Indulge me. Just because it’s Valentine’s week, let’s talk about love—but not the kind of love you often see in movies. It’s not the sort of love that you think you can’t live without, even if it began that way. It is, however, the sort of love that makes life—and loving—worth your while. Sometimes, some loves just come to leave a lesson.
There was a boy I used to love who was always in love with somebody else who, except for a few fleeting exceptions, never loved him back. He pined after them as I pined after him.
There is a decade-old picture of us and friends that I don’t even need to see again to remember: he stands apart from us, wearing his tie-dyed shirt, looking at his watch. I remember this picture because we weren’t on good terms that night; the camera had captured him hurting and wanting to go home.
I don’t remember why we weren’t on good terms, as I don’t remember at all any of the tiny little fires that went between us. I suspect it is because I, being in love with him the way I knew how then, blew more meaning into these tiny little fires than were worth smarting about.
Ordinary love is biased, and while I was so convinced back then that what I felt for him was the most beautiful wasted thing in the world, I know now the way I loved him was ordinary. If it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have hurt him over trivialities.
But while the love was ordinary, the boy was—and is—special.
Two or three years ago, he wrote me a strange letter. He’d been reading our old letters, he said, and finally, after all these years, the message of love I’d cowardly penned into my friendly letters had reached him.
His letter was long, written on yellow pad paper and enclosed in his trademark long letter envelope, the faded kind that brings to mind dusty, sleepy sari-sari stores and Skyflakes and 6 oz. Pop Cola. Like his other letters, it was bursting with beautiful words and images that all spelled out, “I had no idea!”
At the time, I was crazy in love with somebody else, and his letter was, more than anything, a blast from the past, something to giggle about, to feel nostalgic about, something to remind me how silly I’d been at 19, so convinced my life was cursed forever because I couldn’t even get my college love to love me back.
It was also something I could touch base with old, loved, lost friends about: a postscript to a beautiful, tragic, dramatic, magical period of our lives; an epilogue to a love story I so wanted to be true because he was a poet and I wanted my own constellation to claim and my own clichés. The magic was back for a second, and then— I was sucked back into the current love, and his letter, no longer relevant, went to my forgotten memory box. There was slight scorn, I have to admit. What to do with a boy you loved who only realized it eight years later, the darling dear idiot, who’s now married and a father, and seeing the past with clearer and yet nostalgia-clouded eyes?
I didn’t think much about it anymore—until this year’s letter, crammed among bills in our mailbox. It was a few days after my birthday, I was figuring out a present love. I was on my way to work, and I saw the long letter envelope, still the faded kind, peeking out at me. I knew instantly who it was from.
To be continued on Valentine’s Day.