First Love

I just finished watching First Love (A Little Thing Called Love). It’s a Thai movie starring a really cute half-German half-Thai boy and a bug face turned beautiful butterfly girl and their love story that started in high school and carried on until forever after. You know those cathartic events during or after a particular movie when you just want to share how much you can identify yourself with one of the characters or with the movie plot itself? Well, I’m in that phase right now, so let me just tell you why I cried and still am crying buckets of tears from this movie that I basically “read”, thanks to the helpful subtitles.

So the girl Nam goes off confessing to the boy Shone whom she’s been liking for three years now, but in the almost ending, breaks her own when she found out that Shone was with another girl already, who coincidentally was a good friend to Nam. Huhuhu. Pretty sad right? Tell me about it. To tell you the truth, this isn’t the first story we have read in which the guy or the girl pours his or her heart out only to be turned down in the end. It happens a lot I tell you, and I don’t say this to exaggerate. But my point is not to emphasize how many broken hearted souls exist out there, but really the question, despite knowing that confessing your feelings would hurt one so so so much, why does one insist on doing so anyway?

To be honest, I’ve had a lot of times when I just wanted to walk up to some guy and tell him directly that, “hey I really like you, and I’ve been liking you for a while now.” But why did I cower? Why do most Filipina girls recoil and abandon their mission to confess to the men they liked? I realized, we (including myself) are afraid of what they have to say. I mean, after our cathartic speech, what do we expect to hear from them? I like you too, and it’s going on for a while also. Taena, you’re fucking creepy, get away from me. Uh, okay bye. There are a gazillion things these individuals can say back to us but which one will be it? Hayayay.

Who knew showing our feelings can be this complicated? Aside from that, who the heck told us love was so simple?! I mean, I think love has got to be one of those things that is so difficult to grasp, yet something some people assume they are masters of.

On March 23, we are given this “perfect” opportunity to be like Nam or Shone in a rather Atenean way. If Nam gave Shone a white rose, each senior is granted one or two or more blue roses (for a minimal fee of 50 pesos per rose) to give to someone he or she has been admiring for so long. Overanalyzing individuals as we are, “admire” can mean a lot of things. it can be something romantic, friendly, inspirational in a somewhat leader-like sense I guess, or even religious. It’s up to us to decide on what meaning we’ll make out of it. Some seniors would dismiss this idea of a blue rose as overrated, cheesy or probably childish. But I think, secretly, each one is wishing to go home with at least one blue flower in hand or to at least give it to someone who really deserves. As for me, I’m still not so sure what I’ll do with mine.