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There you were. It was as if God temporarily took you out of this dimension, only to insert you back today and just for today.


It made the day so much sweeter; a smile would have edged it into memory, but it was sufficient nonetheless. Enough to cause a momentary flashback, with your laughter echoing in the distance and the bittersweet longings tugging against the strings of my heart. Even your scent danced around for too short a period, and my arm tingled nostalgically in sudden reflection of a loneliness thought to have disappeared with time. For the brief period of half a lecture, amidst a jolly white man's enthusiastic assertions of deviant religions and collective effervescence, I entertained wishful thoughts of you approaching me just to talk: about how you have been all this while, your plans for the future, the changes in your life, and briefly, just ever so briefly, I toyed with the fantasy of you returning to my arms.


It was then that I realized that the hope within me still flickers, but hasn't died yet. Ironic, given that I don't believe in true love anymore.



I returned home, sat down, and watched 500 Days of Summer for the second time in my life. After all, it was a movie about us. "This is not a love story. It is a story about love." God, how I love that line. And I love the indie music behind the film, the urban landscape, the meaningfully meaningless conversations, the Tom Handson's heartbreaking agony, his awfully goofy friends, the little sister-cum-love-advisor that I never had. I love how Summer Finn reminds me so much of you, the way she scrunched her nose in bed, the unbroken eye contact when she talked, the drawl in her voice, the way she noticed and loved the insignificant things, how she was so mysterious, sang whenever and wherever, and most of all the way she just walked out of the ambiguous relationship into another more stable one without explaining why, or being able to, for that matter.

The only noticeable difference to me at least was that she was a Caucasian, had blue eyes and could sing perfectly in pitch.


And as I relished the film dialogue in greater details, savored the British rock-influenced indie music, I began to realize that ever since that day you left, ice has begun to form around my heart, slowly but surely. You know it's happening to you when romantic love becomes seen as nothing but a huge waste of time and you internalize the notion that you're better off alone because it's simply more efficient and easily maintained. And it's movies like that which can melt the ice temporarily, for an evening, at most a few days, but that's all. But isn't it through the melting that we realize the presence of ice?


Tom's friend quoted Henry Miller in the movie: The best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature. I concur. And, of all people I should be able to testify to that, given the extravagance of literature produced from the tips of my fingers through the sordid inspiration from just a few breakups.


But who needs to write a book, when someone else has already made a movie about us? And how was I to recall that Patrick Swayze's "She's Like The Wind" song, one that I posted on my blog some time back because it reminded me of you, was the same song that reminded Tom about Summer?



Upon hearing it on the bus after Summer disappeared, he shouted, "I hate that song!"



I dunno if I can do that.






Did you ever do this, you think back on all the times you've had with someone and you just replay it in your head over and over again and you look for those first signs of trouble? -Tom Hansen, 500 Days of Summer

Tom: What happened, why didn't they work out?
Summer: What always happens. Life.