I was in the bed. I tried to close my eyes to get a good nap yet my mind keeps telling me get up and write something. I blamed the light roasted coffee. Though it gets me butterflies in my stomach, still I can't resist its delicious aroma especially when it is freshly brewed. Anyway, I am not here to give you some impractical stuff about coffee. I am writing to evoke interest mostly about love between two people. I'm not gonna give you any utopian principles or ideas about it. Trust me, mine is imperfect. Such imperfections mesmerized me to hold on to it.
So let's start from my childhood concepts about it. When I was a kid, I used to believe in fairy tales. My mother doesn't read me those kind of stories every night. Instead, my lola used to tell me stories about monsters (aswang, white lady, kapre and duwende) hunting little naughty kids at night. About the fairy tales, I read them from the school library every afternoon. That's because we don't have fairy tale books at home. Why? Purely economy. No enough money to spare for buying books. It's not a priority. Okay lets go further. So what's with these fairy tales. Like little kids, I dreamed of being a pretty little princess wearing a perfect classic pink gown embroidered with sequins to make it more glittery and with a hair style fit for royalty. Sadly, I was captured by foul scary huge dragon and waited for my prince, my knight in shining armor, to rescue me. But the thing is, it took him so long to come and blamed his tardiness for some imaginary car accidents along the road. The underlying funny statement I had in this story is that every princess has a prince and there is happily-ever after in life. I think we ought to love to live our life happily ever after.
As years passed, I was not too clingy anymore with princess-dragon-prince stories. My interest shifted to documentary movies mostly about history and science. My dreaminess about knight in shining armor faded because I was too overwhelmed with my academic performance. Bye to fairy tales, hello to textbooks. Yes, I had previous relationships but they never worked well because I was just too busy studying. I realized that to love someone is an obstacle to get your dreams and that there is more to explore than loving. With the subjects I had in high school, I came up with some concepts about love. Like in Math, love between two people involves different operations. Such love adds worries and happiness in your life, lessens your time supposedly allotted for your studies, multiplies your feelings each day and separates you somehow from your friends or family. How about history? History mostly talks about significant past events. Like History, love transcends you to the limit of time. Such famous person's love stories being told from one generation to another. In Theology?From the biblical text, I learned that love does not keep the records of wrong. When you love somebody you gotta love him or her even his negative tendencies. In Physics, I learned about Einstein's famous equation derived from his theory of relativity. It's the E=Mc2, where E refers to energy, m refers to mass (matter) and c pertains to speed of light (time). Love is a forceful energy that moves two people (matter) together unexpectedly (time). Actually, you can relate some equations to love but none of them can give you a derivation of it. Such forceful energy remains mysterious. In Literature? Oh, there's a lot of short stories that tell you about it. One of my favorites is the Wedding Dance by Amador Daguio. Now this story is an opposite of fairy tales. It never ended happily ever after. He talked about love strangled by cultural reality that resulted to the the unwoven marriage of Awiyao and Lumnay. Yes, unwoven! Awiyao was forced to leave his wife, Lumnay, because she cannot bear a child. With this, he has now to marry Madulimay. Yet, we could tell that he loves his wife dearly. Such situation both gave them a crushing heart. That's what love is, it comes with pain.
When I get to college, I was too lazy to exert extra efforts on my academic performance. Perhaps, I was bombarded with too many programming homework and projects. I was surrounded with pretty geeks and nerds. Unlike some college girls, we don't talk about boys in our vacant time. We talked about National Geographic, ancient time, Bermuda Triangle, The Lost City, The Holocaust, Confucius, Power Puff, Popeye, Harry Potter, WWII, C++, Visual Basic, Discrete Math and etc. We seldom talked about love not until when we were in fourth year college. I happened to like a guy from other university. But it never lasted because I had to focus on our thesis. I can't really tell something deeply about love in college. If I were to define it with programming, well it's like a complex source code. Such complexity has to be broken down to simplify everything especially the situation. You need to find the correct algorithm (strategies) to make it work, which requires more effort and time. With this complicated process, surely you will find some bugs (challenges) and you need to debug them otherwise you can't get your desired output (how your love story will be). One of the nerdy pick-up lines I found about it was from Sherly Wu. It says "Let's make like Dijkstra's and find the shortest path between you and me." By the way to those who have not undergone Data Structure, Dijkstra is an algorithm used to find the shortest path between nodes in the graph. Yeah, when we love someone we wanted to be closer to that person.
After college, I got a job. I have been into relationships and failed. Such failures left my family and friends confused. Honestly, I'm confused too. I guess my fairy tail concept about it was too impractical, my variety definitions on it when I was in high school were too narrow and my nerdy ideas about it makes it more unfathomable. You see, even how well you define it one can still never explain about love between two people. I guess the best way to define it is based on experiences. Let's see. Yeah, love is painful. Love hurts. We need to be broken for us to be whole again. We need to be hurt for us to learn and solemnly promise not to repeat the same mistakes anymore. But with love you can overcome all. It makes you strong. It makes you hold on to life. From my experiences, I happened to like 3 Japanese Proverbs. 1) Saru mo ki kara ochiru. It means even monkeys do fall. No matter how well versed you are in love, mistakes happen. It could be you have done something wrong or you were just in the wrong situation. But again, this line should not be made as an excuse to repeat mistakes. 2) Ishibashi wo tataite wataru. It means tap the stone bridge before crossing it. It's a wonderful proverb. It tells you about being careful in love. 3) I forgot its line in Japanese but it means "Burn not the house to get rid of the mouse." In love we encounter problems, this suggests that let us not make some drastic actions that will just worsen the problem. Also, I've read one of Shakira Sison's lines. She is a columnist and essayist in Rappler (I like her). It says "You need to be like Goldilocks and meet three lovers: 1) one that will be too hard, 2) one that will be too soft, and 3) one that is just right. You can't skip #1 and #2, because it's only after being with them that you will recognize #3." Literally speaking, this does not mean you have to go through all those numbers. If I have choices at first, I would go straight to 3. But you can't just make some eeny meeny miny mo and catch a tiger by tail. It's just telling you that finding love is not easy and it's all about at the right place, time and person.
In conclusion, love is complex. It has a sneaky way of making you happy when you are sad and sad when you are happy. Just keep loving, when it's too much and when you feel like you are losing both of yourselves in it, then stop. Martyrdom is for heroes.
