I'd like to share with you an article written by Quickmelt. This was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer in June 1996.
I was in college when this came out. I was tremendously moved then by the kind of love this 16-year old felt. Reading it again today made me wonder if Quickmelt, now in her 30's, finally found her one true love.
Read on. This is really good.
One Love, One Lifetime
by Quickmelt
In the sixteenth summer of my life I fell in love
for the first time. Naturally, I had no idea what I was getting into. Youth,
for all its freshness and vigor, does not have the wisdom of past experience.
And so it was that I was very ill-equipped when Cupid’s arrows first struck. I
still had fairy-tale notions of love: Boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy and
girl pledge undying love for each other, and they live happily ever after. I
only had to find my Prince Charming, and everything would be smooth sailing. I
was young and invincible. No sadness could touch me, especially in the arena of
romance.
To young people finding themselves drawn to
someone for the first time, everything is wonderful and new. I once read that
love is like God’s finger on your shoulder. Every beautiful thing in the world
feels like it was made solely for your enjoyment, like a gift chosen with only
you in mind. Perhaps the greatest of all these gifts is the sound of your heart
catching in your throat at the sight of a boy smiling at you as though you,
too, were a gift he cannot quite thank God enough for.
When I look back at the days when I was all giddy
with that first discovery of love, I find that the grass was greener, the air
was fresher and even the sun was kinder, not sending its rays down to punish my
back on sweltering afternoons, like it does now, but bathing me in its radiance
so that I had the morning sunshine in my smile. The splendor of creation, the
marvel of life — I had never tasted them more fully than when I had a heart
grateful for the first touch of love. It felt like I had the whole world in my
hands, the power to do whatever I pleased, in my own sweet time as soon as I
had finished attending to greater things at hand, such as the business of love.
My prince had come on his white charger, to rescue me from my ordinary,
solitary existence. Suddenly, I had someone to hold my hand. It was bliss. It
was ecstasy. I was madly, deeply, truly in love.
I thought my happiness was without end. I thought
that since we had naturally gravitated toward each other, it would be a simple
thing to get together and be sweethearts until our hearts gave out in our
golden years. Of natural causes, not of exhaustion, like I don’t feel like
loving you anymore. Of a coronary disease, maybe, not some mysterious
happenstance, like where is the love we used to know?
Where did it go? I don’t know. Maybe it was too
beautiful to last. Maybe the deities who bestowed this wondrous gift on me
decided they could not extend their generosity any further. Maybe it wasn’t
love at all. Maybe it was merely a sweet but insignificant friendship, that in
my romantic delusion I had exaggerated into a grand love affair. Years of
sleepless nights, countless tears and endless soul searching have given me no
answers.
But if it wasn’t love, what could it possibly
have been? What was it that made me feel his presence like no other, day after
day, month after month, year after year? He would walk into a room and my
attention would immediately be riveted to him, like an oarsman in the dead of
night fixing his eyes on a lighthouse miles and miles away. I would see him
come out of a building, and my eyes would light up like incandescent bulbs. He
would smile at me and I’d melt, quicker than you can say quickmelt. He would
grant me the privilege of his company, and like a kitten I would purr
contentedly in my master’s lap. I would see him over the weekend, and no amount
of stress could ruin my happiness for two weeks thereafter. He would talk to me
for a while, and I’d panic for lack of something appropriate to say, and my
tongue would fall back in my throat and stay there for the rest of the conversation
almost asphyxiating me. He would narrate some anecdote, and I could recite it
from memory many months after everyone else had forgotten it. He would crack
one of his numerous jokes and I’d laugh like a hyena, loving the sound of his
voice, more than the sound of my own laughter. He would open his mouth to say
something, and I would hear the loveliest music and feel my face glow with
intense satisfaction, like when my father used to take me to the supermarket to
pick as many Dole pineapple juice off the shelves as I cared.
Even to this day, when I have successfully
convinced myself and unsuccessfully convinced my friends that I have fallen out
of love with him, I cannot help but cast one last glance in his direction every
time he says goodbye and starts to walk away to an existence entirely separate
from my own. I keep my eyes on his until the last hair on his head is out of
sight, trying to preserve every detail of his appearance in my memory until
the time I will see him again.
I loved his smile most of all. It must have been
the same smile Noah had upon seeing the rainbow after the Great Flood. Swirling
masses of dark clouds and slowly, one by one, little fingers of light coalesce
to reveal a brilliant arc of colored light in the sky. I remember how he used
to smile at me when we’d pass each other in the school corridors. Reflexively
I’d smile back, grinning like silly, my meager dimples stretched up to my ears,
my face dangerously close to splitting. He’d give me that dazzling smile of his
and everything would stop just like that. It was as if the world had ceased to
exist; it was only me and him: his glistening retainers, the vertiginous dance of
my heart. When they said money can’t buy happiness, they must have meant the
happiness that comes with first love.
He gave me the greatest happiness as well as the
greatest sadness of my young life. The times when he made me feel most loved
will always be like commemorative gold coins in mint condition in my mind. When
you hear your beat in unison with another even for the most fleeting moment,
that’s one moment you will never forget.
I fell apart when it finally became clear that we
weren’t getting anywhere, at least not together and that our great love affair
was only being carried on in my imagination. Love is a woman’s existence, and
mine became totally disordered. I could not sleep. I could not eat. I could not
study. I could not do anything but think of him. I cannot imagine it now, but
there was a time when my every thought was of him. I would be praying and I’d
think of him, and then I’d pray, “Please God, I love him. Please let him love
me again.” I would be eating, and then I’d recall some meal we had taken
together in some restaurant I cannot enter now without him beside me again. I
would be studying, and I’d remember mechanically doing my homework. I would be
sleeping, and if I so much as dreamt of his shadow, I’d be sleepless for days
afterward. I would be looking at the stars in the sky, and then I’d recite that
childhood rhyme: Starlight, star bight/ first, second, third, ad infinitum star
I saw tonight, please grant me his love anew. I would be living my life in the
present, then I’d think of him and suddenly I’d want to live the past all over
again. Once I nearly tore off the tuning knob from the radio, switching
stations because one song kept on playing on the airwaves, telling this is your
story, when I was desperately trying to put a semblance of normality in my life
(and trying to cram for my finals).
Two years down the line, I discovered tennis and
took out my frustration on the hapless, fuzzy, yellow balls. In no time at all,
I had an excellent serve, but alas, I could not master the groundstrokes.
I pined for him until I could pine no longer. I
kept my life empty for the longest time so that he could freely re-enter
anytime he wished. Now I realize that this was a great disservice to myself. In
my great, tragic love for this person I had forgotten to love myself and became
a victim of my own neglect. Buth then in the anguished lives the young lead,
they need drama commensurate to their hormonal levels, and my drama was wasting
away for a boy I had lost, I guess, to college education.
Through it all I loved him very much. I love him
so much that, as the cliche goes, I could not deny him his happiness. If he was
happier with someone else, so be it. If he was happier with me as only friend,
so be it. Though it sometimes felt like I had a wound in my heart, it didn’t
matter, I loved him anyway. After a while, it didn’t matter that he didn’t love
me in return, I loved him anyway. When he’d wonder if there was a girl out
there for him, I could scarcely stop myself from screaming, “Here I am, you
doofus, no need to go far.” When he did ask me for any favors to my
inconvenience, I would whine inside but my brain would be in a frenzy
cancelling appointments so I could be at his beck and call. I loved him so much
I felt it was such a massive injustice, tyranny even, that I could have have
him, when I was probably the one who loved him most, after his mother. I would
never let any harm come to him. Touch a hair on his head and I’d metamorphose
into the Incredible Hulk and kill you.
Call it stupidity, call it insanity, call it
obsession, call it infatuation, call it whatever you want, it was love, sweet
bittersweet love. With love, as with faith, if you believe that’s justification
enough, no explanation is necessary. If you do not, no explanation is possible.
When you are blessed enough to love, it will change you in so many ways you can
never be the same again.
Love means different things to different people,
different things at different times. Like everything, it changes. It waxes and
wanes like the moon.
In all my years of loving one boy with all the
love my heart could hold, I learned that no matter where I went, no matter what
I did, no matter who I was with, there was only one person for me, no matter if
he long ago ceased to feel the same way. It was not his fault that I was so
unhappy for so long, it was simply my misfortune, my cross to carry. In spite of
everything, I am a better person, and I will forever be indebted to him for
teaching me how it is to love. Never mind that his teaching was done mostly in
absentia. I madly, deeply, truly loved him. I hope never to dishonor that love
by engaging in cheap flings with whoever catches my fancy at the moment.
To me love is not a conquest, much less one
conquest after another. Conquest denotes subjugation, a submission to a more
powerful will. You do not make a person submit to your will and mold him as you
see fit to make him more lovable in your eyes. You love him for what he is. You
do not gloss over his imperfections, you learn to live with his flaws. You do
not brag to your friends that he is yours for the taking, there is no place for
braggadocio in love. You wait instead anxiously for the next time he tells you
he loves you, no matter if it may never happen and in the meantime the
uncertainty is making you miserable. You do not lead him on with empty displays
of affection. You do not boost his ego with false praises, only to give him the
ultimate put-down by taking him for a fool. You find yourself speechless with
admiration and fear that the slightest touch will betray the depth of your
emotion. You do not cry foul when you see that the course of love has not gone
according to your fervent wishes. You do not bawl at him, “How dare you tell me
you love me, take my heart, and then disappear from my life.” You do not demand
the return of glorious days long past. You do not blame him for your shattered
illusions and waylaid dreams and least of all for your broken heart. Even in
the lowest troughs of self-pity and despair, you cannot bring yourself to cause
him the slightest grief. You would rather die than give him the slightest hint
that he has anything to do with your unhappiness. Love bears all– maybe not
always with a smile that’s big enough for all the world to see, but just one
that’s brave enough to tell him it’s okay, you’ll live so he doesn’t have to
feel bad.
It is never easy to lay open the door to your heart,
because love and rejection get in the same way. Love is not for the
faint-hearted. I loved once, and years later I am still reeling from it. Having
survived one heartbreak has not lessened my fear of going through another. Thus
I envy people who can plunge headlong into relationships after but just some
tentative attempts at getting to know another person. I envy people who can
meet strangers and shortly afterward declare that they were meant for each
other. I envy those who are not afraid to go after their happiness and damn the
consequences. I envy people who can go from conquest to conquest without
feeling diminished by it.
I can never be like them. I don’t think like
them. Once you’ve tasted manna from heaven, why bother with bread from the
baker? Nothing compares with it.
Until God sends me my angel on earth to love and
to cherish forever, I will be content to be alone. I have learned to swallow my
loneliness like a bitter pill, hoping that my good behavior will make fate
smile at me and say, “Here is the one for you. Live happily ever after, your
name is written on his heart.”
One love, one lifetime — that is my hope. Not one
conquest after another. As Sting says, that’s not the shape of my heart.
