I was already thinking about him before he passed by me at the movies. I was in a movie theatre he — and perhaps we — frequented. He loved going to the movies. He made me create a Letterboxd account in 2019, back when hardly anyone knew about the app. As I’ve moved through life, I’ve done a good job putting him on the back burner, which was a real struggle in years past. He was my best friend, the one who knew all my days and nights.
That weekend was a huge one for movies. Hello, Love, Again — now the highest-grossing Filipino film of all time — had just come out a week prior. It was also Wicked’s first week in theatres, and our screening of the film was packed. My friend Joan and I snagged the last two seats available that were right next to each other — way in the back, in the right-hand corner.
The air was hot, made thicker by muffled breaths and voices. I could sense the excitement building — a kind of electricity in the room, that collective buzz of shared anticipation. Laughter echoing over the “holding space” meme, everyone looking forward to Defying Gravity. For a brief moment, I thought of him — if he’d be here. It was completely plausible. It’s the kind of cultural moment he and I craved — in a world of fragmented realities, movies become the one place where we all experience the same thing, together.
Joan and I were lining up for popcorn when he passed by me — like a gust of wind. An unmistakable pull. A split-second sighting, yet I knew, without an inch of doubt, it was him. There’s this energy. A tingle in my belly. Some people are threaded through you in a way that doesn’t need confirmation. Your body just knows. In the past, I was stuck on unanswered questions, on regrets I replayed in my head until they wore me down, until they beat me blue. A year or so ago, I would’ve jumped on the opportunity to walk up to him and say hello. But that’s not who I was anymore.
It might have been the last time I crossed paths with him. Yet I stayed in my place and watched the chance dissolve into memory. I’ve made my peace with the fact that we’re never going to know each other again — the versions of ourselves shaped by each other’s absence. Maybe he saw me. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter.
In the course of a few years, my heart broke a thousand times over grave mistakes and unresolved hurts, and it cracked even further when they resurfaced in my memory. But if I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that my heart had to crack open over and over — to expand and to grow into something that could hold more love than I ever imagined possible, with depth and openness I didn’t know this heart of mine was capable of. I saw things and dimensions I never even thought existed. I came to realizations that can only come from years of active healing — and learning the hard way. I now laugh at jokes he probably would find unfunny. Or rather, the version of him I knew would. I don’t know the person he is today, how his humor evolved. Does he still laugh like a little kid? Head thrown back, eyes squinting, no trace of restraint? I wouldn’t know.
Just a few weeks ago, I heard news of vows and veils, of slow songs and satin trains. My heart swelled with warmth and happiness. The person who deserves the best things marriage could offer — love, trust, companionship, and quiet joy — will experience it in full bloom, forever. Upon finding out, I revisited the past. Our past. I spent hours reminiscing, replaying old moments, all while sitting in silence. I wanted time to stop, overwhelmed by how fast it all seemed to be moving. Maybe remembering was my way of trying to freeze time, to anchor myself to something that once felt certain.
But, as I now know best, time never stops. It moves forward — quietly, relentlessly — indifferent to the things we wish we could hold on to. I shed tears — those of joy, of regret, of past resentment for words exchanged. I could’ve — no, I would’ve — been there, bearing witness to a chapter I once only imagined for us.
In those four solid hours of reminiscing, I put on music. Having lived through heartbreak over the years, music and poetry became sustenance. They were as vital to my survival as water and oxygen. Only then was I able to experience art in its full power. That miraculous thing only art can do — mend us, free us from the things that bind us, and stretch us past our limits. It let me crash the same car over and over and still step out alive and whole.
I rediscovered the beauty of Melodrama, my favorite album. It’s funny, really — I had just published a piece about Talking Heads, where the opening paragraphs reflect on how I outgrew the song Liability, only to find myself running back to it days later. “Every perfect summer’s eating me alive until you’re gone… better on my own.” I didn’t fully understand it then, but it’s clear now. I simply had to let you go.
I revisited the 8th track of the album called Writer in the Dark. Few works of art hit me like this one does — where I can listen, look myself dead in the eyes and say: this is who you are. It’s a rare moment I don’t take for granted — to be truly seen, and in that sight, muster up the courage to take up space in this world. I was always a writer, but I became one in earnest when all I had left was the story I had to rewrite from the wreckage. Writing became my way of untangling the knots within, of letting the words drift out into the ether so I could breathe again.
We’re gone and through, but one thing I have — and always will — is being a writer. To build worlds that stay untethered to time and place. I was a writer before you, I was a writer with you, and I will be a writer long after you’re gone.
“I am my mother’s child
I’ll love you ’til my breathing stops
I’ll love you ’til you call the cops on me
But in our darkest hours, I stumbled on a secret power
I’ll find a way to be without you, babe”All lyrics by Ella Yelich O-Connor and Jack Antonoff courtesy of Universal Music New Zealand Limited.
I felt immense power coursing through my veins in this confession. That love — alive, untamed, crazy. I am my mother’s child. Water is wet. The sky is blue. And I’ll love you ’til the day I die. And yet, by some secret power, I’ll find a way to be without you.
A few years ago, I listened to this song a million times over, in hopes of convincing myself that I too would stumble upon this secret power. My mind couldn’t yet grasp the possibility that such power existed; what would it even look like? How would I learn to wield it? But I kept listening anyway, and crying my nights away. Flash forward to today — after all these years, and the words ring truer than ever. I love you, I have found a way to be without you, and I know deep in my heart that it’s better off this way.
It was weird being inside that movie theatre. Unbeknownst to the people around me, there was another dimension hovering — one where everything left unsaid hung in the air, where the space between us had its own gravity, pulling me back to the version of me that I’ve shed but still lingers somewhere in time. The audience in the theatre was alive. Wicked was a hit, every punchline ignited a burst of laughs, and the energy of the music moved through the room. There’s this trend among cinephiles — already mentally drafting your review, rating the film before it’s even over. I certainly did this, and I realized that it was you who imprinted that in me. Yet you were a few rows away, out of reach. In another world, we would’ve sat next to each other, laughing together and raving about the film afterward. But this isn’t the past. It never will be.
