Until the next Friday
I saw a familiar face the other night. Just like six years ago, I was still chopped liver in his eyes.
He walked-in in this curious café cum bar in Makati, (he was with this skinny --of course, of course-- girl whom I remember was with a different guy whose name and face escapes me now. I don’t know why I remember such useless things.)
It was during that blue rose night that my sick self (then) wanted to come up to him and say, “Hey, you changed my life. You made me love math class.” He was right there in front of me and the note was tied around my rose’s stem, crumpled within my fist. I just couldn’t do it.
And thank the gods I didn’t! That would have haunted me until now! Imagine bumping into him years later had I done such a silly thing. “Heeeey creepy girl…didn’t think I’d see you ever again, but hi, anyway!” he’d probably say, or worse, he’d say and remember nothing.
In the interest of going against expectations and making that night in 2007 interesting, I planned on giving my rose to someone whom I knew only from afar thinking that that fake rose was meant to symbolize everything unsaid and undone-basically everything impossible and out of this world.
Who would have thought that years after, I would realize that it was only right that the rose ended up in the hands of the only person who deserved it in that time of my life? That fake rose symbolized everything real that ever happened to me in college, and after that. There’s nothing wrong with being predictable about it, after all, especially when neither of us knew what was in store anyway. That was for living for the Now then.
Math class guy passed me several times, with his girl in tow, that night in Makati. I looked at him quickly and then rested my eyes on the real guy next to me. He smiled and squeezed my hand. He was real.
I thought, “This is why I am thrilled more than ever to live for the Now now.”