The last temptation of Lovi Poe

Message in a bottle

MANILA, Philippines - Dear Lovi (who I have never met but do dream of meeting),

Let’s get this out of the way: you’re beautiful. Everyone knows it. You probably know it, too.  I imagine wherever you go, you have people walking up to you, saying hi, telling you just how beautiful you are sa personal. I wonder if it gets tiring. Does it? Does it finally get old when you no longer know where to place the adoration of strangers — something that, we must admit, we all wish we had? But even if you are tired of hearing it, I suppose it bears repeating: you are beautiful.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, perhaps I can tell you why, with all the beautiful women in showbiz, it is you I think of before I hit the sack, as I close the book I’m reading to brace myself for another round of dreams.

I read in an interview of yours once that you have two tattoos on your back, saying “My Wings, My Gravity,” and you said it served as a reminder of your father — the person who allows you to fly and the person who pulls you back to the ground. You talked about positives and negatives and how they make their respective necessities felt as we go through the journey of life. And perhaps that was the precise moment when, in my eyes, you transcended the archetype of the beautiful celebrity — your conscious choice to sear your every happiness and sadness onto your skin to remind you that they exist to make us better people — your way of saying the body has its own way of remembering, separate from the mind.

Do you know what this tells me? This tells me that behind all those awards you’ve received for excellence in pretending to be another person — the FAMAS award, or the Cinemalaya award for best actress, for starters — behind that is a real person with an enormous, uncontainable love, and I find that lovely. You are a lovely person, Lovi; and it kills me that you’re all the way in Temptation Island and I am in this room surrounded only by books and thoughts of you.

Maybe one day I will be able to meet you. Maybe one day I will finally meet the person who, with the love of her loved ones, is unafraid of flying and is unafraid of landing. Maybe one day, Lovi, when you return, you can also realize that your thousands of adoring fans and admirers also want to help you reach everything you can reach with your unquestionable beauty and talent.

We want to be your wings too. We want to be your gravity.

Love,

A fan.

Gian Lao