One Year Ago Today

... I gave someone a third in a series of ten letters.

I don't know where he is now, nor do I care to find out. I only remembered him again because his father was featured in the Sunday Daily Inquirer magazine, and in the article, writer Bibeth Orteza misspelled his name (as most people usually do).

Now that I look over these letters a year after I'd written them, it's become clear to me that it wasn't about him, or any man, for that matter. A part of me wonders how we got here, to the point of forgetting and abandonment, but this is the truth - we were only filling in that which we thought was empty. It should not have been this way, but then again, it is.

August 3, 2005

# 1

They say I’m good with beginnings.

My writing teachers tell me I have a knack for opening scenes. You make the reader want to read the rest of your story, said one venerable professor, while another had gushed, your first sentences are like lightning. Once, I began a story with a cat lying in the middle of the road, about to be crushed by a fire truck. In my most well-received story to date, I open with a young girl, who is petrified of driving, sitting in her mother’s car, trying to start it so she can run away from home.

In life, like art, I am the same. I am a magnificent beginner. I hit it off with people instantly. I can engage the grumpiest stranger in intimate conversation, get her to tell me her whole life story in the time it’ll take for us to change into our high heels in the locker room. Once, while waiting for my passport picture to be developed, the old lady at the counter showed me her high school pictures, then she told me that she was going to send them to her daughter in the States, who’s presently having problems with her Texan husband because he’s been working far too many late nights … etc. After ten minutes, I left that Floro-Foto shop knowing the minute details of her daughter’s complicated marriage – everything, except the old lady’s name.

It’s endings that I have a problem with. I don’t know how to finish my stories. More often than not, I go for the cliché ending: the wind snuffing out the flame of a candle, the little girl turning away from the grown man who’s in love with her, or the abandoned woman staring out of the window, into the dark of a future she doesn’t want to know or comprehend.

As such, I handle the end of relationships just as awkwardly. I never know how to say goodbye; how do you part ways with someone you’ve known (and who knows you) so intimately? Most of the time, I just disappear, drop out of circulation for a while, only to surface months later, sheepishly apologetic, bearing good will presents for the boy whose heart I’ve broken, hoping he’ll forgive me, at least enough for him not to make a voodoo doll in my likeness.

So, perhaps, it’s not so much that I’m bad with endings: it’s just most of the time, I don’t always get the kind of ending I would have liked.

I’m hoping that’ll change soon. I’m not getting any younger, and there’s only so many mistakes a girl can make.