I fell in love with a boy who eventually became my first love. Fell out of love as another boy broke up with me, leaving me to experience my first painfully sober heartbreak.
My grandfather, who I lived with for the first 15 years of my life, died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest. Silently, I began to celebrate the day he died as his birthday in Heaven.
It is a month where something always happens. And those somethings usually consist of happenings I'll most likely remember forever. Good or bad, nothing escapes September.
It is the annual, month-long era of: finding love... losing love...births...deaths...and now apparently I could add reincarnation to the list.
A few days ago, imagine my shock when a boy I'd loved (as only a twelve or thirteen year old can, ofcourse) popped up once more on the grid from out of nowhere.
I stared at the pending Friend Request on my Facebook inbox page, disbelieving.
Ivan Bacungan.
The name held its own myth, history, legend in my mind. If our parents generation had the Beatles to grow up with and be constants in their own adolescence, I had Ivan to bring me into mine.
He was the first boy who introduced me to romantic frustration, secretive glances, butterflies in the stomach, butterflies in the chest, butterflies everywhere, weak knees, the beauty of hearing a song publically dedicated to you playing over the school speakers, the confusing and unexpected ability to cry during love scenes in chick-flicks, tactics at inducing jealousy that would make Sun Tzu sob out loud...
Most importantly we are talking about Ivan Bacungan, the boy who made me first aware of the fact that I carried a poetic license.
God, I can only imagine how many notebooks I've kept hidden dusty and forgotten in my closet that are filled out with rambling and endless poetry about him.
After gradeschool graduation nearly nine years ago, he moved out of the Philippines into the U.S. and completely disappeared. No one has heard from him or about him since.
...Until now.
A flooding of mutual friends' messages came pouring in on his wall and mine and everyone's excited about his reappearance. In the initial excitement I felt like I was part of the LRT crowd at rush hour, trying to keep afloat, as I felt myself being squashed and carried by the current of the crowd rushing up to greet him.
Life is so definitely unexpected.
And it has an advocate in the month of September.
September never fails to stump me and make me realize that no one ever trumps it. That it's Life job to constantly keep changing the game plan. No time to step up to bat? Well, too bad because this curveball is headed straight for you. Awake yet?
So to September, I will close my exposure and love letter to you with the last update I'd typed into my twitter page:
"Being found by an Ivan Bacungan in US Marines uniform gives me the the heartiest laugh and the weirdest expression and the giddiest stomach."
