puhon.

polaroid love

Aika's POV

I hum along to the music coming from my phone, finding myself relaxing at the simplicity of the day.

It was the weekend, the family was home, and I was decluttering and reorganizing some of the things in Tricia and I's room, as a way to destress from the outside world. It's probably something I got from Mama, growing up with her being the organized person she was.

We learn early on that there are things in the world that you can't control. Just like whoever we fall for. Or more specifically, which gender we fall for.

Fortunately, I had some of the most open-minded parents growing up. They understood and empathized with everyone, never looking down on them for something as simple as who they love.

From them, I learned that the best thing about love was that it simply existed. In the exciting and thrilling kilig of puppy love, to the comfort, warmth, and lifelong kind of love.

Papa being Papa, never shied away from recalling his and Mama's love story. Sometimes he would exaggerate the details, if just to entertain his little girls. And whenever he did, his eyes would sparkle, in the way it always did whenever he was talking about Mama.

And Mama being Mama, always rolled her eyes at him good naturedly whenever he did, a "Bok, ilang beses na yan narinig ng mga anak mo, laging nag-iiba pa yung storya." escaping from her lips. But just like Papa, she always had a lovestruck expression as she listened to their earlier moments as a couple.

My sisters and I would normally tease Papa for being the hopeless romantic that he was, but ultimately, their love for each other became the blueprint for the kind of love we wanted to have and experience in this lifetime too.

The kind of love that you didn't expect. The kind of love that makes you fall in love everyday. The kind of love that you would never doubt.

With so much things in the world that we can't control, organizing gives me a sense of relaxation and assuredness to ground myself every now and then.

I was going through a few boxes, checking if they were still of value or just added to the pile of unneccessary stuff we had. I land on one small blue box. It was familiar to me, but I couldn't quite pin what it could be.

I open it, and immediately the memories come flying back. It was a box of polaroids, pictures and items from my year in Harvard.

I sat down on the bed and proceeded to skim through the pictures, reminiscing with a smile on my face. I realized then that in almost all of the pictures, there was one person constantly present. Val.

And it made sense. The woman became a constant presence in my life in Grad school, be it in the lunch breaks we frequently shared or the presentation of a Year-end project with a terror prof that I'd spent the whole night before perfecting, again, with her by my side.

So really, one could imagine the pain I felt when she disappeared for those 4 years. Not having her by my side felt like the moon without the sun, or the nights without the stars. Like the sands without the waves constantly crashing into them to make their presence known.

It's true, nasaktan ako nung hindi siya nagparamdam, but maybe that was just one of the things I couldn't control. The fact that we both had to grow individually, and that meant having to grow apart as well. If it was fate that pulled us apart, then I'm glad it was fate that brought us back together too.

I picked up a drawing from the box, one I recognized as 9-year-old Agostin's drawing of him and the bear I gave. He named it Jesse, saying he wanted to remember me everytime he looked at it.