"Vivere senza rimpianti"

Live life with no regret.

Those beautiful, meaningful words are tattooed on my best friend's chest. Yep, in Italian, and he doesn't speak the language. We both make sure there's no translation error though, the last thing you want is a Chinese character for "soup" tattooed on your body.

D lives in one of the most exciting capital city in South East Asia, and I'm ashamed that I still call him my best friend, because I haven't really talked to him for 2 years for no apparent reason. There's no falling out or anything like that, we just lost touch. D and I shared a bond. We knew each other since we were 10, but we've only been really spending time together when we were in the late 20s. I had a boyfriend then, he had a (or multiple) girlfriend. Next thing I knew, we made a pact that we would have the same tattoo and call each other best friend. We both moved away from home to different parts of the world, and I was still talking to him for the first 6 months or so. It's sad, but I think that's just how life is. You move away, find new friends, and while you still think about your other best friends living somewhere else, you move on. Which is why I'm happy, that I have those same beautiful words imprinted on my body as well. That way I know we'd always have something common and special that we share for the rest of our lives.

And then came the 2nd D in my life. D2 is a person who inspired me and taught me many things about life I never learned before I met him. He's someone I admired, looked up to, and loved with all my heart. I broke his heart, and now he despises me, and would never ever acknowledge my existence in his life. His words. However, that doesn't change the fact that he's someone who changed my life completely, from him I learned to always put my passion first above anything else. If you find that in life, everything else will fall together. Everyone comes into your life for a reason, whatever reason it may be, and I believe his reason to stumble upon mine for a short period of time was to teach me this life lesson, and I'll always be grateful. Those words imprinted on my body, was his parting gift for me, one I will treasure for the rest of my life.

There's a 3rd D, by the way. While I'm still trying to figure out the meaning of his existence in my life, I find him to be very similar to D2, in many many ways. Passion, inspiration, dream - these are the things that immediately pop up when I think of him. D3 comes with a heavy baggage of life, and that what makes him so intriguing. He's like a protagonist in a movie; the story of his life makes you root for him, and wish only the best things for him. You want him to have a happy ending, with or without you.