I always had a high respect for love. It is one of the very few things that I hold dear and quite ironically, also fear. Because I know that love is soooo powerful that one is inevitably reduced to a mumbling fool at its wake.
I was fresh out of college when I met this boy who was the epitome of everything that my young heart wanted. He was sweet and funny. He plays the guitar and writes songs. He is tall, lanky, and cute in a geeky way. And he was famous with millions of girls wanting a piece of him.
I fell hard for that boy – I went to gigs, met up with him even though I had to brave the legendary metro manila traffic or had to stay up late at night on work week, was all smiles with fans wanting photos and autographs when we were right in the middle of a meal.
I even checked up on him regularly, asking how he was faring, if the second album was well under its way. Crazy nonsensical things. I even prayed for him every night – for his good health, peace of mind, and of course, his success.
But evidently, I wasn’t what he wanted. He ended up falling for a pretty actress who made him her goffer for everything. The minute she dumped him, he started crying on my shoulder.
I really fell hard for that boy and though I was younger, I know it was real. So I hate it when people tell me, ‘Bata ka pa. Wala lang yan.’ (You’re young. Its just a passing fancy.) People got up on their high horses, telling me things as though I was a dimwit. I might have been younger but I knew what I felt.
Four years later, I’m still here – single. Not because I am hoping he’ll finally come to his senses and realize he can’t live without me. But because there’s never been anybody who made every single cell in my body sing. There’s never been anyone whose happiness was of the utmost importance.
This morning, my friend J sent me this. And it made me smile.
The Republic of Love by Carol Shields
But she noticed something she’s never noticed before. That love is not, anywhere, taken seriously. It’s not respected, it’s the one thing in the world that everyone wants–she’s convinced of that–but for some reason people are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and foolish.
Work is important. Living arrangements are important. Wars and good sex and race relations are important; and so are health and illness. Even minor shifts of faith and political intention are given weight that is not accorded love. We turn our heads and pretend it is not there, the thunderous passion that enters a life and alters its course. Love belongs in an amateur operatta, on the inside of a jokey greeting card, in the annals of an old-fashioned poetry society. Moon and June and spoon and soon. September and remember. Lord Byron, Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s womanish, it’s embarrassing, something to jeer at, something for jerks. Just a love story, people say about a book they happen to be reading, to be caught reading. They smirk and roll their eyes at the mention of love. They wink and nudge. Lovebirds. Lovesick. Lovey-dovey. They think of it as something childish and temporary, and its furniture–its language and kisses and fevers and transports–as evidence of a profound frivolity.
It’s possible to speak ironically about romance, but no adult with any sense talks about love’s richness and transcendence, that it actually happens, that it is happening right now, in the last years of a long, hard, promiscuous century, even here it’s happening.
People dismiss love so easily. Is it because we all lose our heads when it comes along? Because we do the most stupid of things that we wouldn’t normally do? Because when love finally sneaks up on us, we hardly know the person we’ve become?
There are days when I regret having fallen so hard for this boy. How could I have been so stupid? How could I not have not seen how unattractive I am next to the actress? How could I have been so hopeful when he was singing in front of huge crowds while I shoot sofas and beds?
There’s nothing I can do now but learn to accept what happened. And continue to teach myself to look at love with all its richness.
(Universal Pictures)
