My First Heartbeat's Last

 02/07/21

9:53 pm

 

An unusual notification popped out on my phone on my 21^st birthday. It was a follow notification on Instagram. Once I accepted that request, it was immediately followed by a birthday greeting. It was him, my first love. I replied then he did, then I didn’t. Eight weeks later, he passed away.

 

You know that classic first love feeling? Your first time rolling on your bed like a crazy person because of the fluttering feeling you got from a single text message, your first time staying up all night talking to a person on the phone, your first time walking side by side with someone on the roadside with the benefit of feeling giddy about it with no idea how and why, your first time experiencing an embrace from someone who sweeps you off your feet. It was that.

 

Here’s an open letter to someone who gave me that experience.

Hey you.
 
I may not mean something to you as much as you meant to me. I may never even earn the right to write about you sentimentally now that you are gone. And I’m probably not on your list to get a farewell letter from. But here it goes.
 
When I heard the news hours before my slumber, I slept with a rosary on my hand. Come morning, I bawled in our dining room murmuring “but he was so young”, because you are. I cried on the shower, and cried again, and again, and again.
 
My thoughts are with you today. I came home to our neighbors hosting a karaoke party and thought, you deserve to grow old like that. You deserve to raise your own family, grow a beer belly, host your own karaoke parties, and send your kids to school. You should be able to belt your favorite songs on the karaoke, (probably) annoy the neighbor, get into the stupidest adult fights, and win them by your knuckle. But why did it have to be this way?
 
It was an easy task to think about your possible future, how you’d probably end up. Be it still on the track of basketball or whatever it is you could take on, it was not a chore to picture your face getting old. Not until yesterday. I can’t seem to take in the fact that the guy I used to stare to and talk to in our living room for hours on end when I was 14 would turn 21 with the rest of us and be left with that. It just didn’t seem right. It still doesn’t seem right.
 
I didn’t put too much thought on your birthday greeting to me. I just thought it was nice of you to approach me and that was it. But now, I extremely thank you for doing so. It was like the instance assured me that we are in good terms. Still, in the roster of guys I religiously avoid (mostly because of my shame and embarrassment), three persons who delivered to me the biggest lessons there is to love, you held a spot. Just the day before yesterday, I saw your Instagram story being in our neighborhood. I went out of my way not to do anything that requires me to go out, in hopes to avoid you because I’m just that a nervous-type of person. I can’t believe that I don’t even have to bother avoiding you anymore. I just can’t. I’d wish to avoid you forever, not for my sake but for your family, your friends, and people who love you, because they, too, deserve better.
 
You are a special person to me. Even more so now. I’ll always remember you by songs with Derek Sanders’ soulful voice on it with lyrics to put your fist in the sky, by skating rinks and ¾ tops, by young summer love novels, by those SWS songs which would take the words out of my mouth if I were to describe what it felt like being in my first love phase with you.
 
Our thoughts and prayers will be with you.
You can rest well now. Rest easy.