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weddings have become an inevitable part of my life now, just as christenings are about to be. despite being a hopelessly hopeless romantic, i’m not much of a wedding person. i dream about my own wedding, more often than i probably should; but none of the beautiful weddings i’ve attended so far have brought me tears. this is something that makes me think that maybe i am a stone-cold ice queen as a friend described me once. i do have some favorite wedding moments which include: 1) AVPs of how the couple’s relationship grew, 2) how the couple interact with each other throughout the wedding and reception with side-glances and laughter that only they could understand, and 3) the first kiss as husband and wife. it truly is nice to see a couple truly and deeply in-love. it makes a single gal like me hope that true love does exist even if not for me then at least for someone else.
weddings make me look at my life. at 27, most of my friends are settling down and starting families of their own; then i look at myself, still single. whether by circumstance or by choice is never quite clear. thing is, the guys i’m interested in aren’t interested in me, and the guys interested in me aren’t guys i’m interested in. for some inexplicable reason, the rare times that the feeling is mutual between me and a guy have never materialized into anything tangible either. i can’t help but wonder if there is something wrong with me. i am the common factor after all.
the thought of never finding love and going through the rest of my life “alone” absolutely terrifies me. sometimes i wonder why we all, or maybe it’s just me, put too much importance on the idea of “the one”. we should be complete beings in ourselves, right? perhaps Plato had it right with his theory that we were all once creatures with four arms, four legs, two faces, four ears and two sets of genitalia that were cut in half. so we spend our life searching for our other half in an effort to “complete” ourselves. does this mean i’ll never feel “complete” until i find “the one”? what happens if i never do? oh, so many questions and yet the answers are ever so elusive.
Postcards
Sarah KayI had already fallen in love with far too many postage stamps when you appeared in my doorstep wearing nothing but a postcard promise. No, appear is the wrong word. Is there a word for sucker-punching someone in the heart? Is there a word for when you’re sitting at the bottom of a roller coaster and you realize that the climb is coming, that you know what the climb means, that you can already feel the flip in your stomach from the fall, before you’ve even moved. Is there a word for that? There should be.
You can only fit so many words in a postcard, only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness. It is hard to build a body out of words. I have tried. We have both tried. Instead of lying your head against my chest I tell you about the boy who lives downstairs from me, who stays up all night long practising his drumset. The neighbors have complained, they have busy days tomorrow but he keeps on thumping through the night, convinced, I think, that practice makes perfect. Instead of holding my hand you tell me about the sandwich you made for lunch today, how the pickles fit so perfectly against the lettuce. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. Repeat the same mistakes, over and over, and you don’t get any closer to Carnegie Hall, even I know that. Repeat the same mistakes, over and over, and you don’t get any closer. You never get any closer.
Is there a word for the moment you win tug of war, when the weight gives and all that extra rope comes tumbling towards you? How even though you’ve won, you still end up with muddy knees and scratches on your hands? Is there a word for that? I wish there was. I would’ve said it, when we were finally alone together on your couch, neither one of us with anything left to say.
Still now, I send letters into space, hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down, and recognize you from the descriptions in my poems, that he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you, “There is a girl who still writes you. She doesn’t know how not to.”
i have been listening to this again and again for the past couple of days because it’s beautiful. but if i have to be honest with myself, and most of the time i am, i keep listening to it mostly because J hasn’t written to me at all yet this year. there was this one short message on my facebook wall to acknowledge that he received my christmas card but that was the last i heard from him. as for me, there have been two attempts to make contact: a birthday card and an email update mid-may. while i am not heartbroken, i feel a bit saddened about the entire thing.
some pictures popped up on facebook around a month ago that i recognized as from the night when we met. it wasn’t love or even attraction at first sight. but after a night of good conversation over religion, no less, i swear a voice in my head was saying, ‘here is what you’ve been waiting for.‘ i surprised myself when i got home because i ended up praying for him that night. i, who hadn’t been in touch with my spiritual side for years, prayed for a guy i had just met. he was here for two weeks and in that time we got to know each other through texts, chatting, two lunch dates, one group dinner after disc practice and one drinking session that ended with me passing out on his friend’s couch. (yeah, one of those crazy, unplanned things that i swear could only happen to me. haha!) to quote a line that’s been haunting me since reading it in Carrie Ryan’s book The Dead-Tossed Waves, “i could feel the possibility between us.”
translation: some stuff to make hammer-hammer to my head
if you’re as lucky as i am with love then this probably happens to you a lot too…
as i watch Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan hold hands during the last scene in Sleepless in Seattle, i can’t help but sigh and wonder, when is it going to be my turn? (cue background music: oh tell me where? / where is that someone who will turn and look at me / and want to share my every sweet imagined possibility? [A Piece of Sky, Yentl]) i would be lying if i said that the thought of ending up alone doesn’t scare the crap out of me because it really does.
breaking up is hard to do
during the past couple of days, i’ve been consoling a friend who is coming to terms with the finality of her break-up. she and her ex-boyfriend called it quits more than a year ago but maintained a good friendship. we know how tricky that could be, right? to make a long story short, he has moved on while she has not. and of course, she’s devastated.
having had my heart broken before, i know how much it can hurt. as i listened to her tell her story while having cocktails in a crowded bar, memories of the pain i once felt came flooding back. it was a struggle to maintain my composure when she started crying. there is so much i wish i could do to help her forget the pain but i know there really is nothing i can do but be there for her. she kept on apologizing on being such a downer but i told her that my friends kept me sane during my dark hours and that meant everything to me.
it truly is hard to imagine how a person can move on after such a devastating loss but as i’ve learned, and i’m sure most of you have learned too, we all move on. it’s just the way it is. it truly is sad to think that a relationship ends and each person eventually finds someone else to be with but that’s the natural way of things. life goes on.
where are the boys at?
seriously, nasaan sila? hahahaha!
my mom has already told me that maybe i should try a different sport since it seems that i haven’t met anyone in ultimate during the 3-4 years i’ve been playing it. to this, i answered that i play ultimate because i enjoy the game and the company of all my friends and not to meet potential partners. i found it funny though that my mom had to tell me that. 😉
i once hoped i’d find love in the workplace but that didn’t work out so there goes another option.
i don’t think i’ll find a “good” guy in any of my gimiks either. let’s face it, guys in bars are mostly hoping to score and aren’t really looking for long term relationships. while this can be fun once in a while, it’s not really fulfilling at all. i go out to party more to enjoy the company of my friends rather than get picked up by guys.
so once again i have to ask, where are all the good guys at? can anyone out there help me out? hahahaha!
hope springs eternal
there is a book that has been catching my eye for a good number of years now, When God Writes Your Love Story. having read both I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl, i have a pretty good idea what that book may contain. whether or not you believe in a God is a personal preference. but i love the thought that i am a love story waiting to happen.
tv shows such as Sex and the City and Ally McBeal deal with the struggle modern women face with juggling a career and a lovelife. i love how both shows have dealt with the wacky situations single gals can get themselves into. but what i love most is the fact that no matter how many scrapes the characters in each of the shows get themselves into, they never stopped believing that true love was out there for them.
it’s important that we keep believing that love is out there for us, no matter how bad things may seem.
i’d like to leave you guys with one of my favorite quotes from Rilke. i have to confess that i was just reminded of it tonight while i was checking my blog for past entries.
“believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
~ an exerpt from Letter 4 of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke
a couple of nights ago, while doing my usual bedtime routine which consists of scanning channels before settling on one to fall asleep to then adjusting the sleep timer to 20mins, i was able to catch an old episode of sex & the city. in this episode, carrie was wondering: “In mathematics, we learned that “x” stands for the unknown. “a” plus “b” equals “x”. But what’s really unknown is: what plus what equals friendship with an ex? Is this an unsolvable equation? Or is it possible to transform a once-passionate love into something that fits nice and easily onto the friendship shelf? I couldn’t help but wonder… can you be friends with an ex?“ later on throughout the episode she comes to the conclusion that cosmopolitans + scotch = friendship with an ex.
i’ve never had an ex-boyfriend, having been a member of the Single Since Birth Club since, well, birth. however, i’ve had another type of ex: the guy-i-was-in-love-with-who-didn’t-quite-love-me-back type of ex. one of them is in Beijing now and the other one is someone i see at a regular basis. it sucks when an “ex” is part of the same group of people you hang out with. we’ve both become adept in the civil department, not really addressing each other unless completely necessary and if we find our eyes meeting we just quickly avert them as though nothing happened. once in a while, a smart-aleck-y friend would send a well-placed barb our way which we both would ignore. it’s become a comfortable situation, after a fashion.
recent events, namely the possibility of him liking a new teammate (yet again!), have got me thinking if it’s possible for us to be friends again. it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine being friends with him again considering we were pretty close once. even after the “breakup”, we still remained to be close, sometimes going out for coffee and discussing random stuff in our lives. but then something else happened which changed our dynamic and it hasn’t been the same since.
a close friend of mine congratulated me recently when i told her that i had chatted with the guy-who-liked-me-but-i-didn’t-like-back during the exciting and emotional (for me) match between Nadal and Soderling. she said that it was great that we can put the animosity aside and be friends again to which i replied that there was no animosity just a lot of awkwardness (and sometimes irritation) on my side. yes, it is a two-way street. sometimes you get hurt and sometimes you hurt someone else.
so what happens when a great love, or maybe just a passionate affair, ends? can two people transform from being intimate lovers to just good friends? i honestly don’t know the answer. i think it depends on the situation and the people involved. i believe that time can heal most, but not all, wounds and that eventually we all forget. As Joan Didion said: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forgot who we were.” (and because i don’t know how to segue into this link, i’ll just post it as is and hope you’ll be intrigued enough to click it. :P)
perhaps someday i’ll be able to have coffee and laugh over fun memories with an ex. perhaps we’ll always be tiptoeing around each other. who really knows, right?
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