"Kumusta love life?"
Whenever I am having a conversation with a friend, family, or an acquaintance that is cheeky enough to ask, this is my most dreaded question. This question has come a long way from being the one i am always hoping someone would ask to being a question that I hope would never be brought up. It has been two and a half years.
Now that i have realized it, i never had a decent answer to this question. For the first part of those two years, i had been giggling like a schoolgirl whenever i am asked. I think of a conversation we had recently, what i think of as your lame pick-up line, and how i prevented my stomach from exploding with butterflies. Then it came to the phase when that event happened but we're still okay. Then the phase when you're in law school making it the perfect excuse why we never talk anymore--"ah, he's in law school so he's kinda swamped right now" then referring to a "recent" conversation that happened two months ago.
And now this phase. When it's time for that question I hear a shrill sound inside my head, like a boxing match has been declared as over and it's time to leave. "Kumusta love life?" Unbearable silence. Crickets.
Recently my ex-boss asked this. He knows about you. i told him I've been in emotional limbo for the past two years, so he said that i should talk to you and ask you out and it doesn't matter who makes the first move--it's better than waiting forever and getting nothing. I should make sense of this pointless waiting. Either your heart is broken or you'll be happy. Simple. Rather than breaking your heart every day because you don't know the answer.
I just hesitated to say: Believe me. I've been trying to know the answer for what seemed to be like forever.
Lots of people ask me this hastily, but there are also those people that ask out of genuine concern. Lola A would ask: "Kumusta na sya?" and with the silence that I give she already knows the answer. She knows that you made me happy so she'll say she's praying for us. Ninin, meanwhile is entirely different. She'd ask for details and ask me what I'd do next. I'd tell her i don't know. She'd then hug me virtually and say I know how you feel. She's the only person I trust enough to believe what she said is true. My ex-roomie Erin is another.
Yesterday Ninin and I had this conversation again. She asked: "sya pa rin?" And I said, "Never namang nagkaron ng iba eh." Half of me pities my self for not having moved on while the love lives of the entire world's populace have gone through a lot. The other half commends my self for being strong and showing that I don't give a flying f*ck despite the fact that I still cry whenever I write things like this.
I don't know what this question is made for. It's just fishing for information on someone's private life. For me it's torture in the form of words. It's a question I avoid like the plague.
But deep inside and in all honesty, God knows how much I also want to have a proper answer for this question. An answer which i am also sure of.
Maybe my exposure to optimistic pop music caused me to be like this. The Beatles told me that all I need is love. Jason Mraz's I Won't Give Up is my lifelong anthem. Westlife told me that love can build a bridge between your heart and mine. What I didn't know is that telling someone that you love them can also bust that bridge up.
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