It wasn't a caricature of something big
that was going to happen. I mean, a girl, standing there, barely even noticing
you: what tell-tale hint could anyone come up to expect that, say, a supernova
was going to happen some light years away from Earth, or that a birthday candle
would be blown out in some household somewhere? There was nothing really. Only
that I knew that she was a sad person herself. Like me. Like I was back then.
My life wasn’t the exciting and excited
type the other people of my age used to lead back then. If there was any
concrete description of a normal student’s life, mine was a notch or two below
that level. As early as kindergarten school, I already knew about my incapacity
to build and bloom the social side of my life. Imagine you were a loner and a
weird kid with a penchant for dissecting the map of the Philippines into its
regions and drawing them apiece on a paper. That was the illustrators of our HeKaSi
books were. And I also did that for pastime.
Fourth grade saw me crushing on a
classmate. And it took a good many years before I realized how blindingly
awkward it had been during those times when I was spending every damn time in
grade school wanting to be that girl’s boyfriend. Graduating from College and
starting to squeeze myself into the real world, I happened to find my copy of
our Elementary graduation picture. It was taken right after the Baccalaureate
mass. We all stood on the steps of the elevated park outside the church, and
with the usual set-up. The taller students stood on the topmost step, down,
down, until it came to us the shorter ones on the first step. I stood on the
leftmost side. I was the shortest in the class. On my right was another
classmate, a few inches taller than me, and the next one was the girl of my utopian
fancy. I looked at her and thought, damn if that face had belonged to the era
of the Trojan horse, it definitely would have sent a thousand more ships than
Helen’s. But then I felt my heart sank, not with some affectionate nostalgia,
but with—I don’t know, embarrassment? The hell I feel embarrassed? The woman was
almost a foot taller than me! That’s like a frog crushing on a fucking whale.
But anyway, I didn’t end up getting her,
so might I as well carry on leaving that in my memory lane. I only had proved
some point. When I was a kid, when everything I could describe myself with
rhymes with naïve, I didn’t look at the woman’s body and said I gotta have a
piece of that. No. That at the early stages of romantic inclinations, a man’s heart
knows no criteria of how chiseled a woman’s body is so he can get attracted to
her.
Eventually, all good feelings must pass,
and to the tune of “Through the Years” we parted.
High school was a little like Elementary
school. The only differences are: that in High school all the teachers are given
their own space each in a faculty office, while in Elementary, a teacher has
his/her house inside the classroom he/she is handling; that in High school
there are no CR’s inside the classroom, so there is no need for a student’s
father to volunteer to do the carpentry in constructing one in each of the
Elementary school’s classrooms; that in High school the students go to the
canteen outside the classroom during recess, and not lining up inside for the
snack tray; that in High school a flag ceremony is done only once a week; and
especially that in High school all subjects are freaking hard; and—I mean,
screw this: High school is a whole lot different from Elementary!
After all, change is constant. If I’d
only allowed myself to age without the person that I was to age with it, I
never would have realized that one profound point in my High school life. When
I saw her, when I heard her talk, when I watched her walk the aisle toward the
front of the class, I abruptly said to myself: “If this swan doesn’t float on
my heart’s lake, then the tractor would not run over the grass that sings to
the melody of the moon on its first quarter.” Yeah, that is, I didn’t fucking
understand what I felt. It was like deciding to stop Earth and start at once
with Heaven. (And I don’t mean dying.) Sometimes you just have to set aside the
reality and take yourself into the wonderful world between the stretched arms
of Spongebob.
And like all period romance, it doesn’t
get any better than fighting yourself out of numerous competition. Let us call out
all the aspirants, shall we:
First, there is me—a small, silent,
awkward, piece of writing desk that Alice couldn’t answer. I came from the
land-of-don’t-leave-your-doors-open, a place where being lost in its interior
is like having coffee on a Tuesday.
Then there’s this guy—a bully magnet,
artistic, probably from Pluto. He came from a place where blah blah blah.
Then there’s this other guy—squirmy, flatulent,
oh-hell-whatever-he-was.
Then finally this guy—the seeker of
Ravenclaw, if the snitch is a small ball of attention, a footy shooter who
hates the board enough to spank it in the forehead, and a crying lady. I mean
dude. Because, he cries. Is all.
And so commenced the heated competition
between us four. As for me, I did the best of what I do best—sitting on my
chair, stealing glances at her like I was a stroboscopic light who can’t get enough
of her sunshine, and keeping my calm. Also, I wrote poems for her. I went all
Shakespeare and all Poe and all Leav at that span. And though I didn’t know what
poems could do for my cause, I kept writing. Hoping one day someday she’ll
notice that somewhere around the classroom, some stranger was weaving words in
her name just because he couldn’t megaphone them in front of her. In the end,
she didn’t. Or she may possibly have, but didn’t have the same tide washing
over her to resonate with mine. But “you
can reply even without the measure and the rhymes, my sweet, all I care is that
maybe just maybe you’ll see me as I see you.” In the end, all hope must
stop. That had been three years of unrequited puppy love.
After that, I thought I learned a
lesson. But history history. It never learns how not to repeat.
College was a tough biz. So tough I and
a friend had to keep a list of the Top Ten Chikababes around the campus a la
Watchmojo and shit. That’s right, we were the Chicksmeter correspondents you
never heard of. And looking back, I can only say the same thing to myself about
that shenanigan (the list, not the friend)—why was this certain girl on the
number one spot for the whole duration of my first year? Because shit, that’s
why.
I found I was in the quicksand again, slowly
burying myself in the grains of this psychedelic swarm of thoughts, or lack
thereof. You know the routine. But this time, I progressed to the point that I
can at once talk to her, or she at once can find a listening ear in me. For the
next sequence of months, I inadvertently enrolled myself once again in the
lessons of hopeless romantics. There can be no denying. I had been a resident
of the friendzone before the place was universally publicized around the
Internet. And you know who the heck abetted a finger to send me in that zone? That’s
right, the shenanigan (the friend now, not the list). When the news came to me,
I reacted like a silent movie star—silent, emotion-jabbed, my thoughts running
in a very low frames-per-second rate. As if I had the right to despise him,
though.
But all’s well that ends well. In the
end, I fared just the same in this game, and he ended up without her. So close
friends we remained, making sure we’d always have a good laugh on everything
that happened.
And I remained the hopeless boy who had
all heart to write it out, but couldn’t get a girl to listen. And maybe entrap
her with it. So I decided to put my pen down, focused on Math, and did every
bit of deed to be a typical College student.
I was a good boy. I thought of it like I
thought I had been the one destined to prove the Goldbach’s conjecture. Because
for anyone who isn’t aware, yes we do live in a world where there still abound
questions and curious propositions that yet need to be proven if true and
disproven if false. Goldbach had made a simple one. He believed that every
prime number is a sum of two even numbers. Beautiful, isn’t it? Yet no one can tell
for sure whether it’s true or otherwise. Much like love and finding one. It’s simple,
beautiful, yet you would have to dig to the ends of the world just to quite
realize it. (For the record, I already have proven the Goldbach’s conjecture,
but the margin of this page is too narrow to contain it.)
I was a good boy because I was sincere. Through
all the women in the past whom I have come to knock the doors of, I believed of
my sincerity. And yes, I was.
Eventually I found a flicker of a light.
But that was it, only a meaningless tiny bit of light. College was slowly
burning out.
Stealing the Silence
“One day I’ll see you
Shedding your tears for me
Someday you’ll feel it
The warmth I tried to give
Will you go crying
Because I didn’t try?
Don’t steal my silence
Don’t blow away in here
Keep my stillness
Back in place
That day i'll see you
Fall away from the dark
This way i'll try to
Walk a step from us
Will you go trying
Because i didn't cry
Don't steal my silence
Don't blow away in here
Keep my stillness
Back in place
If we try to hide
Will we have the chance
To make this right
But it's over now
Don't steal my silence
Don't blow away in here
Keep my stillness
Back in place for me
Don't steal my silence
Don't blow away in here
Keep my stillness
Back in place
But i still love you.”
There’s a reason you haven’t heard of that
song or even any line of the lyrics. Because it’s fucking cat litter. But
believe it or not, this was the song that brought me into the doorstep of this
girl, who opened the door even before I came knocking, and ushered me in even
before I could completely bring myself back together from the abrupt turn of
events. This is called a snapshot of love.
Everybody should have one of that. Or at
least one. Anyway, that is how Mitch Albom had put it, so you can stick any
argument back up your tongue now.
For quite the first time I began to
understand the essence of being in love. When you get appreciated and all you
do seems apple in their eyes, all you ever want to do is to grow apples. No,
seriously, all you want to do is to do what you’re doing in the best possible
way that you can do it. I thought I could poem my way in to this girl, but she
preferred them with a tune. And though I needed to right-click-restore my
singing voice from the recycle bin and had to call for a rocker-friend to do
CPR on my guitar, I was able to scrape a song from my scanty knowabouts in
songwriting. And though I wrote a 3-minute scraping noises on a tin roof, she
said it was good, then said it was soulful, then a little sugar on top of that,
then eventually she told me the voice was for anyone to fall for. If that
understates it, it would feel like looking over the critical reception section
of your novel’s Wikipedia page and reading that it was universally acclaimed.
Then suddenly I realized, oh yes, my voice had just been universally acclaimed,
knowing that I had first realized she had begun to transform into my own
personal universe.
I was always sincere. I was always a
good boy. We kept communication, and I didn’t miss a second letting her know
that I cared for her. There were maybe some things we cannot confront each
other with, but we went on knowing that we were not straying from the typical
boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. The first month was flawless and happy, but
the second one made a mirror-crystallography-wallpaper-group-stuff-you-don’t-possibly-know.
(You will hate me for using that too many hyphens, but imagine reading it with
hashtags instead.) Okay, I’ll elaborate it, non-Math gecko. The second month
was all ice and neglect and doom. Not even nearing the halfway of it, I already
knew that I was about to be looking at myself at the back of a car’s trunk,
heading to the lessons in hopeless romantics. To no one’s surprise, she later
gave me a night of bullshit break-up clichés in a mall’s parking lot, with all
my friends enjoying shit inside, and all her friends enjoying the same shit,
and she slowly pulling herself away from me. I didn’t have questions raised. I
didn’t have any protests made. I looked at her, and looked at the only woman
who dared tell me my voice was that awesome, my tune that eclectic, and me in
general that worthy to be spent time with. I was looking at her and simply was
just too hurt to dare move. But I loved that stupid girl, even while I was
under that particular moonlight, when everything seemed to be wrong.
I drank with Brendon Urie and Patrick
Stump afterward, and from them I heard the best pieces of advice you can give
to a heartbroken person. Brendon said that lying is the most fun thing a girl
can have without taking her clothes off. And then Patrick said something but
his lawyers made him change it so he wouldn’t get sued. He simply said, “Oh,
oh.”
It wasn't a caricature of something big
that was going to happen. It was how the broken roads should be blessed.
A girl, standing there, barely noticing
you. What could possibly happen?
I stood just outside the Fullybooked
entrance, waiting. That’s how every great event is supposed to start. If people
don’t pay time in waiting, no great magic trick is ever performed, no high-end
technology is ever mustered, no driver’s license is ever issued. So I waited.
Then we walked toward the open field
outside the mall, sat on the grass, and started drinking each of our Coke
float. I didn’t know I was meeting with a lawnmower because all she did was to
pick every blade of grass growing around her. But I understood her perfectly
well. All I ever did myself was looking around, pretending to be cool enough
not to start a conversation. But hell it isn’t cool. The awkward afternoon
rolled by awkwardly. The last time we were there, with both of us in presence
together, I was with her cousin, and she was with another guy.
Bastards be judging me, and I had even
judged myself at first, but forgive me if there is that pricking sensation in
you hearing that I was dating the cousin of my former sweet. It shall very soon
pass, maybe even that of her mother’s.
When you’re into someone, you only sang
the sweetest melody as far as your heart is concerned. When you fall for
someone, everyone else whom you had fallen for in the past are just tiles on
the sidewalk of your memory lane. They’re just there, and they don’t lay a
finger on your every move in the present. When you love someone, it is just
that someone and everything else doesn’t matter. Maybe that was what put the
awkward away from that nascent pursuit of happiness I was weighing to partake
or not. I took my leap of faith.
I obtained far more understanding of
love and its other drugs when I met her. I thought I was the good boy, not in
the sense that I thought now that I was insincere, but because she showed me
that there are these faults in our stars, in the constellation that I was
prepared to give. She showed me how bad I am in some aspects, but then made me
realize that I could be better. And who in the face of the Earth is not going to
fall for that kind of girl? Justin Bieber, I guess? (Because he’s a girl too?)
I used to realize my dreams just because
I wanted them. But now, I realized them all because I love them, and I love
being in the time when they would actually come true. She brought me into that
realization because she had then become my biggest dream. And how lovely, how
utopian, how sunrise-sunset-spectacular would it be to start living the rest of
my life with her! There were no more
lessons in hopeless romantics. There are instead lessons in dreams coming true,
in love finally requited—and I am a fucking PhD of it all.
(Also, the rain fell upward because
Youtube did an awesome barrel roll, and Trunks is the weirdest name because,
hey who names their child Trunks?)
