Chapter 45 - A Bridge Over the Ocean

That decision wasn't made in some grand academic review chamber or behind a neatly organized desk, but out under the night rain soaking the studio's wet courtyard, with a guitar pick digging into his palm and a text message glowing on his phone screen. Rimba no longer cared how badly his pride had been wounded, or what people would say about a brilliant young composer suddenly abandoning an important project to chase after a girl. To Rimba, music would never mean anything at all if he had to play it standing on top of the ruin of the person he loved most.

The next morning, Yogyakarta's sun peeked out shyly from behind the last remnants of gray cloud. Rimba's footsteps carried him straight toward Professor Hans's office at the Swasemesta Music Conservatory. Without a shred of hesitation, he set the thick folder holding the contemporary orchestral score down on the senior lecturer's desk, along with a letter requesting a sudden two-week leave of absence.

Professor Hans raised his eyebrows, studying his student with a probing look from behind his sagging glasses, a look that had, until recently, always meant trouble for whoever was on the receiving end of it. "Two weeks, Rimba? This project has already entered the final stage of national evaluation. Where exactly are you planning to go?"

"To Vienna, Prof," Rimba answered firmly, his voice calm but carrying a resolve that admitted no argument. "There's an unfinished melody out there, and I have to find it again before the score loses its life for good."

Professor Hans paused for a moment, studying Rimba's eyes, which no longer radiated anger or rigidity, but a burning determination. The old lecturer finally let out a slow breath, smiling thinly as he signed off on the leave request. "Don't go shocking the musicians in Vienna with that stubborn head of yours, young man. Go finish whatever needs finishing."

Time moved at lightning speed for Rimba after that. In less than forty-eight hours, he handled flight tickets, his passport, and an expedited visa without any sign of exhaustion, running on nothing but conviction and the fear of arriving one day too late. He didn't tell a single soul in Vienna, not even Michi herself. He wanted his arrival to be a complete answer to all the longing and misunderstanding that had frozen solid between them.

The dozen-odd hours inside the plane cabin, crossing continents and time zones, felt endlessly long—but not nearly as long as the pounding in Rimba's chest the moment the massive metal bird finally landed at Flughafen Wien. He hadn't slept a wink the entire flight, running the same handful of sentences over and over in his head, none of which felt sufficient once he actually tried to say them out loud to the empty airplane cabin. Europe's distinctive cold air greeted him the second he stepped out of the airport, wrapped in a thick coat with a backpack slung over his shoulders. Vienna's cityscape stood magnificent, lined with grand Renaissance-style classical architecture beneath a dim evening sky, but Rimba's mind stayed fixed on one single address: a small apartment near the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien.

His footsteps carried him down cobblestone sidewalks scattered with fallen leaves, his breath fogging in the cold, foreign air. Every beat of his heart fell into the same rhythm as the drum breakdown that had once shaken the Tirtodipuran basement studio—the exact same rhythm he now realized had fused itself into every breath he took.

When he finally stood in front of door number 402 of an old, four-story apartment building, Rimba's breath came fast. He raised his hand, hesitating for a moment before finally knocking on the wooden door three times, slow but certain.

Inside, he heard the sound of footsteps slowly approaching, followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock. The door opened slowly, revealing a girl wrapped in a loose knit sweater, her hair falling messily loose, her eyes looking exhausted.

Michi froze in the doorway.

The world around them suddenly stopped turning. Standing in front of her was the man who had haunted every one of her nightmares and every ounce of her regret for the past month—Rimba, breathing hard from the exhaustion of his long journey, looking at her not with a flash of anger, but with an extraordinary tenderness that made Michi's defenses collapse instantly. Michi's lips parted without a sound, uncertain whether the figure in front of her was real or merely a hallucination born of longing that had gone too far. The tears she had fought so desperately to hold back for an entire month in a foreign country now surged upward, pooling hot at the edges of her eyes.

Meanwhile, Rimba, without wasting a single precious second, stepped forward and opened both his arms—welcoming back the girl who had, all this time, been half the life force behind every melody he had ever created, erasing thousands of kilometers of distance and the freezing cold between them in the warmest, most longed-for embrace of his life. He held her the way a man holds something he'd genuinely believed, for two long weeks, he might never get to hold again.

For a moment neither of them said a word, the two of them standing frozen in that narrow doorway with the cold Vienna evening pressing in behind Rimba's shoulders, the hallway light flickering faintly overhead, and the whole absurd distance he'd just crossed collapsing down into the small space between their bodies. Michi's hands found the front of his coat before her mind had caught up with what was happening, gripping the damp fabric as though letting go, even for a second, might make him disappear again. Somewhere behind them, a door creaked open down the hall, a neighbor peering out at the noise, but neither of them noticed or cared. The only thing that mattered, in that moment, was that he had come all this way, across an ocean and a continent and two weeks of unbearable silence, just to stand in this doorway and prove that some things were worth more than pride. He smelled of long-haul flights and cold rain and, underneath it all, still faintly of the same cedar soap she'd missed more than she'd let herself admit.