DEAR EMILY,
Here’s another senior love story for your column.
It was an unplanned break-up with a foreigner boyfriend of two-and-a-half years, which happened after I went back to Manila for a vacation. We never quarreled or had any misunderstanding, ever. In our few years together I just took it for granted that all men loved like him.
He was not very ambitious, but he was ultrathoughtful, very generous, and loved me so much that he promised that he would do anything to make me happy. He took very good care of his appearance and health, all for me. Before I went on vacation, he went down on one knee and gave me a ring—something I knew he’d have to pay for for a long time.
While in Manila, I met a new guy who was a professor in a local college here. His conversations, his intelligence just overwhelmed me. He said the moment he saw me, he knew he’d marry me. True enough, we got married three months after our meeting.
It was a huge mistake, though. He was cold, inattentive, reclusive—so unlike the loving foreign boyfriend I left for him. Trouble is, I couldn’t get out of my marriage fast enough. I found myself pregnant a month later.
A year after I gave birth, I went abroad and sought out my foreign boyfriend. When he saw me, his eyes welled up. I told him I had just given birth and I was returning the ring he gave me. He didn’t want it back; he wanted me. He said over and over that it was never too late to start a life of our own. He wanted me to bring my baby, but I couldn’t. I just wanted to feel the old love he had showered on me. Life had changed. It didn’t feel the same.
After that last encounter, we lost contact for another 30 years. He learned that I was widowed and called me a few months later. It felt good to be talking about the past with him again. We were as giddy as teenagers. We hardly talked of the present.
When we met again hoping to pick up the past, I was shocked. He looked at me hard and said life was unfair because although older, I hadn’t changed much. I couldn’t say the same about him! He looked like he had let himself go, so badly. He aged so much I doubt if I’d even recognize him if we met on the street. His balding head was unkempt, his stomach looked like he had swallowed a watermelon, his thin nose became bulbous. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And he is younger than me!
He said he was living with a married daughter, and living off his retirement pension from working in the post office. We talked, but we didn’t have much in common anymore.
It was sad because all my married life, I had sung praises to my memories of him and craved for the love we shared together. Finding him again after many decades of aching for him, feeling much sadness and regret at leaving a great love—all possibly contributing to the unhappiness of my marriage—I could only shake my head and wonder if fate had played a trick on me. But I felt liberated in not finding any connection with him anymore, and closing the chapter on him, finally.
A.B.
Closing the chapter on a great love is always sad in any language. That’s the reason for the periods in sentences, winters in seasons, deaths in a life. Every good thing ends, somehow or other. As a song goes, “All good things must end, and autumn leaves must fall.” But that’s what memories are for—for reliving, for playing back, for reminiscences.
You’re one of the lucky few who can enter a secret door in your mind—to smile and be warmed by the playback. Others aren’t so lucky, for they have nothing to go back to.
Nature didn’t play a trick on you. Who knows, you might have been unspeakably miserable had you stayed with him. Looks like he lost his direction when you left him, and that couldn’t have augured well during your married life. You couldn’t have been very happy masterminding and constantly steering the direction of your lives together.
Your life flowed as it did, and you must admit that you experienced many other wholesome, memorable, and even astonishing events that could only have added to your happy past with this foreign boyfriend.
There are seasons and reasons for how lives unfold and are lived. Sometimes the current is so strong you just have to accept being overtaken by the elements. But fighting and swimming against it must have been the cause of so much unhappiness for you.
You may not have been happy romantically with your late husband, but surely, you admired and respected his mind. And that truly amounted to something.
(emarcelo@inquirer.com.ph or emarcelo629@gmail.com.)