His friend

BACK IN freshman year, I had a dream friend. He was an impossible dream because it was highly unlikely that we would have mutual friends. I studied in a school where I was the only one from my high school and probably one of the few from my province. I wanted him to become my friend because I was really impressed with his writing. I was amazed by how he wrote so eloquently in Filipino, much better than the best student writers I had met when I was still a high school campus journalist. I read his work in one of the campus publications. His work got published because he had won first prize for essay writing in Filipino. His work changed my whole view of how it was to write well. Ever since I read his article, I vowed to myself to practice writing and to do it well. He was my idol. I was his fan.

Fortunately, after several months, I realized that we were org mates. We were both members of Matanglawin, the official student publication in Filipino of the Ateneo de Manila University. For my first article in Matanglawin, I was lucky to work with two other writers and him. I thought I grabbed the opportunity to know him then but we did not become close friends because we divided the work by pairing up and I got paired with another writer. I missed the chance when I was in sophomore year but the desire to become friends with this guy never went away. He was a fellow writer. I was his org mate.

We became good friends in junior year. The friendship just happened. He turned out to be very approachable. I did not have to make extra efforts to befriend him since he was naturally amiable. We would hang out every day in the publication room. We would chat online every night. We would talk on Plurk all the time. We would go to lunch and dinner together. I would sometimes accompany him as he attended to personal matters and he would do the same for me.

We shared secrets only the two of us knew. We traveled places for our organization and took it for granted that we would be seatmates in the bus. He invited me to watch movies a few times but unfortunately the plans never pushed through. Some common friends labeled our relationship as “intimate” and we did not mind. I was happy with him and I assume he also was happy with me.

There was a point in my life when if I were to rank my friends from top to bottom, he would occupy the first slot. I might have not been very significant to him but he became one of the most important friends I had in college. I asked him to do the write-up on me for the yearbook and he did it. He was my friend. I was his friend.

What happened was both a personal and social achievement. I got what I wanted: friendship. However, in the middle of our intimate conversations, I fell in love. I believed it was not absurd to fall for a friend; it happened often to different people from all walks of life. I kept it to myself for quite some time but common friends came to know about it after almost a year of keeping it to myself. I did not care too much about them knowing and about him knowing because I used to think he would understand because we were friends. I used to believe he would not take it against me and things would be the same because I never expected something more than his friendship. I was perfectly satisfied with us being friends. He was my friend. I was his lover. I was his friend.

The romance did not go the way I wanted it. My first love turned out to be unrequited love. At first I did not mind it, primarily because I had never really dreamed of us loving each other as a couple. However, there came a point when my love transformed into love with a slight bitterness because as time went by, I was not only experiencing unrequited love but also unrequited friendship.

We never talked about it. Not being friends like what we-used to be just happened. I used to blame myself for it. Perhaps, had I not fallen for him we could have been friends, nothing more and nothing less. A friend advised me not to be bothered by it because friends did not break up like lovers did. I was his friend. I was a hopeless romantic trying to kill love for his friendship.

Deep in my heart was the realization that friends do not break up but they move apart. I tried my best to arrive at rationalizations to answer my questions questioning love, questions questioning friendship. Friendship is a human relationship governed by motion, constantly moving—moving towards, moving apart, moving away. One moves towards a prospective friend. When he realized I was falling for him, he moved away. We moved apart. In my attempt to forgive myself, to understand him, and to forget, I could not allow it to have a broken and bitter ending. While still governed by motion, I needed to move forward. It was difficult. I needed to kill love to salvage a friendship while the person on the other end did not want it to be saved (or did not even care).

Up to this time I wonder how and when our friendship ended. Strange how one can be involved and not really know what is happening. Since we have both graduated, we no longer see each other every day as members of the same organization. However, I firmly believe we will see each other again. Why not? According to Facebook, we share 72 common friends. Compared to my humble beginning of having to dream from scratch, I can still dream an old dream and I have 72 possible ways to reach him. Who knows, my old dream might take me to a mysterious path and allow me to create a 73rd means to salvage a long lost friendship.

I am his friend.

<em>Frances Lipnica Pabilane, 20, finished her AB European Studies at the Ateneo de Manila University this year.</em>