Beyond Definition




Death was an excuse for me not to open up my heart and mind to reveal the wounds festering inside. It was the wound dealt by hate and disappointment for being failed by so many people for several times. It was just my poetic way of saying that I have writer’s block. But it is not death that I want to talk, but about love.
Love in different forms.
I keep with me an old paper during my 1st year in Ateneo de Davao University as a Communication Arts freshman student. It was an assignment required by our professor, Ms. Celia Andas. It was a poem analysis on the different kinds of love and I chose to write about Elizabeth Barret Brownings’ poems, Sonnets from the Portuguese which are Sonnet 14, Sonnet 28 and Sonnet 43.
I tried to describe love in its many comparisons through Ms. Browning’s poem but at that time it seemed shallow and my answers were too mechanical and detached probably because I have never experienced falling in love in reality.
But looking back 13 years after, I see love differently now that I have come across so many forms of love which is really varied depending on culture, race religion or nationality.
Yes, I have fallen in love with someone different from my race and it is probably going to be the cause of my heartache soon.
He has opened up my eyes and exposed me to something totally opposite of my idealism that it struck me how selfish and stupid I am.
I would probably dispute his convictions as an excuse for being a male chauvinistic polygamist pig but in reality his reasoning and idealism was just based on his upbringing.
And then I saw the love that struck me so much which is his love and respect for his parents.
I felt ashamed for being liberal and too open minded that for as long as I can remember my parents always respected my decisions may it be success or a mistake.
He is a person of contradictions. He told me a story, about someone he knows whose tribe would not allow him to marry from another tribe despite the same nationality. He loved this girl for four years and he was so down – trodden because his family would not approve of his choice.
One day his aunt asked him to check out one girl from his tribe and he did. He liked the girl and asked for her hand.
This person, the man I have fallen in love with asked this person he knew if he regretted letting go of the girl he loved for four years and marrying the girl he just met but belonged to the same tribe. His friend told him, if he would have married that girl he wouldn’t be as happy as he is right now. He has fallen in love with the girl he married and everyday he celebrates that fact that he had hit two birds in just one stone.
And it struck me, me --- a person who believes in serendipity and spontaneity doesn’t have the right to say that falling in love and marriage are based on an idealism of certain or several persons or based on a movie, a book or an expert on love. A blatant fact flashed across my mind, love knows no meaning or definition. Love is not bound by anything. Love is love depending on how people experience love in their lifetime.
I have been searching and longing for this elusive thing called love when in fact it can never be found. So I stopped searching. It is what it is. It is the care of a friend, the voice of your sister or the touch of your lover.
The night he told me that story, made me decide to stop fighting what I felt for him. I love him period. For now. Today, oh I do! I really do! For tomorrow probably I do too. But for now I am going to answer the present. I am in love with him. C’est la vie.

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