The want to relive those days when you can just laugh all night until your abdomen is sore is an addiction. I held on to those times — they are just memories now.
Just like me, the people I have shared friendships with have also moved on.
Trickles, ripples, waves, in whatever forms they took. They are now waters gone by. They are not lost but with time they have also evolved, changed, morphed, moved on.
I want to step back in time so I can walk the city streets of home, giggling, trying to find a post-midnight after-party grub as friends and comrades sway through the night into the early hours of the next day. We set out to slay dragons, topple giants and attempted to change the world. Maybe we failed, maybe we didn’t but for sure we did try. And we tried damn hard.
Sadly, that’s how life is. Just like me, whose life has had many unexpected meanderings, you too took different paths. Life is no longer the same. The situations are now different. We are still bound to each though, in one way or another — a happy thought. We shared a common passion way bigger than us, larger than life itself. We knew exactly what we would have lived and died for. We were in the trenches, we set up the barricades together and every now and then, side-by-side, we held the fort.
I do not expect that we still share the same dreams right now. Know this though: if we don’t, I will try not to question why. After all, I am more than 8,000 miles away in some foreign shore. I have had my privileges and I recognize them. On the other hand, I do not foster illusions that if I dive back in, I would be able to reenact the laughters and the warmth of those years.
Happiness now, is to live in the present and hope that one day, we would not be too old to laugh until it hurts, toast each other and celebrate everyone’s beautiful meanderings and elegant evolutions. Life is fleeting and we are not wasting ours.
MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Omar C. Bantayan is a Dabawenyo living in Texas, USA. He describes himself as a “Social Justice junky, labor organizer and cycling addict. This piece was first published in his Facebook account. MindaNews was granted permission to publish this.
