An afternoon, early summer of 2010, at the pathway to the CHSS building of UP Mindanao, I first saw the girl I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. Her name was G, a freshman. She had a shoulder-length hair, parted at the center, a thin physique which was emphasized by long sleeves shirt and pants. In my vision, she walked as if her feet stepped on piles of cotton—softly and lightly.
I have always felt a tinge of envy every time I hear stories of romance from people close to me. All of them seemed so easy as though it has long been planned and only the perfect time had to be waited for before the execution.
There were times when I would catch myself smiling at random pictures of my high school classmates with their boyfriends or girlfriends beside them. There was always a hollow in my chest. Scanning through photos on social media, I would sigh and every breath sent air right through the hole in my chest. I could not help but tell myself: I was not one of them. My true identity, as others would call it, was unknown to me until I turned seventeen—a sophomore at UP Mindanao, thriving, getting by, trying to get over with the academic life. It was as if the universe handed me what I could not give myself—a means to determine who I was.
A lot of people have given testimonies before about time and motion slowing down when they meet somebody who could possibly be their other half. And for me, that somebody was G.