Dating : The Date Who Thought He Was an Alien

All he wanted was to go home…

I met Emilio in Paris, which sounds like the beginning of a fairytale romance. We’d both recently moved to France — he was Mexican and I’d been living in Mexico for eight months before changing continents. I knew no one in that city and I missed speaking Spanish. Also, his profile picture was beautiful.

I’m not sure whether it was a date exactly, because we were both broke so we decided to skip dinner and just get a bottle of wine to drink along the Seine. We sat on the cobblestones under a bridge and watched the Eiffel Tower opposite us light up the darkness. (See? Fairytale.)

Emilio told me he didn’t drink very often, which became apparent after a few swigs from the bottle, as he overcame his initial shyness and started talking faster and more freely. I asked him why he’d decided to come to Paris, because obviously one would need a good solid reason to relocate to the City of Love. That’s when the conversation took an unexpected turn.

He started by explaining that he was from another planet. I wasn’t sure if I had understood him correctly — and thought perhaps my Spanish wasn’t as good as I hoped it was. He was from another planet, he insisted.

He was from a distant planet where everyone lived in couples — “Kinda like this one?” I scoffed — but he was separated from his soulmate when he arrived on earth.

“What do you mean by ‘arrived’?” I asked.

He patiently explained that he was born into a human form so convincing that even his Mexican mother didn’t know he wasn’t really human. He wasn’t going to tell her either, because it would probably make her sad.

But back to why he decided to move to Paris. He’d been living in Canada taking a lot of psychedelic drugs, which presented him with a vision.

I was entranced at this stage, because with his slight form and pixie haircut I started to think he did actually look sort of extra-terrestrial. Also, beautiful.

“What did the vision say?” I asked.

He’d been told that his soulmate was living in Paris and that’s why he had to come here. Inconveniently, he didn’t know what they looked like because they’d also changed into human form through birth.

“How will you find them?” I wanted to know if he had a strategy, a clear plan of attack for combing a city of millions of people for his soulmate — or if he was just going to wander around and go on dates with random Australians.

And then, for the briefest of moments, I thought there was going to be a plot twist. I thought the story might end with him telling me that I was, in fact, his soulmate.

But he just said “When I see my soulmate, I’ll know” and to be honest, I was sort of offended that this handsome alien in the body of a Mexican didn’t think I was his soulmate at all.

Because I wasn’t the type of soulmate he was after, I grew quite skeptical about the whole story. Then I thought about all those movies I’d grown up watching where someone from the future or past/outer space accidentally ends up in the present/on earth and no one ever believes them. It makes the audience want to shout at the screen, “He’s telling the truth, why are you humans so skeptical!”

So I decided to believe him. And by the time we finished the bottle of wine and that extraterrestrial being was very drunk, I gave him my shoulder to lean on and helped him onto the Paris metro and all the way back to his sharehouse. Then I deposited him on his doorstep and never saw him again.

But I think of Emilio several years later — and I do so hope that he found his soulmate and made it back to his home planet, just like he wished.