Dear Jose

Dear Jose,

I know you but you probably don’t know me. Okay, let me take that back. You obviously do not know me. I know you quite well ever since I was a little girl. I’ve seen your face not just on one peso coins but on match boxes as well. The first time I saw your face on a match box, I didn’t know your name so I had to ask my yaya who you were and she told me, ‘Bampira na. Kung dili ka matulog, mabuhi na siya’. Now that really scared the hell out of me.

It was during my first Araling Panlipunan class that I actually found out that the face on the match box and on the one peso coin was not a ‘bampira’ but that it was you, our national hero, Jose Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda. I’ve got to hand it to you Jose, you’ve done an awful lot of great stuff for the country and I guess, if you were standing right next to me right now, I wouldn’t have hesitated to shake your hand and give you a pat no the back because you stared death straight in the face. Your willingness to die on that fateful December 30, 1896 stirred everyone’s inner hero to life. Because of you, we weren’t scared to fight back. Jose, you’re the man.

In the 114 years following your death, people have heralded you from martyr to hero to icon. You should see your face on those shirts that some teen-agers are sporting. They even made you wear aviators! Cool, huh? And guess what, they still make us read your books—Noli Mi Tangere and El Filibusterismo, to be specific. In Spanish class, we still have to memorize your poem Mi Ultimo Adios when finals week swings around. It’s a good poem to recite when the teacher is about to scribble a huge F on our grading sheets, you know.

Jose, you are the quintessential renaissance man. You’re a prolific writer, essayist, and poet. You’re a straight A student at one of the country’s most prestigious schools. You’re well-traveled and you’re a polygloth who knows at least 10 languages. You are the man the ladies would be proud to bring home to mom. However, if you were my boyfriend, I don’t think it would work out between the two of us.

Since you do not have a regular clientele, we would probably have to be content with you visiting my house when you’re in the Philippines and we’d probably have to talk at the veranda while gazing at the stars. Otherwise, we might have to settle with watching DVDs at home of movies like The Patriot or something. This is very nice and all but you know, it wouldn’t hurt to watch movies at a real theater or eat at some swanky restaurant (your treat of course) every once in a while. Since you are a gentleman, I would expect that you will not let the lady pay. But since you are a broke gentleman, I would probably have to pay for our dates, won’t I? We might just end up fighting about this.

Quality time would probably be hard to be had because if you won’t be talking about La Liga Filipina and the Philippine Revolution, you might be busy cutting off our conversations by having to answer text messages from Antonio Luna, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Marcelo H. del Pilar, or worse, from your exes Segunda Katigbak and Leonor Rivera. Too much intelligent talk will definitely make my headache—even if it means having my IQ increase by 50 IQ points. And if you only have to text while we’re together, I guess you’d better just forget it.

You probably won’t be home too much since you’d have to be away to places like Austria, London, Germany, France, and Japan. I wouldn’t really mind the whole long distance relationship thing but then I don’t think we’d really make it beyond one year in this kind of setup. Since you will be very busy studying, writing, and planning together with your compatriots, you might already be too tired to call me or answer my calls, to check your Facebook, or to even think of me. 

Jose, you are a good man and even if you are not a dead-ringer for Brad Pitt, people have heralded you as the ladie’s man. The kilabot ng mga kolehiyala. But after a lot of thinking, I think you’re better off as my hero than as my boyfriend.

Love,

Stash