently uprooted his entire life from the humid chaos of Bangkok to Germany for his university studies—to look at a single, crisp amber leaf drifting from a branch and think, “Wow, that is a poetic metaphor for my entire single, tragic existence.”
East pulled his oversized woolen scarf tighter around his neck, burying his nose into the fabric to shield it from the crisp German air. Back home in Thailand, fifteen degrees Celsius was considered a national emergency. It was the kind of weather that prompted people to break out thick winter puffers, post dramatic temperature screenshots on their Instagram stories, and complain endlessly on Twitter. Here? The locals seemed to treat it like a mild summer afternoon, strolling around in light cardigans while East felt like a frozen block of tofu.
Fortunately, the public park was practically deserted. Perfect. Back in Bangkok, finding a spot this quiet would require a minor miracle or trespassing on private property. But here, on this chilly afternoon, East had an entire row of dark wood benches completely to himself. He was surrounded by a breathtaking, towering canopy of gold, orange, and deep crimson trees that rustled softly in the wind. It was the ultimate, picture-perfect setting for deep, quiet, intellectual reflection.
Naturally, East used this serene sanctuary to absolutely scream into his phone.
“I am telling you, Nat, it is going to be a literary masterpiece! Webnovel writers are going to shake in their boots when I drop this!”
East shifted his phone to his left ear, his fingers already going entirely numb from the cold, and gestured wildly with his right hand at an innocent pigeon that happened to walk past. The pigeon stopped, gave him a deeply judgmental, side-eye look, and waddled away in a huff.
“Okay, okay, listen to the premise,” East continued, leaning so far forward on the bench that his knees almost touched his chest, his voice echoing loudly in the vast, empty clearing. “So, you know Rawi? Obviously, you know Rawi Srisuwan!The national swimmer? The actor? The boy with a smile that can literally cure seasonal depression?”
On the other end of the line, thousands of miles away where it was currently a humid, sticky evening in Bangkok, Nat groaned so loudly it rattled East’s phone speaker. “Are you seriously calling me all the way from Europe, making me stay up past midnight on a weekday, just to talk about your celebrity crush again? East, you are a grown man. Get a grip.”
“First of all, he is not just a crush, he is my muse! There is a profound artistic difference!” East defended loudly, throwing his head back against the wooden slats of the bench. “Anyway, don’t interrupt the creative flow. In this fanfiction I’m writing, he isn’t a swimmer or a celebrity. He is an exiled prince from a completely different galaxy. Planet Aqua. Because, you know, he’s a swimmer in real life. It’s symbolic.”
“Groundbreaking,” Nat said, his voice dripping with dry sarcasm. “Truly, East, your mind is a terrifying, unregulated place.”
“Shush! Let me cook,” East argued, his voice bouncing off the nearby brick wall of an old building. “So, Planet Aqua is under attack by these ruthless, interstellar evil space squids. Prince Rawi’s royal advisors force him into a high-tech escape pod, and he crash-lands right here on Earth. Specifically, right in front of a completely regular, highly relatable guy—who may or may not be modeled after myself. And this regular guy suddenly has to teach a literal alien prince how to be human. Like, teaching him that you can’t just pay for a subway ticket with space stardust. And he has to hide him from the government in his tiny, messy apartment!”
East burst into a fit of giggles, thoroughly amused by his own imagination, kicking a stray pile of leaves with his sneaker. “But the real plot twist? Every time Rawi gets nervous, flustered, or shy, his alien powers malfunction, and he accidentally starts levitating things. Can you imagine them trying to cook dinner together?Rawi gets a little flustered because Liam (the guy) looks at him a second too long, and BAM! The spatula starts floating in mid-air! The pasta sauce goes flying!”
