By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

SHE could not remember their faces. Their faces have changed with time, and the expression of their bodies changed with their mindsets and physical wellbeing. What is there to say after more than thirty years, barely touching each other’s lives or not touching at all for that length of time?

Former classmates had become professionals, experts in their own chosen careers, and she, having married early, had four grown sons, with seven grandchildren, all huddled in the same place, in a house built on small inheritance of a farm lot, in the middle of nowhere with no access road, where mobility depended on your own two feet walking on narrow rice paddies. Her husband still tills the land owned by others, having no desire to acquire new skills to venture outside the perimeter of the farms.

Others have fates much worse. One died of gangrene, the other of diabetes, and one lost his mind, believing he was the mayor of a town. So many are in the state of depression, especially after the pandemic, that one wonders how a celebration of success and bounty could be happening to others at this time to warrant a reunion.

But, she was excited to see him, a classmate she secretly had a crush on, with whom she shared her dreams back then. The nagging question in her mind, “What if?”

She was there, at the reunion, despite her doubts, trying to convince herself she did the right thing. She recognized him, despite his size, which she could never have imagined growing from a small, fragile frame she remembered him from high school, a stick turning frantically with the slightest wind. He was called “Palito” by his peers, the local term for a matchstick. Now he looked like, the heavy rock that keeps rolling back, kept in place by Sisyphus, except that Sisyphus had grown tired and old, and stopped pushing.

“Hey, Palito, meet Angelina, you were inseparable in high school!”

He turned around, and looked at her, a tall, gaunt woman, with very little resemblance from the face of an angel he kept in his mind over the years, extending her shriveled hands from her shrunken body where water seemed unable to flow. A curious classmate, distracted from a conversation, turned his head to see them and stared at both in incredulity.

Is that Angelina? I used to have a crush on her. How did she become ugly?

Palito was staring at her, and he saw, in her eyes, the same soft flame that animated his nights, recognizing the strong emotions within himself, the existence of a woman he kept very close in his heart, snatched by the circumstances of life. Angelina, too, realized that feelings don’t go away with time and distance and form. Without a word, they danced. He remembered his father saying, “Walang pangit sa umiibig.” (To a lover, there is no ugly.)

Hold me now, say nothing
Be you, be me
This moment, let’s live

In her heart, she kept dancing. He offered to take her home, but she declined. It was enough. It was enough to live the moment. Enough to sweep her feet back to the reality of rice paddies, to the little house that she chose to nurture, where her brood slept side by side, where she found her husband, snoring.

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