HAIJI & MOMOKA / LOVE · CULTURE · NON-FICTION
CHAPTER 00 — 15 AUGUST 2026
5 Days
to
Marriage
Two people who had never occupied the same place chose, in five days, to become husband and wife. Their first date still belongs to the future.
PROLOGUEThe First Date
Is Still Ahead
August 2026. Haiji Vlue and Momoka have not yet stood in the same place. They have not held hands, eaten at the same table, walked through the same town or learnt each other’s temperature. They do not even know the feeling of one another’s physical presence.
And yet they chose to become husband and wife.
It happened on the fifth day after they met.
This is not a story about romance arriving late. It is a story about bodies arriving after the relationship.
There is no need to call it normal, rational or easy to explain. It is not. It is much more interesting than that. It is a record of a relationship that formed through messages, voices and video calls — and decided to make the future real before its first physical meeting had arrived.
DAY 1Match
The beginning was almost aggressively contemporary: a match on the dating app Tapple. Momoka sent the first message. On any given day, that may happen tens of thousands of times somewhere: see a profile, feel curious, match, send a line, receive an answer.
Usually, the rest of the process unfolds slowly. You talk for a few days, arrange a time, meet, eat together, go on several dates, then consider whether you might become a couple.
For Haiji and Momoka, almost none of that ordinary sequence existed.
The messages began and then they would not stop. Not just greetings, but the things they thought about; their pasts, values, wounds, likes and dislikes; ridiculous conversations, serious conversations, things that mattered and things that did not. Through written exchanges alone, the density of each day became strange.
They had not met. Yet the feeling of speaking to a stranger started to disappear.
DAYS 2–3Voice Before
Touch
Eventually, text was not enough. They began to call, and the calls became long. A voice carries information that writing does not: a pause, a breath, the way someone laughs, a silence, the trace of choosing a word, bravado, shyness, sleepiness, relief.
Then video calls brought faces into the exchange. Even so, a screen still stood between them. Physically, they remained entirely apart.
But, strangely, the distance mattered less than the sensation that they had been talking for far longer than they actually had.
Haiji had once imagined a very different future. If he were to marry, he thought there was only one particular person it could be. Marriage with anybody else had barely been part of the plan. He had come to believe he would not fall in love again. He was tired of relationships with women; fiction felt safer than romance in the real world.
Love was not supposed to re-enter his life. At least, not a few days earlier.
Momoka did not read that schedule. She arrived from outside it.
DAY 4“I Want to
Be With You.”
On their fourth day of knowing one another, Momoka said that she wanted them to be together.
They still had not met. Normally, perhaps, this is where somebody says: “Let’s meet once and see.” Haiji was already deeply drawn to Momoka, though, so the answer came with unexpected ease.
Let’s be together.
And so they became a couple. The first date did not yet exist. The first time they would hold hands still lay ahead. The first time they would sit side by side also belonged to the future. Yet the name partners arrived in the present before those things did.
Romance normally seems to work by drawing bodies closer as hearts draw closer. For these two, the order was reversed. The heart ran ahead. The body was still somewhere far behind, trying to catch up.
DAY 5“Then Let’s
Get Married.”
Then, on the fifth day, Momoka said that she wanted to get married. Haiji answered that he did too.
There was no prolonged committee meeting between them. No list of conditions. No presentation deck. No spreadsheet of life plans. Just: “Then let’s do it.”
On the night of 15 August 2026, they chose to become husband and wife. They had still never met in person. Five days earlier, they had been strangers. Yet in their own time, they passed through the word couple and reached the word marriage.
It is very fast. It is not conventionally rational. It is difficult to explain. Even they ask, “Why?”
Which may be why it is interesting.
15 AUGUSTWhen Coincidence
Becomes Story
Afterwards, another story seemed to gather around the date. Momoka had been told by her grandmother that she was a reincarnation of Princess Kaguya, the moon princess. There are stories of shrine maidens in her family. Haiji, meanwhile, feels closest in spirit to Shiva: a god of destruction and renewal.
Of course, this is also mythology the two of them are playfully placing over their relationship. But stories do not always exist before events. Sometimes an event happens first, and only later do you wonder whether it might have meant something.
Coincidence becomes a story afterwards. And stories sometimes look like fate.
BEFORE MEETINGEvidence Without
Touch
The strangest thing about their relationship is not only that they made a marriage decision in five days. It is that they had not met. Romance usually uses the body as evidence: you met, touched, hugged, kissed, spent time in the same place — therefore you know this person.
Haiji and Momoka do not yet have that evidence. What they have is a great volume of messages, hours of conversations, video calls, voices, faces, confessions, promises — and the mutual will to say, “I want to be with this person.”
It is a romance made possible by 2026. Without smartphones, they could not have met at this speed. Without video calls, they could not have understood one another’s expressions across this distance.
Being in the same place has stopped being a condition for romance to begin. Personality meets personality before the body does. That kind of love can now occur as an ordinary fact of life.
THE EXCEPTIONShe Rewrote
the Future
Haiji had rules. Do not fall in love again. Do not trust someone easily. He had his own rules about any possible future marriage too. Momoka did not persuade him into breaking those rules. They did not debate them. She simply appeared.
Then, before he noticed, the rules were the things that had stopped functioning.
Romance has words such as type, conditions and ideal. Yet the person who genuinely changes your life does not always arrive by perfectly meeting those conditions. Sometimes, they invalidate the conditions themselves.
She didn’t fit into my future. She rewrote it.
Momoka did not enter the future Haiji had already decided on. She rewrote the future, then entered it.
FIVE DAYSWhat Matters
After 120 Hours
Five days. One hundred and twenty hours. Less, once you subtract sleep. Ordinarily, it may not be enough time even to learn every food somebody likes.
Within that time, the two of them moved from strangers to people who caught each other’s attention, from there to partners, and from there to husband and wife.
Is that fate? Momentum? Madness? Love? Nobody knows yet. They do not know either.
What matters is not only what they decided in five days. It is what they make from the sixth day onwards. Falling in love can happen in a moment. Deciding on marriage can happen in a moment. Becoming a married couple may be the act of accepting the innumerable ordinary days that come afterwards, together.
LOVE IN 2026An Experiment
in Real Time
This can be reduced to “a strange pair who got married in just five days”. Honestly, it is strange. They laugh about that themselves. But behind the joke sits an interesting question about love in 2026.
How many times do you need to meet someone before it is enough to like them? Is knowing a person a matter of seeing their body up close? How many years together are required before you can claim to understand them? Or, conversely, after how many thousands of exchanged words might it be fair to say that you know someone even if you have not met?
There is no answer. These two do not have one. So they are conducting an experiment with their own lives.
THE FIRST MEETING IS STILL IN THE FUTUREChapter 00
Is the Beginning
In ordinary romance, “the first day we met” belongs to the past. For this marriage, it is still coming. The first face not seen through a screen. The first voice not routed through a speaker. The first knowledge of walking pace, personal distance, scent, temperature, silence and the atmosphere of sharing one room.
All of it remains in the future. In other words, after choosing marriage, Haiji and Momoka still have an enormous number of firsts left to discover. In one sense, they are a remarkably luxurious couple.
Fate as an everyday thing. Necessity disguised as coincidence. Contradictory phrases, perhaps — but they suit these two.
Haiji thought he would never fall in love again. Momoka sent a message without knowing that plan existed. On the fourth day, they became a couple. On the fifth day, they chose marriage. The day they meet directly for the first time has still not arrived.
If this were fiction, it would not end here. This is where episode one begins.
5 DAYS TO MARRIAGE.
Five days from meeting to marriage.
The first date: still ahead.
No one knows what kind of couple they will truly become. Not Haiji. Not Momoka. One thing is certain: a “we” that did not exist five days ago now exists.
Whether coincidence was destiny cannot be known until the future arrives. So they will make that answer together.
TO BE CONTINUED.
HAIJI VLUE & MOMOKA
EDITED BY ELIELI (ELI VLUE)
HAIJI & MOMOKA / VLUER DOCUMENTARY SERIAL