Photo by totomai
Z is in a non-relationship with X. Of course she loves him, and X, to be fair, loves her back in the ways he can. Only, he could never marry her. So at the ripe of old age of thirty, Z is like a teenager, with a secret love whom she can never introduce to her parents.
O is single too. He just came out from a seven year relationship with J. He’s very open with his past. O reveals that the reason they broke up was because J cheated on him. At one time she was doing a balancing act with, get this, five other lovers. There’s a karmic thing here too. O cheated on V, his squeeze of three years, with J. When push came to shove, he chose J over V, and vowed never to cheat again. O, now reformed and ever-faithful got screwed by J.
R is our friend from down under. The geeky guy in college who turned into this happy-go-lucky Aussie. He is single too, and lives with his white flatmate, M. Now M is the typical western girl who’d shock the pants out of our Pinoy parents. R regales us with crazy stories of M, how she’d point at men and tell R nonchalantly, “ Oh, I’ve slept with him.” At this point, we all look at him with expectant smiles, the questions bright in our eyes. Ermm, yes so M is R’s flatmate with benefits. He clarifies though that it’s just for, ermm, pleasure.
I tell them I am the most single of us four. Which is weird. I used to get a bit mad at myself for the complicated relationships I placed myself in the past year. Okay, so I fell in love, cheated, and then found myself alone. From being loved to feeling unwanted. To be honest about it, there was always this hint of anger at myself for being so stupid. And now, after all my brouhahas, I am, in our circle, currently living the most uncomplicated life.
Z and I, we kind of made a promise to ourselves to do right by 2009. I tell Z, if I was not brave enough to say no I might have ended up sustaining a non-relationship too. And we both know, Z and I, that the pain is not worth the fleeting happiness that non-relationships give. We’re women. And for that alone it is more difficult for us, and senseless I might add, to be in such gray set-ups.
There is something about O’s story that is heartwarming but sad. O is single but sometimes when the wind and the heavens are in alignment, he and V gets together. Without strings attached, of course. And J, the girlfriend he dumped for V, they’re now slowly slowly coming back to being friends again. Maybe it is because of the pain, or it could be really about realizing that J was the best one he had. But O is honest that given the chance he would have chosen differently. And so we come to all these cliches again. How sometimes only time can give us a proper perspective of what was. That six years of loving someone else does not erase the affection or feelings you once had for someone. How you never really stop loving someone, it might fade, the intensity turning to a weak flame, it might shift into something more convenient or acceptable to both of you, but the emotion itself never dies.
R who is in no hurry to find the one, looks at it all philosophically, Enjoy what’s there and save the worrying for when you’re older. Which is a pretty good advice too, only our grown up lives sometimes need more than these clear cut lines.
Nine years out of college and we’re living pretty okay lives. I am assuming that our stories are as common as anyone in their late-twenties and early thirties. Still free and hustling up to the world. Youth carries with it the naivete that life’s about as easy and straight as finding a job, meeting someone and raising a family. While, for most of us it is still the goal, we now know how the path is skewed, more akin to the routes of those brightly colored balls in a pinball machine. You never know where your might end up in, with what, or with whom . You grow older, you get more options. Now it’s no longer as easy as yes/no, right/wrong, yin or yang. I look at the four of us, amazed and, weirdly, relieved. Four lives out of the box, fluid yet complicated. How we adjust it to one that suits us, this label, the idea of being “single”.
