Clichéd goodbye

A DAY has 24 hours. It has 1,440 minutes equal to 86,400 seconds. Imagine how five seconds can teach you a lesson and make a difference.

It was incredible to see you there, and for a second my eyes lingered on yours, and yours on mine. But that was the end of it. I thought you were just a passing moment. It was just me, and along the halls of the university are embedded memories of you that I cannot forget.

The first time I heard you speak, you were all I heard. Perhaps because of selective attention. Maybe it was because I saw you smile a beautiful smile I wouldn’t mind seeing every now and then. Or maybe because we have met in previous lifetimes. You were just too familiar.

At some point I mistook what I felt for you as love. If we talk about economics, there was a time when you started to become my total utility, my entire source of happiness, or a negative externality I wouldn’t mind facing daily. You became the whole set of natural numbers when I knew I was a mere digit to you. You filled my vocabulary, but I was just another word in your dictionary.

You remind me of eyes, of butterflies, of ceilings. I will always remember how your eyes seemed to be a pit of masked emotions waiting for someone to discover what’s in them. There were always butterflies in my stomach whenever you were around. To be honest, I think most of them are still alive. And I know they are still for you. In my solitary moments, I stare at the ceiling and a series of what-ifs start appearing, haunting me, asking me if things would be different if I said hi.

In that second, Cupid made a funny joke. He didn’t have an arrow to shoot into me this great kind of love, so he shot me with a gun, and since then the bleeding has not stopped. You, I want to know you. And that’s an understatement. You may even have purchased real estate in my state of unconsciousness.

You, you remind me of when I rode the roller coaster when I was younger. You remind me that I am not afraid of heights, or of falling, that what I fear is what’s going to happen by the time I reach the ground, of how painful the effect of the impact would be if I fall for you.

You, there’s someone made for you out there. But I can still be your destiny, a soul mate you will never get to keep, and you can be candy-coated snowflakes although it never snows here. One thing’s for sure, though: You are and will always be my greatest “perhaps,” my most memorable “almost.”

Here I am, back at that day when I first wanted to say hello. And I feel scared. And I remember that I have always been fascinated by balloons and bubbles because I always liked things that would end immediately. That’s why I tend to like people who may never like me back. That’s why I prefer to be the one who first says goodbye rather than the one being left behind. And you may think that that goodbye is just another cliché, but it actually teaches you to run before he realizes you are not worth fighting for. So run. I think it’s safer that way.

Months and seconds later, I finally got to say hello, but you replied with a fast and careless goodbye. You are a lesson learned. You are a memory I will remember. You are a song saved in the album of my life titled “2014.” Maybe you are the wrong person at the wrong time. I know I am the wrong person at the wrong time, but it doesn’t matter because I fell in love with you, and I learned that loving means never expecting to be loved back, because you never loved me back; and maybe you never will, and I thank you for that.

Thank you because for a very short time you taught me a very big lesson I have long tried to write but can no longer put into words. Thank you for the goodbye.

Dayana Alecs de Guzman, 18, is a junior political science student at the University of the Philippines Manila, “taking everything one step at a time.”